SOLO

Canto Ostinato is the new volume of classical minimalism from musician and producer Erik Hall. Written for four pianos from 1976 to 1979 by the late Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, the piece is freshly framed as an intimate, hour-long solo performance consisting of multitracked grand pianos, electric piano, and organ. The second album in a trilogy of reinterpretations, Hall’s Canto Ostinato is modern yet warm, ethereal yet tangible, and it expertly bridges a revered piece of meditative concert repertoire with a tactile and highly personal studio setting.

Chicago-born and Michigan-based, Erik Hall is known as a multi-instrumental pillar for the groups NOMO, Wild Belle, and his own songwriting moniker In Tall Buildings. He has composed music for feature films, and as a producer/engineer he has shaped records for Natalie Bergman and Western Vinyl labelmates Lean Year. In a 2020 creative pivot, he chose to reinvent composer Steve Reich’s monumental contemporary classical masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians as a solo undertaking, applying the piece’s score to the familiar keyboards, guitars, and synthesizers in his studio. “At the time I think I was working through my identity as a musician and an artist,” Hall explains, “and on a level there was some sort of exorcism of a long held pop spirit.” The album was celebrated for being “freshly thrilling” and “legible in history but assertive of the moment” (Pitchfork) and “beguiling, meditational, and magical” (Electronic Sound). It won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and it quickly joined the canon of the piece’s quintessential recordings.

“There is a pseudo-meditational benefit to working on a longform piece that’s built on repetition,” Hall says. “Every stage— from internalizing the music, to executing the performance, to editing and mixing the record— requires deep and sustained presence of mind. I’ve always been drawn to a hallucinatory combination of harmony and repetition, and I found the entire process addictive.”

An apt second chapter, Canto Ostinato is Simeon ten Holt’s blissfully adventurous magnum opus. As a solitary Dutch composer of the mid-20th century avant-garde, ten Holt dared to abandon the fashionable twelve-tone language of his schooling for a return to tonality, the simple triad, and shifting rhythmic patterns. Rather than revert to the old laws of harmony, he employed overlapping, freely repeating shapes with a highly distinctive tonal center to manifest an independent ‘musical object,’ liberating the piece’s overall structure from the written page and defining a new Dutch minimal music.

As such, Canto Ostinato is inherently vast, and its score gives great creative license to the performers. Comprising 106 sections, complete freedom is given to repeat each one as many or as few times as desired. Additional leeway is given with regard to dynamics, articulation, and even instrumentation. On the heels of his previous, rather maximal arrangement, Hall chose to limit this album’s palette to three foundational keyboards of his studio: a 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1978 Rhodes Mark I electric piano, and his family-heirloom 1910 Steinway grand piano. “This particular piece brought the added challenge of rekindling my dexterity as a pianist, something I haven’t maintained in earnest since I was a teenager,” he admits. The ensuing five-note rhythmic motif— the piece’s primary building block— is steady and workmanlike, forgoing virtuosic flare for depth, texture, and resonance, and eventually giving way to the stunning gratification of a gorgeously lyrical left turn.

As with Music for 18 Musicians, Hall employed no loops nor quantization nor any programmed or sequenced instruments of any kind. Every part was performed live in a room and captured with microphones, one at a time, each informed by, and reacting to the last. In this way the record breathes with interplay and an organic humanity, complete with flaws, noise, and the faint sound of turning pages. As the piece’s first edition to comfortably fit on a single vinyl LP, the recording quality is nonetheless toneful and saturated, characteristic of Hall’s production style and straying from the usual transparency of classical albums by using gear with tubes, transformers, and various stages of compression in the signal path. Always there is unmistakable realism and the feeling of being present in the room, sitting among the white and black keys, hammers, and tines.

Simeon ten Holt died in 2012 as celebrated in his country as he was singular. “A great deal of time, patience and discipline are the prerequisites for making a genetic code productive, that eventually determines form, structure, length, instrumentation, etc.,” he said. “Such a process is laborious, as it is constantly being troubled by human short-comings and one’s own will, and it is dependent on moments of clarity and vitality. And then, the sea washes and polishes, time crystallizes.”

Ten Holt’s landmark composition provides Erik Hall once again with a wondrous and expansive space in which to reverently embody this sentiment and deftly convey the elegant beauty of this music.

– Western Vinyl, 2022

MUSIC FOR 18 MUSICIANS (STEVE REICH)
2020, Western Vinyl

Performed and recorded at home in Galien, Michigan, February 2019, using prepared piano, Fender Rhodes electric piano, Hammond M-101 organ, Moog Sub 37 synthesizer, Nord Lead synthesizer, electric guitar, electric bass, Roland CR-68 drum machine, and processed voice.

Composed by Steve Reich, 1974 - 1976

Mixed with Brian Deck at Narwhal Studios, Chicago, IL
Mastered by Warren Defever at Third Man Mastering, Detroit, MI
Artwork by Aaron Lowell Denton


Best Classical Record - 2021 LIBERA AWARDS

”Shrewd… prismatic… organic… legible in history but assertive of the moment… makes a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit.” - PITCHFORK

”Beguiling… meditational… magical” - ELECTRONIC SOUND

”Pays audacious homage to Steve Reich’s 1976 minimalist masterpiece without losing any of its unique timbre. ★★★★” - MOJO


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A re-interpretation so often comes from an impulse, even if subliminal, of one-upmanship – let me do better, wait ‘til you hear it my way. Sometimes though, and it happens too rarely, the cover is an act of devotion in which a musician’s humility produces something more beautiful than bravura could. When Erik Hall undertook his painstaking reconstruction of Steve Reich’s 1976 masterpiece of minimalism, “Music for Eighteen Musicians”, it was as much an exercise in modesty as ambition. With its repetitions and complex constructions, the piece makes great demands on stamina and concentration, and Reich himself advised that these challenges meant it should probably be performed with more than eighteen musicians. Hall, however, recorded every part himself in his small home studio, playing instruments he had on hand, in live, single takes. Here, then is the ambition. But here too is the modesty: by doing one section a day, one instrument at a time, he made his way through this monumental piece, building a faithful and loving re-creation, one sonic brick at a time. Xylophone becomes muted piano, violin becomes electric guitar and so it is that music for eighteen becomes music for one. “I didn’t want it to be distracting, or a gimmick,” says Hall, who’s loved the piece for as long as he can remember. “I wanted it to be true to the timbre and spirit of the original recording,” and he thought a great deal about, “how I would shape the tone of each instrument, to come across with the same impact that we know the piece to have.” His methodology, as with Reich’s piece itself, is workmanlike, and it’s from this humble and steadfast undertaking that something honest and radiant emerges.

– Hermione Hoby, 2020

IN TALL BUILDINGS

AKINETIC
2018, Western Vinyl

Recorded 2015 - 2017

Produced and mixed by Brian Deck
Mastered by Josh Bonati
Artwork by Rick Alverson / Jared Bell

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DRIVER
2015, Western Vinyl

Recorded 2011 - 2014

Mixed with Benjamin Balcom
Mastered by Bob Weston
Artwork by Hans Peter Sundquist

WESTERN VINYL | BANDCAMP
SPOTIFY | APPLE MUSIC

IN TALL BUILDINGS
2010, Whistler Records

Recorded 2006 - 2008

Mixed with Rick Fritz
Mastered by Bob Weston

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NOMO