Sunday, 3 August 2014

Peter Hai - Blitzkrieg

Echo Pressure bassist Nathan Kerntiff, aka Peter Hai, has just released his new album "Blitzkrieg," a lyrical instrumental album featuring violin and woodwind drones, intricate fingerpicked guitar, growling bass synths and even me (Zygmunt) playing trombone.

Listen to it below:




Although cinematically wide in scope, the album retains a homespun intimacy and personality, achieved through honest recording techniques - buzzing strings, atonal brass waverings and the rasping of fiddles are all left in - building up a rustic, impressionistic soundscape, that, for me, evokes the desolate, war-torn European countryside that seems to be suggested by the title, a dreamscape of small lives snatched up in the darkness of huge events beyond their knowledge or power to change.

However there is also a timelessness to the music, which is perhaps partly down to the tasteful use of modern insturments to flesh out, rather than ornament, the music - synths are used as part of the fabric of a whole, working in harmony with the acoustic instruments, not as signifiers of the cutting-edge.

Anyway, since Nath joined the band we have had many discussions about the record and it's great to finally hear it in it's entirety. Give it a listen.

- Zygmunt


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