Imperfect Forms: The Music of Kenneth Kirschner

by 5:4

On various occasions in the past, i’ve written about the music of American experimental composer Kenneth Kirschner. His work, all electronic and available free via his website, is endlessly fascinating, exploring a wide and unexpected variety of sonic shapes and timbres within formal contexts that take a radical approach (informed in part by the music of Feldman) to notions of narrative and development, with a tendency toward indeterminate—or at least, perceptually indeterminate—structures. Kirschner’s considerable output deserves much greater exposure and engagement than it has hitherto received, which makes yesterday’s release of Imperfect Forms: The Music of Kenneth Kirschner, a multimedia project celebrating and exploring his music, extremely welcome.

There is a 188-page ebook comprising a selection of essays, articles and interviews (two contributed by me), with an accompanying 4½-hour digital album containing responses to and remixes of Kirschner’s music by an eclectic cluster of composers—Tom Hodge, Ambrose Field, Maps and Diagrams, Christoph Berg, Marco Oppedisano, Adam Barringer, Orphax, Yukitomo Hamasaki, Monty Adkins, Erdem Helvacioglu, Billy Gomberg, Tomas Phillips, Shinkei, Stefan Goldmann, Anne Guthrie, Dirk Serries, L’Eix, Stephen Vitiello, Tobias Reber, Steinbrüchel—plus an additional software-based indeterminate composition created by myself. Further to this are a small number of videos by Sawako, Monty Adkins & Julio D’Escrivan, Josh Ott, Andy Graydon and Molly Sheridan.

The project is published by Tokafi, and in keeping with Kirschner’s own approach to releasing his work, the entire kit and kaboodle are available free of charge via the Tokafi bandcamp page (of course, feel free to pay something if you can).


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