Christian Windfeld is a Danish, Aarhus-based experimental percussionist-composer, with a minimalist but highly expressive approach to the percussive instruments, often reducing his set-up to focus on just one instrument.
His solo album I am a deadbeat repercussionist, features two extended compositions. The opening, title piece is a non-narrative collage of field recordings, site-specific improvisations, and a handful of studio overdubs, collected during Windfeld’s busy international career, between 2012 and 2022. This restless, fast-shifting composition suggests strange and noisy percussive sounds, including a percussive piano, voice and angelic, operatic samples, resonant overtones, exotic natural sounds, and a Deadbeat text written by the AI SWeeT PETE («space for fear of empty space») taken from the Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies to Adventure Bay on Bruny Island off of the Tasmanian Coast to the hills of Appenzell in Switzerland to the Lofoten Islands off of the Norwegian coast north of the Arctic Circle to a Tibetan monastery in the Nepal Himalayas to reoccupied warehouses in the suburbs of Sydney Australia and back to the starting point in Aarhus Denmark.
The second composition, «’1 4 4 Cymbals», was written for four distinct cymbals, focusing on delicate noise aesthetics and subtle interference between the four cymbals and their rich, highly resonant frequency range. Windfeld did not use any effects, overdubs, or editing on this studio recording of this mysterious, atmospheric composition. It demands full surrender to its stubborn waves of highly immersive, resonant vibrations, until you feel totally embraced by the cymbals’ waves of sounds, experiencing some kind of magical cleansing ritual that recalibrates your mental and physical frequencies for the upcoming sonic adventures.
Eyal Hareuveni
Christian Windfeld (drums, cymbals, ticks, stones, cowbells, ice bells, woodblocks, piano, guitar, voice, feedback, rgy chimes)
