Ko Shin Moon - La Rivière by Akuphone published on 2019-05-21T20:51:09Z Extract from "78 Fragments" Akuphone (AKU1017) Digital only Buy: akuphone.com/catalog/NRer109T2eQ#content SAMPLE: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1081254x At the end of 2018, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Gallica (the digital archive of the Bibliothèque nationale de France), Akuphone and Ko Shin Moon were invited to create a piece from the library’s audio archives. After working on it for several weeks, a first version was presented during the anniversary ceremony. The project continued to develop over four months before arriving at a definitive version. The scope of the project was limited to audio recordings from the library’s collection that were free of legal restrictions, which meant: only 78 rpm records from the first half of the 20th century. The format is unique, left to specialists and forgotten by listeners and producers. 78 records are almost never used for sampling and it’s this application that makes Ko Shin Moon’s album stand out. Many factors needed to be considered, including white noise, breaths, the harshness of certain frequencies, and the production style from the era of the recordings. Using these precious resources as a creative tool, Ko Shin Moon made substantial rearrangements, but he forced himself to respect the original tuning of the recordings by setting his analog synthesizers and instruments to the same microtonality as the records. Most of the chosen samples were recorded between 1910 and 1940 and came from different parts of the world. These include: North Africa for “Gasba” and “The River,” The Middle East and Central Asia for “Segah,” “Bayati Chiraz,” and “Nava,” India for “Devi Sthothra” and “Narayan,” Mozambique for “I-XIII,” South Asia for “The Offering” and “Sabat Sabing,” Japan for “The Consonants,” and France for “The Offering.” “We’re very thankful to have been able to have our work infused with such cultural heritage,” says Ko Shin Moon. “We thank the Bibliothèque nationale de France for their trust and above all, we want to show our respect to the musicians and singers present on these recordings. We hope to bring their voices to life with our music.” Genre Electro