Lineaments I.

In Lineaments 1, electronic music composer Ákos Nagy explores the merger of acoustic instruments with electronic music. He sees the album as a “Mission Impossible” challenge where “an acoustic medium can become an electronic medium and vice versa”.

Joining Nagy in this exploration is a quartet of musicians. Including Zsuzsanna Aba Nagy, Roland Szentpali, Zsolt Szabo and Robert Mandel. They explore how Akos’s music creates its own world where each note has a story, equally familiar and at the same time completely alien.

Janos Bali says “I listen to the misty world of the record in an eddying sequence: a selection of pieces by my friend Ákos Nagy, a lunch eater, protester, cable to cable plugger, runner of many kilometers on city asphalt, one head higher than me and even talks twice as much as I do.

I’ve heard these pieces before, not even once, in fact, I’ve played along some of them at once without knowing that a piece is what’s behind the improvisation. But are these pieces? I do not remember. Where are the boundaries? Are there any? Or do we just imagine? Hugely magnified granular synthesis: everything fades in from somewhere and fades out somehow. Like the Saints in the Medieval Clock Tower of Prague, out of the shadows and back into the shadows: but what are they doing in the back from which they vaguely appear? And do they really come every hour? They may not even come anymore.”

Akos Nagy tells us about the recording process in Stereo DSD 256 “It was important to keep these nuances and even try to highlight them. Adjustments from time to time were being made how much we were pushing the preamps to increase harmonics. We had to change and adjust some mixing decisions made beforehand. It also seemed logical to have some sort of separation within elements, leaving room for fine tuning in the mixing stage. Therefore, we grouped instruments together and did a separate pass for each group. This way we had 6-7 takes of each piece.

Having all those different microphones and preamps meant that at the mixing stage, EQ-ing could be done mostly by adjusting the balance of each mic since they all sound a bit different. The mixing was mostly about automating volumes for each individual mic and instrument group as a whole, enhance or balance out the dynamics and tone. Our final step before delivery was a subtle mastering where we applied a mild glue compression with the SSL G Series Bus compressor and a tiny amount of EQ to introduce some “air” to the top end.

We wish you all a happy and deep listening experience.”

Ákos Nagy – Composer, Electronics
Zsuzsanna Aba Nagy – Harp
Roland Szentpali – Serpent
Zsolt Szabo – Viola de Gamba
Robert Mandel – Hurdy Gurdy
István Rimóczi – Percussions, Objects