Time Sketches John Kameel Farah

• 1 Fantasia Prelude 06:30
• 2 Behold! 05:45
• 3 Shiraz Sketch 04:55
• 4 Maqam Constellation 05:10
• 5 Quiet City A 02:38
• 6 Quiet City B 06:39
• 7 Simple Rotation 04:08
• 8 Grasshopper Dance 05:33
• 9 Leaves (For Mom) 04:00
• 10 Fantasia 12:19
• Total Runtime 57:37

Info for Time Sketches

Maximalism’ is what the Canadian-born composer John Kameel Farah calls his unique composition style. The artist has a musical style which, despite its complexity, still creates an organic feeling of unity. In this way, Farah represents a new generation of North-American composers who share a style in which complexity and musical narratives are not mutually exclusive. His music brings the listener powerfully into its sound world, with piano and live-produced synthesiser and organ sounds which are layered onto passages which could most accurately be defined as ‘power minimal’. These give way to practically ‘contrapuntal’ units, into which Arabic melodic fragments are interwoven.

Recording Time Sketches was a huge experiment for John Farah. The focus of the album is his 12 minute long piece, Fantasia. This was originally written as a commissioned work for the Western Front Society in Vancouver and performed in Berlin in 2016. John revised and recorded this work for the Neue Meister series, and wrote and recorded all the other pieces on the album in only a month (a feat which would usually take many more months). For the recording, a concert hall belonging to a home for blind children on the outskirts of Hanover was rented, into which John moved during the recording period. This rather special situation is reflected in the composition of the album, which, apart from the ecstatically complex Fantasia, has a special mood and musical flavour. Every piece comes with one of John’s own illustrations in the booklet.

John Kameel Farah, Nord Lead 3 Synthesizer, Moog Mother 32, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Absynth, Reaktor, Focusrite Clarett 4Pre audio interface, Neumann KM184 Mikrofone

The album was mixed and mastered by Berlin producer Guy Sternberg

John Kameel Farah
is a composer, pianist and visual artist based between Toronto and Berlin. He studied composition and piano performance at the University of Toronto, where he received the Glenn Gould Composition Award twice during his studies. In 1999 he had private lessons with Terry Riley in California, and later at the Arabic Music Retreat in Hartford.

Farah now focuses primarily on his own creative hybrid of improvisation, composition and electronic music. Simultaneously using piano, synthesizer, computer, and at times harpsichord and organ, his solo performances exist between the worlds of the concert pianist and the electronic producer, combining elements of free improvisation, jazz, electro–acoustics, middle-eastern modes and rhythms and ambient minimalism.

Farah’s music draws upon an interest in astronomy, history, mythology and painting. As a visual artist, his intricate ink drawings have been presented at solo and group exhibitions. He has composed extensively for solo piano, as well as for string quartet, percussion groups and chamber ensembles.

Farah performs regularly in both Toronto and Berlin, and has toured internationally across the U.K., Europe, USA, Canada, the Middle–East, Brazil, South Korea and Mexico. In 1999 and 2002, he visited the Edward Said National Conservatory, giving performances and masterclasses in the West Bank. In 1998, he performed the complete solo piano works of Arnold Schoenberg in Toronto, and more recently, the first book of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” in Berlin. In 2006 Toronto’s NOW Magazine named him ‘Best Pianist’ and in 2011 he received the K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Music from the Ontario Arts Council. In 2016 he received a Dora Mavor Moore Award from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts for his work with Peggy Baker Dance Projects.

His first album, “Creation” was a compilation of electronic tracks connected by piano and harpsichord interludes. His second album, “Unfolding” (Dross:tik Records 2009), a 2011 piano-duo album with pianist Attila Fias, followed by “Between Carthage and Rome” released in 2015. He is a member of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, as well as pianist-composer for Peggy Baker Dance Projects, and was the Electronic-Composer-in-Residence for Soundstreams Canada for 2013. His newest release, “Time Sketches”, is now released on the German label Neue Meister/Edel Kultur.

Booklet for Time Sketches