b. fleischmann: music for shared rooms

Music for Shared Rooms is B. Fleischmann's eleventh solo album and his first since 2018. It is also not an album, or at least not in the conventional sense of the word. These 16 instrumental pieces provide a kaleidoscopic glimpse of a forward-thinking musician at home in many different musical worlds, including experimental and abstract music, pop, and more classically-minded compositional forms. These pieces were culled from an archive of roughly 600 compositions for theatre pieces and films written throughout the past twelve years. The Österreichischer Filmpreis-awarded composer, however, aimed for more than simply documenting his extensive work in and with different media. To do so, he edited and re-mixed the individual recordings for this release, taking them out of their contexts and reworking them for an audience who can experience them in a different setting. Music for Shared Rooms makes it possible for its listeners to engage with the sounds and to fill the spaces they open up with their own imagination. Roughly speaking, music for theater or film can serve two functions: it either takes the lead, or underscores what is happening on stage or screen. The marvelous thing about these pieces is that they manage to do both. Fleischmann's work as a prolific producer has always drawn on contrasts, at times combining pop sentiment with rigid experimentation, the seemingly naive with the intricate and complex. This approach also marks the tracks collected here: bringing together acoustic elements and electronic sounds, at times working with conventional structures but always de- and re-contextualizing them, Fleischmann constructs a vivid dramaturgy out of discrete singular compositions, letting them interact across the record. A dramaturgical interconnectedness of varied musical materials is the thread that runs through Music for Shared Rooms. The differences between the pieces may be striking, but the progression from one to the other is subtle. It goes on like this through different moods and tempos. All these pieces create distinct situations through the juxtaposition of diverse musical elements, but are also bound together by a single vision. Writing music for theatre pieces or film requires a composer and his pieces to engage with people and their movements in space, which is exactly what Fleischmann offers on this record. Includes printed inners and download code; edition of 500.