Soon we’ll have a short break for a couple of weeks when I’ll be off on holiday to Sorrento, Italy to recharge the batteries. There’s just enough time for one more release before then and next up is Stuttgart, Germany based artist Frank Baker with ‘The Silence Of The North’. This is a cinematic record centred around icey cold piano compositions captured over a three-hour late night recording session. The album is available now on Whitelabrecs in a very low run of just 50 CDrs.
The album went out to our mailing list subscribers last weekend and we have just a few copies left at the time of writing. To find out more or secure your copy, you can click the link below or on the player above to listen. To avoid missing out on future releases, you can join our mailing list HERE
Take a look through this email to find out more or click the link below, or image above.
https://whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com/album/silence-of-the-north
Press release
“Frank Baker is a composer/producer from Stuttgart, Germany who has mainly released music through his own label Frank Baker Music. He began recording guitar back in 1999 with cassette tape experiments and began recording under his own name around 4 years ago with his debut ‘Noctilucent’ being released in winter 2013. He also records Ambient/Drone material as Noonsize and Post-Rock as Hawks From The Ocean Abyss.
In Silence Of The North, we have a generous twelve track offering centred around recordings from a 1970s Yamaha grand piano as an imaginary soundtrack inspired by the Northern Hemisphere. Frank spent around 3 hours one evening, sat at the piano as he improvised into the dead of the night. The material has been whittled down to a dozen short pieces, and a familiar thread returns throughout the record which tells a story much like a movie. With the piano at the heart of everything, the sound is naturally cinematic and references colder climes with Frank having been inspired by visits to Canada and Scandinavia. Frank’s main idea was to record an album that characterises silence and whilst the lonely old piano would evoke that alone, his added sound design featuring prepared-sounding piano strings, cavernous noise and found sounds programmed into Logic delve further into the ideas of loneliness, isolation and silence.
With its clear film soundtrack aesthetic, it would be all too easy to reference classical music – Frank points out that he is not a piano player but instead, he used the piano notes to paint his picture in what has more to do with Ambient music than classical. As humans tend to search for warmth and reside nearer to the equator, Silence Of The North embraces a stark coldness that is often ever presence within the lesser populated Northern Hemisphere. Recommended if you like Hauschka, Nils Frahm or Dakota Suite.”
credits
Catalog number: WLR009
Written, produced and mastered by Frank Baker
Artwork by Frank Baker
whitelabrecs.com 