| photo credit: Curtis Perry | |
| Ahead of the release of his third solo album Empyrean on 11th September and a forthcoming tour with Einar Solberg, later this month, acclaimed Canadian cellist and composer Raphael Weinroth-Browne unveils the album’s emotional centrepiece, ‘Dissolution’. The new track is a mesmerising deconstruction of one of J. S. Bach’s most recognisable cello melodies, which gradually fractures from Baroque elegance into distortion, noise and near-abstract sound. Originally composed for UK contemporary dance company James Wilton Dance and their production BACH Reimagined, the track sees Weinroth-Browne push his instrument to extraordinary extremes, using layered live-looping, effects and repetition to move from a sombre, funereal reimagining of the Sarabande from Bach’s Sixth Cello Suite through an increasingly dramatic and operatic crescendo before finally dissolving into pulsating waves of noise. It is a striking embodiment of Empyrean‘s fascination with transformation, impermanence and the fragile boundary between order and chaos, questioning what holds music, life and existence in harmony before everything inevitably begins to dissolve. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/jXtf1D9y4sE Listen to ‘Dissolution’ here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/raphaelweinrothbrowne/dissolution Pre-order Empyrean album here: https://raphaelweinroth-browne.bandcamp.com/album/empyrean Comments Raphael:“‘Dissolution’ was originally composed for the contemporary dance production BACH Reimagined with UK-based company James Wilton Dance. It is the centrepiece of the Empyrean album, and is most certainly its emotional apex. Of everything I have released as a solo artist, this is at once my most classical and experimental work to date. “The piece is based around the opening melody from the Sarabande of the 6th Cello Suite by J. S. Bach. While the original movement is bright and hopeful, in a major key, here I decided to transpose it into minor, reharmonizing the melody to give it a sombre, funereal quality. The idea was to take a melody, strip it of its harmonic colouring, and gradually transform it using live looping and effects from Baroque purity into distorted noise over the course of many repeating cycles. What begins as a solemn chorale becomes a dramatic, almost operatic solo before giving way to a churning maelstrom of distortion not unlike something one might hear from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and finally dissolving into pulsating waves of noise. “When working on the music for the BACH Reimagined show, one of the concepts that James Wilton and I discussed was the convergence and collision of religion and science in the time of Bach and Sir Isaac Newton. With ‘Dissolution’, I wanted to explore that dichotomy – the intersection of beauty and abstraction – and to ask the question, “what keeps the music in harmony and prevents it from dissolving into chaos?”“For the music video, I travelled all the way from Canada to the UK to shoot on the gorgeous north coast of Cornwall in a variety of spectacular caves, sand dunes, and in the ocean itself. Since ‘Dissolution’ felt like the pièce de résistance of both the BACH show and the Empyrean album, I really wanted to showcase the incredible dancing of James and Sarah with the video for this track, to highlight our collaboration and share it more widely beyond our performances on tour. The awe-inspiring power of nature and the elements is on full display here, giving the video a timeless, epic atmosphere.” |
