In the early 20th century, brands like Columbia and Victor courted the millions of European immigrants who had recently arrived on American shores, including Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. Seeking new markets for both records and record players, these labels recorded hundreds of cantors, klezmer bands and residents of New York’s Yiddish Theater District. A century later, many of these records can still be found in legendary musicologist Alan Lomax’s archive, curated by Kentucky-based guitarist Nathan Salsberg. Landwerk No. 3 It’s the third installment in a series of haunting, mournful, glacially-paced albums from Salsberg that he plays alongside loops of Yiddish records. This is a haunted project with a particularly Jewish-American perspective, allowing Salsburg to open up a dialogue with the bygone springs of the Yiddish Kite.
all samples above Landwerk No. 3 comes from a Jewish artist who performed and recorded in New York City in the first half of the 20th century. Still, listeners who come without any context will be forgiven for placing the action thousands of miles west in Monument Valley and the Mojave Desert. Salsberg’s guitar had been used on previous albums to explore his folk and blues forms in American, but was also used by country musicians, spaghetti western maestros on his soundtracks, and later artists such as North American and his SUSS. accentuated with the same reverb and sadness used by the Americana abstractionists. The expanse of the sun-kissed American West.Salsberg made a point of not using blues records for the project, but still tweaks the sounds he makes and the scales he plays on his guitar. Landwerk No. 3 for the genre.
Landwerk No. 3 It incorporates more instrumentation than the previous installment while still allowing the sample to breathe more. Salsburg achieves this balance with runtimes of 10 minutes or more. Over 1 hour on 6 tracks, Landwerk No. 3 It’s about as long as both of its predecessors combined, and much of the extra time is spent with vinyl crackling and samples looping. On “IX,” Cantor’s Meyer Kanewsky sample is little more than a faintly ghostly swell, and at first it sounds as if he’s Salsburg duetting with Static Electricity. Closing 18 minutes, “XIV” keeps the guitar moving on the bench for much of its time, with a faint percussive sample from Yiddish theater pioneer Abe Elstein’s “Mazel Tov” and an organ. It opens with a plaintive chord progression. “XII” is based on an eerie piano sample from Jacob Silbert, another star of New York’s Yiddish theater, and Salsberg finds the sample interesting and only benefits from the occasional guitar filigree. I truly believe that you will get it.
In addition to the mainstream of Jewish music and Salsburg in American roots music, Landwerk No. 3 Also inspired by Leyland Kirby’s The Caretaker project. In this project, the deterioration of vinyl records represents human cognitive decline. Kirby and his contemporaries such as Christian Marclay, Janek Schaeffer and the late Philip Jeck drew boundaries between what is sampled and what is overdubbed to create music that sounds like it radiates from the distant past. obscured.upon Landwerk No. 3, These differences are more pronounced, as the pristine polish of the guitar and piano emphasizes the temporal distance from the muddy vinyl loop. Because of this contrast, the process cannot be separated from the music. Landwerk No. 3 It never quite transcends the image of a man playing along to a record. The best experimental turntablism can make the listener feel as if a ghost has entered the room.listen to Landwerk It’s like eavesdropping on someone else’s seance, but luckily these spirits can teach us a lot.
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