Related Rocks

  

"Related Rocks" is an amazing 1997 music by the finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. In 1977, Magnus Lindberg is - along with Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen - one of the founding members of the association Korvat auki! ("Open your ears!"), whose mission is to promote contemporary music by organizing concerts and offering a meeting place for composers, instrumentalists, critics and musicologists. In addition to his compositional activities, Lindberg is a pianist, and his concert career will lead him to create many pieces. In 1980, with Esa-Pekka Salonen, he founded the experimental ensemble Toimii! ("It works!"), which must become, according to his own words, "a laboratory where composers and instrumentalists could work together on new means of musical expression", notably through a work on improvisation in concert.

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for 2 pianos, 2 percussionists and electronic set, "Related Rocks" is a kind of patchwork with lot of different sounds, very different harmonic and rhythmic patterns, even distant stylistic allusions. 

percussions : Samuel Favre, Victor Hanna  & pianos : Hidéki Nagano, Sébastien Vichard,  

all 4 soloists of the Ensemble Contemporain

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& to listen to: "Kraft", one of the main composition of Lindberg, considered as one of the great sonic brouhahas of the late 20th century. "Kraft" is the aural result of what happens when German metal-merchants Einstürzende Neubauten meets Xenakis (two of Lindberg’s most important inspirations at the time) filtered through an iconoclastic twentysomething Finnish composer’s imagination.