SKU: HL.48025042

ISBN 9781705154212. UPC: 196288021711.

The work, which the composer counts among her favourite pieces, was inspired by the life and work of Marguerite Duras. In her play of the same name, a Flemish woman goes to Saigon at the beginning of the 20th century, marries a civil servant and has two children.After her husband's death, she also works as a piano player at the local 'Eden Cinema'. Eden Cinema, which is 'to be played like a traditional piano piece from the Romantic period' according to the composer, sounds poetic, but also cool, funny and extremely modern. Motif repetitions and ostinatos play a major role, as they do with Duras. In addition, quotations appear, literal ones from Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata as well as vague echoes of dance rhythms and commonplace music as used in silent film theatres. Thepreparation of the piano strings - metal parts on the high ones, rubber pieces on the low ones - creates a tonal patina and the impression of the past - 'in connection with Duras also recognizable as traumas sedimented in the subconscious, whose indistinct traces obsessively push to the surface' (Eckhard Weber).

SKU: IS.PN7295EM

ISBN 9790365072958.

Light the fire, James. We’ll take our digestive by the crackling of the hearth. Such were the thoughts that came to mind as I started listening to Guy Van Nueten’s new record. Because, yes, there is a certain aristocracy to this music. There’s the feeling of autumn and you immediately long to warm yourself on the sounds that issue from Van Nueten's bony fingers. But it could just as well be a car ride through soft rain at nightfall, where trees become freakish phantoms, and here and there a villa looms like a light beacon. Pacman is a record that makes you hunt for images, films you have seen before, feelings you have known and wish to relive, like a somewhat forbidden fruit, a secret pleasure. Melancholy? Absolutely. A vague sadness to make a person purr like a contented cat? Certainly. Yet at the same time, Van Nueten is cunning. While ensuring that his music pleases you, at the end of some compositions he’ll suddenly come up with a theme that he’ll stop abruptly, so that the notes remain hanging like snapshots of aerial acrobats in action. It is also investigative music as if Guy himself does not wish to know just where he will finish up. There is a stubbornness to it, an elegant fight perhaps between composer and pianist. It pursues you – exactly like a Pacman, in fact, chomping away at digital pieces of your heart. Yet it never seems to dissolve into thin air: time and again, right from the first listen, he makes you long to hear more. It is music that should protect a person like a secret, like an illegal fire in a forest that warms your hands and fills your head with dreams. It smells like cedar, this piano music. Or like a nice cigar offered to you by the imaginary James, who whispers: The fire is crackling, sir. Just as you like it. At which point the enchantment begins all over again.