Bob Ostertag

After reading Bob Ostertag´s piece "Why I No Longer Give Away My Music", on how difficult it can be to give away music for free (!), I bought his latest album on CDBaby for next to nothing.

"A Book of Hours" (2012) is 50 beautiful minutes of music, with the voices of Theo Bleckmann, Shelley Hirsch and Phil Minton, and Roscoe Mitchell´s saxophone.

While listening I wondered if it was all improvised, or if parts were composed, but wonder no longer, - Ostertag is writing quite comprehensive about the music on his own site.

Let´s borrow some from him:

"So the only electronic processing I have done is to use a synthetic reverb to place the musicians, who recorded their material separately in different locations, into the same synthetic "space.""

"What I have done is splice: hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of splices. I have also done some slight time stretching or compressing, and equally minor pitch transposition, of the original material. None of this was done to change the "sound" of the musicians, or to make them appear to sing higher or lower or faster or louder than they can. Rather, these slight changes were done to make the parts fit together better. And this was a difficult challenge, because the project began with each of the four musicians recording a set of solo improvisations, separately and without any knowledge of what the others were doing".

Check out this one!