Christopher Chaplin - Patriarchs Live
"Performing 'Patriarchs' live for me is like following the path of the songline, the path of a dreaming track, the route followed by our primordial 'creator-beings'“ — Christopher Chaplin
After his acclaimed album trilogy Je suis le Ténébreux (2016), Paradise Lost (2018), and M (2020), London-based musician and avant-garde composer Christopher Chaplin released a major new work Patriarchs in 2021. The album is based on the ten antediluvian patriarchs, from Adam to Noah and their journey from the darkness of the Fall towards enlightenment. Through its strong artistic force, the album is both timeless and topical. Another powerful work of art, located between electronic music and avant-garde. Once again, Christopher Chaplin breaks genre boundaries and managed to condense experimental and colorful electronics in chamber music in a unique way, transporting the listener into mental and spatiotemporal intermediate states. A completely unique musical microcosm that can also be experienced in his powerful solo live performances.
As a foretaste of his upcoming live dates in 2023, Christopher Chaplin releases Patriachs Live, his first concert album - a recording of his celebrated live performance on 14 February at Rhiz Vienna.
Biography
Christopher James Chaplin, a British composer and experimental artist, has carved a unique path in the avant-garde music scene. With a background in piano studies in Vevey, Switzerland, he later made his way to London during the early 1980s, where he began to explore the boundaries of sound and composition.
In 2009, Michael Martinek and Fabrique Records invited Chaplin to collaborate on the concept album Seven Echoes with the artist Kava. This project came to life at the Art Brut Museum Gugging in Lower Austria, igniting Chaplin's passion for experimentation. It was during this time that he crossed paths with electronic music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius (known for his work with Cluster and Harmonia), leading to a captivating live session on BBC Radio 3's "Late Junction." The result of this second collaboration eventually led to another album – King of Hearts.
In the following years, Chaplin and Roedelius performed all over the world: mostly improvised performances with Roedelius on piano and electronics and Chaplin on synthesizers and orchestral samples. In October 2016, Christopher Chaplin’s acclaimed first solo album Je suis le Ténébreux was released – with guest artists such as Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Christine Roedelius, French singer and actress Judith Chemla or Claudia Schumann – some of which had been recorded in Air’s legendary Paris Atlas Studio.
While Chaplin’s first album was an artistic interpretation of Gérard de Nerval’s poem of the same name and the “Enigma of Bologna”, his second longplayer Paradise Lost (2018) translated John Milton’s poem about the descent of fallen angels into hell into epic soundscapes. The album features the voices of Nathan Vale and Leslie Winer. Vale is a British tenor and reciter, who specializes in baroque singing. The U.S. musician, poet, and artist Winer is almost his counterpart: Jean-Paul Gaultier called her the first androgynous model, working with Sinéad O’Connor, Grace Jones, and Helmut Lang.
In addition to his solo studio recordings, Christopher Chaplin continues to perform numerous collaborative and improvised live shows with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and other artists such as the Icelandic electronic music trio Stereo Hypnosis. Based on these live improvisations, the ambient electronic album Bjarmi was recorded in Hvammstangi, Iceland, in 2018.
With his third solo album M (2020) – the final part of a trilogy –, Chaplin not only picked up musically where his two predecessors left off, but takes it to the extreme with virtuosity and wit, with an over-theme that couldn't fit better into our time – change and transformation. For the album he once more brought top-class guest artists into his studio: BRIT Award winner Finley Quaye, the exceptional Austrian musician Mira Lu Kovacs and acclaimed artist and performer Aurelia Thierree.
