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CD
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NORM 020CD
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This is the electronic debut album by classic avant-garde composer Daniel Smutny on Normoton. What happens when a classic avant-garde composer eventually lets out the pop, which has long been bubbling under his skin? Telehors is an act of a first-time production with a completely unique slant: to record itself with noises and piano playing -- to make acoustic photographs, and at the same time a private travel diary, then to make complex abstractions of these details, to experience the inner rhythms of these sounds, to form them into patterns, to make music out of noises against their will, to find songs and tracks all over the world with a laptop -- always with the ideal of an unattainable classic pop in mind. Telehors is like a process of self-discovery and at the same time a little like a test set-up for listeners and their expectations. Telehors is music for an era in which people not only follow a life concept, but also establish parallel identities, combine images of different lifestyles, build themselves "playlists" out of media citations. This music is the expression of this movement, this access to content, this patchwork style, but it also strives to create a pleasing harmony of opposites. It invokes pure musical qualities, compositionally intense moments held in flow, instants stretched to long atmospheric spaces, which are subjected to internal movements -- an ornamental immobility. Telehors is utopist, the thrill of trying to make the impossible possible. It is a masterly expression of this endeavor for change and transformation. Up until now, Smutny has been in the spotlight as an avant-garde composer, but he now spans a musical range of reference which reaches back to the first decades of the last century, to Denes von Milhaly's first still-frame television, a precursor of the mass medium we know today, in the form of tiny transmitted shadow pictures with a few rows of perforations as picture fields. This also provides a way of understanding the form of Smutny's tracks: tele-long distance? These pictures first become complete in one's own fantasy. Telehors is the forcefield which provides the energy. That is how the journeys begin: on the backs of wandering machine horses into new worlds. How is it possible in this day and age to recreate this atmosphere of change and be authentic? Or has everything become just like transfer pictures, that we play and gamble with like experts? Telehors is both of these.
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