Autopsia: Karl Rossmann FRAGMENTS

"VARIOUS ILLUSIONS ARE FORMED, THAT OBSTRUCT US FROM PERCEIVING THE REALITY OF VOIDNESS, WHICH IS THE BASIS OF THE TRUTH"
Karl Rossmann 1922.

Rossmann is best known as a composer and pioneer of electronic avantgarde music. But his artistic output was not only music, of course, and his output in any case was not particularly large. There are about 30 works in all and there are occasional gaps of up to three years between one piece and the next. The bulk of his music was written between the two world wars - it was in 1918 that he inherited the title - though his earliest successful pieces were written before that, and accepted for publication, while he was a diplomatic attaché at the Cehoslovakia Embassy in Warszawa.

The few he did produce shows that he was one of the few truly original Czech composers of the last century. However, he also published 7 novels in his later years, 2 volumes of poetry and had two one-man exhibitions of his paintings in the 1930’s. In his lifetime he exhibited over 100 oil paintings all of which are now lost or in private collections. Most were landscapes - Night Landscapes.

On this album Autopsia are peforming a series of his fragments and paying him tribute. True Avandgarde and minimal electronic music back to his origins. A step back into Electronic and a step forward into Industrial.

"... By another accident a few days I got the latest CD by Autopsia, which seems to be dedicated to the life and work of one Karl Rossmann, who was apparently a painter, composer and writer from the Czech Republic, but in these internet times I am not an easy believer when it comes to people who "destroyed as much evidence of his existence as he could find". On the Autopsia website we see him mentioned as one of the 'few truly original Czech composers of the last century'. Its a bit hard to understand all of this, in relation to the music playing in the background, the 'Karl Rossmann Fragments'. But strangely enough it comes close to the work of serious modern electro-acoustic composers from France - to complete the circle. The twenty fragments are short, almost 'pop' in length of electronically processed sounds, reverb, drone like sounds, and pitches that go up and down, but it cleverly stays away from the long form that we usually find in this part of the music world. Each fragment seems to have a life of its own, completed, finished, and, despite the word 'fragment', a finished composition. This new Autopsia work is hardly alike the work they are best known for, the sampled orchestral bits, even it at times seems to have sampled strings and percussion. Perhaps its all a bit much this release to take in at once, clocking in at over seventy minutes and with a lack of variation here and there, but half today and the other half tomorrow is quite nice to work with. " [FdW / Vital Weekly]

Tracklist
1 Fragment 7 4:18
2 Fragment 12 1:58
3 Fragment 15 5:46
4 Fragment 9 3:59
5 Fragment 11 2:54
6 Fragment 17 2:24
7 Fragment 5 2:51
8 Fragment 26 3:46
9 Fragment 23 2:41
10 Fragment 27 7:37
11 Fragment 7a 3:29
12 Fragment 12b 1:15
13 Fragment 32 6:18
14 Fragment 29 1:44
15 Fragment 9a 6:01
16 Fragment 33 5:00
17 Fragment 1 3:23
18 Fragment 19 3:21
19 Fragment 4b 2:46
20 Fragment 20 2:03

CD ILLUMINATING TECHNOLOGIES IT0011
Package: 4 glossy pages 180mm x 180mm
Ltd. edition of 500 handnumbered CDs
Style: Electronic, Acousmatic, Avantgarde
May 2009