Ludovico Einaudi will present The White Tree at The Big Chill 2009.
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The White Tree

Chose a headline: Clash of the titans, The definite boygroup re-inventing the wheel of deepness, Classical and electronic music finally make the long-awaited handshake, The best album so far of the 21st century. Funny thing is: all of these bold statements are true to the core. Being as tabloid-inspired as they may be: Robert Lippok, Ronald Lippok and Ludovico Einaudi have crafted a very special album indeed, requiring not only our full concentration and attention, but, much more important, our whole-hearted appreciation

Inspired and named after a very special, paradise-like retreat in Amos Tutuola’s novel ” The Palm-Wine Drinkard”, the album is the cosiest pair of french mittens, helping to withstand the cold and fast pulse of our technology-driven times. Think about it: “Cloudland” is not the first effort to merge electronics with classical music. Far from it. Carsten Nicolai worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald inject Ravel’s Bolero with a techno twist, a whole new generation of musicians is as comfortable with a laptop as with classical instruments. Yet brave and remarkable efforts, Cloudland brings across a playfullness, a looseness and broadness which makes the album something unique.

The reasons are obvious: The Lippoks are not your typical electronic music composers. Nor is Ludovico Einaudi your average classical composer. Their individual bodies of art have always been about this special extra mile, an effort hardly anybody seems to care about these days anmore. With their main project “To Rococo Rot”, the Lippoks, together with their fellow colleague Stefan Schneider, have not only recorded an impressive yet diverse catalogue, mixing band-based tracks with all sorts of electronic sounds. The project also always benefited from Ronald Lippok’s unique style of drumming, giving their music a lush, yet powerful and almost sequenced feel. In fact, it was the style of drumming which got the ball rolling in the first place, when Ludovico attended a show of To Rococo Rot in Milan some years ago. “I liked the concert very much, I remember I was attracted from the interaction between the live drumming of Ronald with the electronics of Robert.

I remember I went to the dressing room after the concert and we just exchanged few words saying that it could have been nice to do something together in the future.” Ludovico is no stranger to electronic music. He always drew inspiration from tape manipulations, experiments of all sorts and special piano treatments. While all White Tree-members found their individual styles and voices to articulate their musical visions, it is this collaboration which brings all their seperately developed talents together in a dense, unexpected sequence of songs.

It all started in 2006, when Einaudi approached the Lippoks to do an italian tour together. A week of rehearsals was all they built their set on. Two weeks of sold-out shows followed. “It was a dedicated club tour”, Ronald Lippok remembers, “small venues, sometimes it was almost impossible to get the piano onto the stage.” The trio connected well while on the road and decided to record some of the material in the studio. Planet Roc in Berlin was chosen, a place which has “History” written all over it. The former broadcasting centre of East German radio has a reputation for perfect acoustics and all kinds of special you need for anything from recording an orchestra to making a radio play as realistic sounding possible. “We played as a band. Always live, always in one room”, says Robert Lippok. “With just a few overdubs. We wanted it to be as natural as possible. This is what made mixing the record so adventurous. We had so many takes of our songs to go through! Going into the studio together was very special. Our tour had been quite ‘loud’, full-on. Recording the material, we had the chance to add some quiet ideas as well.” “It all came out very naturally, from the first sessions in the rehersal room”, Ludivoc adds. “Listening and concentrating to sounds and loops made by Robert and Ronald, sometimes I didnt even know who was making it. I sat at the piano and closed my eyes, entered that space of sounds, and I opened my imagination. It was like searching figures and forms in an abstract painting or pulling out emotions from the clouds. Then we were playing for long, losing ourselves into the music, responding to each other inputs, it was like building castles with the sand, no rules, everything was possible.”

The mixture of quiet and loud, the always shifting level of energy is intriguing indeed. The shocking thruth: There isn’t a single piece on the album which distinctivly identifies one member of the group as the composer. The joint effort is, among other things, what makes “Cloudland” such a unique recording. Be it “Kyril”, which starts out as a Satie-inspired pirouette and suddenly develops into a marimba-driven piece of glitched-up electronica. “The Room”, the closing composition of the album, could have been a typcial piano-based lullaby, but becomes a disturbing yet assuring moment of genius with unexpected subtle digital hiccups. And of course “Mercury Sands”, the impossible hit single, the essence of this collaboration, some might say, bouncing around a light melody you want to whistle for the rest of your life, subtle vocoder chords and lush yet incredible tight hihats coming from the drumkit. Still, everything on “Cloudland” is leveled, neither the acoustic nor the electronic part ever tries to overpower the other. A phenomenon unheard of.

“I’m a drummer. I know my instrument and i know how to handle loudness”, says Ronald. “I was shocked by the sheer power coming from Ludovico and his piano. I never could have imagined that it can be such a powerful instrument. Then suddenly I understood how we could make this work”. Robert Lippok adds: “I always wanted to work with a musician who has an academic background, who approaches things differently. We never work with melodies so fully written out, so defined. Before, we used melodies more on a macro basis. Ludovico opens up the piano, sits down, starts playing and it’s there. Energy. Our album has a very physical aspect. Sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, but always lively, open, cheerful.”

(Thaddeus Herrmann)

Biography

The music of composer/pianist Ludovico Einaudi has been described as minimalist, classical, ambient, contemporary and deeply touching – the welcome sound of stillness in a hectic world.

Week after week, his hauntingly beautiful and evocative music has kept him among the best-selling and most requested recording artists (in the UK and Italy in particular).

Born in Turin, the pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi trained at the Conservatorio in Milan, then continued his studies under the guidance of Luciano Berio.

Einaudi’s music began to assume its own unmistakable character towards the end of the 1980s, as he absorbed elements derived from popular music. Around this time he first became involved in collaborative ventures in theatre, video and dance. These included compositions for the ballets Sul filo díOrfeo (1984), The Wild Man (1990) and The Emperor (1991); Time-out (1988), a dance-theatre performance created in conjunction with the writer Andrea De Carlo and staged in Italy, Japan and the United States by the American ISO Dance Theatre company; Salgari (Per terra e per mare) (1995), an opera/ballet commissioned by the Arena di Verona with texts by Emilio Salgari, Rabindranath Tagore, Charles Duke Jr, first performed at the Arena with choreography by Daniel Ezralow and sets by the American Jerome Sirlin; and E.A. Poe (1997), conceived as a sound track for films from the silent era.

Einaudi’s latest album, Una Mattina, has been released in 2004 for Decca.

The album Le onde (1996, BMG), was a turning point in Ludovico Einaudiís career ñ his first real work as a soloist. It is true that Stanze (1990) had included 16 of his compositions, but they had been performed by Cecilia Chailly, one of the first musicians to take up the challenge of the electric harp. With Le onde, Einaudi put together a cycle of ballades for piano (performed by the author) inspired by Virginia Woolfís novel The Waves, in which the waves are a symbol of life itself. The recording was released a couple of years later in the United Kingdom, eventually receiving acclaim from general public and critics alike, with a little help from Classic FM.

The long-awaited sequel arrived in 1999. Entitled Eden Roc (BMG). ìIn a way, it explores in greater depth the themes raised in my earlier works, Stanze and Le onde. It takes a stage further the experiment of defining a kind of suite, creating shorter pieces, akin to instrumental songs, but always linked to an overall project.î Eden Roc is a recording with obvious ëinner tensionsí, less static and freer than earlier works. Einaudi collaborated with the Armenian Djivan Gasparijan, a past master of the duduk (a kind of small oboe made of apricot wood) ìto emphasise the popular (and traditional) roots of areas such as the Caucasus or the Balkans, which are more closely connected than one would think with the Mediterraneanî.

The end of 2001 saw the release of I Giorni (BMG) ñ a dozen pieces for solo piano, composed as deliberate snapshots of the creativity of a musician who has achieved full freedom of expression. They constitute ìa kind of musical thinking process and/or a spiritual piece of embroideryî, inspired by his travels in Africa. ìOne day, a little while ago, during a trip to Mali, I was travelling by car with a friend, Toumani Diabate, a virtuoso performer on the kora (the typical Malian harp), when suddenly I heard the most enchanting music. An ancient melody from the thirteenth century. When I got home and was making my new recording, I began to improvise with that sweet, melancholy music in mind, and so I fought off my nostalgia for Africa.î

This was the genesis of an album involving a long process of reflection. (ìWhen I compose, I need to improvise,î explains Einaudi, ìbut also to meditate for a long time on what I am writing. I progress on two apparently antithetical levels: I create a great diversity of styles then, at a later stage, I review it all with a rational ear.î). The result was yet another performance of great emotional intensity, quite unconnected with the concept of a sound track.
Five years after Le onde, I again decided to create a solo work for piano; after experimenting with various things, I wanted to get back to the solitary dimension. It is a kind of suite of pieces in the form of an instrumental song. Although each piece has a meaning of its own, they are linked by a general idea of musical accountability and by melodic, thematic and harmonic references. You need to listen to the whole album to get the full message.

For Einaudi, it is now a time to take stock: About ten years ago, after many years composing for various instrumental groups, I began to feel a desire to play my own music in live settings. Being restricted to writing in isolation in a studio seemed too abstract and distant a way of working. I felt the need for a more immediate relationship with both music and audience. I needed to check out personally the meaning of what I was doing, find a direct channel of communication with the public, be at the centre of the magic and emotion that can be created only during a live performance. Basically, these were my reasons for beginning to do concerts, rather in the spirit of someone singing his own songs. In the piano, I have found a home that I feel I have built with my own hands, designing the rooms one by one and carefully choosing the materials and furnishings, with freedom to include the essence of all my past experiences and the things I have loved.î

Ludovico Einaudi also has an intense and fruitful career composing music for the cinema. He began with two films made by Michele Sordillo: Da qualche parte in citt‡ (1994) and Acquario (1996), for which he was awarded the Grolla díoro for best sound track. He continued in 1998 with Treno di panna, the only film made by Andrea De Carlo. In the same year, he composed the sound track for Giorni dispari by Dominick Tambasco, then making his debut, while some extracts from Le onde (Le onde, Ombre and Canzone popolare) were included in Aprile by Nanni Moretti.

2000 was a breakthrough year. As well as collaborating with Antonello Grimaldi on Un delitto impossibile, he composed the original sound track for Giuseppe Piccioniís Fuori del mondo, a film nominated for an Oscar, for which, in 2002, Einaudi won the coveted ëEcho klassikí award in Germany.

Einaudi’s collaboration with Piccioni was repeated the following year with Luce dei miei occhi, judged as having the best sound track at the 2002 Italian music awards. He also composed the music for Francesca Comenciniís Le parole di mio padre and Maria Iliouís Alexandria, both of which were released in 2001.
2002 will be remembered for the sound track of Zhivago, a television film based on Boris Pasternakís famous novel, which was directed by Giacomo Campiotti, produced in the United Kingdom and broadcast all over the world.
It is worth mentioning that La linea scura (a piece from Le onde) is included in the sound track of Fame chimica, a film made independently in Milan in 1993 by Paolo Vari and Antonio Bocola. Einaudiís most recent sound track, for Roberto AndÚís Sotto falso nome, came out at the beginning of 2004 and won the prize for Best Filmscore at the Avignon Festival in France.

www.myspace.com/ludovicoeinaudispace

www.ludovicoeinaudi.com/

Ludovico Einaudi will perform at The Big Chill 2009.
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Tags: Artists 2009, Ludovico Einaudi

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