“With electronic music, it’s hard NOT to create huge amounts of sound… and to me it’s often about taking things away” – Kenneth Kirschner
OK. Let’s try to find a way to begin here. Let’s start with Tokafi.
Tokafi is a Berlin-based website, curated by Tobias Fischer, presenting album, concert and movie reviews, as well as in-depth articles, interviews and label profiles. A wealth of information, and in fact a multi-media platform itself. Tobias Fischer also curated this very special project dedicated to the music of Kenneth Kirschner, called “Imperfect Forms“.
But first, it might be interesting to take a look at Kenneth Kirschner‘s own website, because it will tell a lot about how he thinks about music and its distribution. It is a very minimalistic site, one white page only, featuring 143 links to music files (and an occasional app) you can download for free (in MP3 or FLAC format!).
“I’m not telling you to copy other things. I am telling you to pirate my music – because I think it’s important.”
All tracks are untitled – just their creation date is mentioned:
“The lack of explanatory material about his music is quite intentional. Kirschner wants listeners to focus on the end result and is uninterested in seducing them with detailed notes about his compositional process, because ‘if you don’t like what you’re hearing, the methods have already failed”.
(Quotes from “Pirate This Music”, by Molly Sheridan, NewMusicBox 2013)
From this incredible wealth of electronic experimental music, the Tokafi project “Kenneth Kirschner: Imperfect Forms” took shape. A project containing:
- Three albums with a “Best of Selection” called “MM/DD/YY”.
“Part 1” is compiled by Tobias Fischer, “Part 2” and “Part 3” are selected by Kenneth Kirschner himself.
(As I wrote before, all of there pieces can also be downloaded for free from Kirschner’s website, but this way the fairly priced compilations serve as a donation to the artist. In my opinion, any artists that gives away his music so open-handed deserves to be rewarded too!) - A 20-track, 4 hour remix compilation: “Imperfect Forms – The Music of Kenneth Kirschner Remixed” – which was in fact the album that draw my attention in the first place.
(More about this below) - A 180-page PDF e-book, also offered as a free download .
A book in the true sense: only text – there are no images or pictures to fill it. 180+ pages full of essays, interviews and analyses. - A compilation of videos, musical as well as documentary.
There are music videos from the remixes by Sawako, Monty Adkins & Julio D’Escrivan, Joshue Ott (below) and Dmitry Gelfand & Evelina Domnitch.
- and, to conclude, a software based indeteminate generative composition “February 24, 2013” by Simon Cummings.
(which unfortunately did not seem to work on my computer at the time of writing)
I guess that’ll be enough material to fill your coming Christmas holidays!!
The “Imperfect Forms” remix album features 20 tracks from different artists interpreting Kirschner’s work. The tracks are quite different in length (the total playing time of this album alone is over four hours – the shortest track being 3 minutes long, the longest 60 minutes), but also in style. There is minimalism, modern classical interpretations, abstract electronics, and long-form drone pieces by artists like Ambrose Field, Maps and Diagrams, Field Rotation, Orphax, Monty Adkins, Billy Gomberg, Shinkei, Dirk Serries, Stephen Vitiello, Steinbruchel and others.
A great and versatile introduction which invites you to further check out the works of Kenneth Kirschner.
By the way: it should be noted that the “Imperfect Forms” remix album is offered on a Name Your Price basis, which is of course in the spirit of Kenneth Kirschner’s own philopsophy.
But with a large-scale project like this, where so much content is offered for free, anyone with a warm musical heart should definitely consider a donation – to both Tokafi as well as Kenneth Kirschner himself!