Dog Dreams is a genre bending collection of instrumental and electronic works that were originally the product of collaborations with a diverse array of choreographers.
Launched by his composition Chains (for Vibraphone and Piano) featuring performers from the Athens, Greece based ARTefacts ensemble, this album includes new, as well as revised, remastered, works from his pre-digitally distributed era CDs. Stylistically this album's first six works, which feature piano, guitars, percussion, and orchestral instruments, hover somewhere between minimalism and post-classicism, seasoned with elements of jazz, world, electronic and ambient music. A suite of four pieces revolving around combinations of Asian and Western instruments set in unconventional contexts (inspired by work with choreographers from India, South Korea and Indonesia) comprise the album's middle section. The album's last four tracks explore various extremes from the propulsive, metal influenced, Cage and ambient, dystopian minefield, of Dangerous Moves, to the weaponized piano of Mano Sinistra and, finally, the psychedelic roller coaster of E-Ticket Ride.
Music composed, performed, produced and recorded by David Karagianis*
* Chains (for Vibraphone and Piano) performed by ARTefacts Ensemble (Theo Vazakas, Vibraphone, Ai Motohasi-Sideri, Piano recorded at Artracks studios, Athens, August 2015).
Playing Time: 73:03
Threshold is a collection of new and revisited works with origins, at least in part, as products of collaboration with choreographers, film makers, and writers. If the music that comprises this CD seems like a wildly eclectic assortment of compositions masquerading as an album you are, at least, partially right. While perhaps loosely united under a broad banner of “instrumental music” a wide palette of musical genres are generously woven together within the same piece or sometimes stand in sharp contrast in this CD’s sequence of tracks. This CD, in fact, presents three separate musical sets, three doorways, leading listeners through varied territories. The first four pieces here, or “behind door number one” (because who can resist a cheesy game show reference?) journeys through realms of mood and fantasy weaving together ambient, world, electronic, minimalist, rock and jazz elements. Six Piano Pieces explores concepts of brevity, silence and sustain offset by two works of contrasting characteristics. Particularly given the concept behind my previous CD, PULSE (Laptop Dances 2.0) which was all electronic, single meter and tempo per track oriented, I became interested in shifting to a more intimate, and varied set of works referencing classical and jazz influences, employing occasional lyricism, metric disruptions, and sparse sustained moments. Brave New Age, with its telling title, launches the third and final set’s shift in tone. These pieces travel to stranger, darker or, conversely, more comic worlds where noise, garbled transmissions, machines and even dancing space aliens take center stage.
Music composed, performed, produced and recorded by David Karagianis
Playing Time 73:54