contemporary electronics avant-garde music
Elias Stemeseder - Composition, Spinett, Synthesizer, Electronics
Christian Lillinger - Composition, Drums, Sampler, Synthesizer
STEMESEDER - LILLINGER is an electro-acoustic field of tension. Floating freely and without genre designations, the producer duo inhabits myriad border regions of contemporary music, focusing on sonic, compositional and thematic multidimensionality. With ANTUMBRA, the award-winning artists continue to expand their body of work. Procedural methods employed in their previous works PENUMBRA and UMBRA are revisited, newly assembled, integrated and expanded. Plucked, percussive and electronic instruments, references to sample culture, serialism or folk musics, and the elaborate post-production work imbue ANTUMBRA with its enormous richness of color, sonic saturation and utopian vision.
ANTUMBRA is multi-perspectival: its sonic language is rooted in centuries of rhythm- and harmony-based music yet only realizable today; its beats are unfailingly embodied while ambiguously gravitational, and its tonal manifestation invariably manifold. Processes set in motion on PENUMBRA undergo further refinement: the embedding of historical acoustic instruments into electronic constructions finds its continuation with the use of gayageum, banjo and lautenwerk, resulting in an enormous enrichment of sound; the procedural diversity is expanded and reconfigured through collaboration with guest musicians and producers. ANTUMBRA explores meta-beats, cut-up techniques, multidimensional structures, polyphony, collage, tuning and spectralism. It is rich in content and references as options for a hopeful future. ANTUMBRA's instrumentations and imagination are boundless in depicting extreme scenarios and landscapes. Utopia and dystopia are incorporated with great refinement and precision to meet their immediate temporal realization.
To STEMESEDER - LILLINGER, ANTUMBRA (pre-shadow; from Latin ante, „before“, the region from which the occulting body appears entirely within the disc of the light source) is the realization of another visibility of what has not yet been shown and seen.
The result of recording sessions in New York's Figure 8 studio with Lily Wen, a session in Athens, Georgia with Jason Kingsland, a work period at Villa Waldberta on Lake Starnberg and various concert recordings from Cerkno, Bezau and Florence defies any impulse of categorization. While individual pieces may show distinct aesthetic points of reference, the entirety of ANTUMBRA is a post-genre work and serves both as a reflection on a hybridized present and as a canvas for projections of possible futures.
