Lineaments II Ákos Nagy

• 1 Recitazioni [to Ádám Kondor] 18:47
• 2 Vibhava-taṇhā no. 1. 12:31
• 3 Fragments from Chiaroscuro 29:51
• 4 Ripples on the ice of Enceladus [trio version] 10:14
• Total Runtime 01:11:23

Info for Lineaments II

An endless shout drifting through time and space: When someone cries out while falling it is not because they hope to be heard. Perhaps - by stirring the very medium of the fall - they simply wish to leave behind a trace, some audible imprint of their passing. It sends out waves, waves that slightly outlast the moment of impact.

Of course when listening to the compositions of Ákos Nagy the situation is far less catastrophic. We are falling, yes, but not from a tall building nor from the top of an old walnut tree. Rather we leap from somewhere in the realm of satellites' orbits. Which means we will keep circling the center of mass of our tiny fragment of a galaxy many more times.

At every moment we feel the density of gravity, and we are fully aware of the eventual end of this motion - so precisely aware, in fact, that we could calculate the time remaining down to a tenth of a second. But why would we when this fall might take sixty or seventy years?

Along this long (?) trajectory we slow slightly as we enter elliptical curves and speed up again as we exit them. Each deceleration and each acceleration is reminiscent of the cyclicity of an orbit - but perhaps it is more accurate to say: it is the shifts in speed themselves that give form to time. Ákos Nagy creates the same feeling in his compositions: the music changes speed on the boundaries of form.

Yet he does this in an especially enigmatic way: playing with momentary perceptions of tempo, he thickens and thins the sonic texture creating illusion of speeding up or slowing down. At times, it seems his music recognizes only instantaneous velocity offering no sense of an average speed. And without some rough feel for average speed, it is difficult to estimate how much of the journey lies ahead. Perhaps that is why the length of Nagy’s compositions is always surprising. They seem either startlingly brief or daringly extended. The most enigmatic moment in his music, then, is always the final one. Ákos Nagy’s music invites us on an adventurous voyage - a shared journey among space debris and various forms of cosmic fragments. We are surrounded by tiny, racing objects, each of them compelling enough to hold our attention. And how deeply satisfying it is to encounter any kind of matter in the middle of nowhere - and to imagine the impossible: a loud shout echoing back from the surface of a drifting shard.

Let there be no doubt: the one who shout out into this seventy-minute stream of music - shaped into four distinct identities [lineaments] is the composer himself who loves every reflected sound as if it were his own. (Szabolcs Molnár musicographer, music critic, teacher)

Ákos Nagy, synthesizers, several different cymbals, gongs
István Rimóczi, various percussion and wind instruments
Horia Dumitrache, bass clarinet
Kornél Hencz, temple block, vibraphone, several different cymbals

Ákos Nagy
His art is synthetic and shows synthesizing tendency which is built from the Netherlandish polyphone tradition. He examined Gothic and late Renaissance music, traces of which show up in his later music along with elements of Transsylvanian, Indian, Khmer, Balinese and Japenese classical culture. He is researching the rhythm and tone systems outside Europe. He turns towards exploring new forms and structures, filling them up with his characteristic take on melody which origins usually from non-tempered (just intonation) systems. His music juxtaposes solid blocks of sound that keep reprising accumulatively – a method he branded ’layering technique’. He has been experimenting with psychoacoustic ‘tricks’ for example morfing tremolos with different tempos, phenomenon of binaural beats, low frequencies impulses (ELF-WLF), sounds of pulsars, magnetars and other radio signals from space, different spectral distortions, paradox of tritone and octave, glissando-like effects, scale illusions and Doppler-effect. Apart from acoustic instruments he is interested in electronic instruments, electro-acoustic music, sound synthesis, percussions and instruments which differs from European ones for example shakuhachi, hichiriki, sho, bansuri, serpent, hurdy-gurdy, viola da gamba, etc.

Booklet for Lineaments II