CTRL Variations Pascal Schumacher, United Instruments of Lucilin, Pit Brosius

• Pascal Schumacher (b. 1979): You Wake up in the Morning:
• 1 Schumacher: You Wake up in the Morning 11:13
• She Turns on Her Laptop:
• 2 Schumacher: She Turns on Her Laptop 10:37
• They Remember a Time:
• 3 Schumacher: They Remember a Time 09:51
• Remembering Olga:
• 4 Schumacher: Remembering Olga 07:11
• God Love Them:
• 5 Schumacher: God Love Them 14:38
• Total Runtime 53:30

Info for CTRL Variations

Is it a love story? Undoubtedly. Is it a play about the strange relationship between people and their computers? Likewise (after all, among other things, quite a few annoying spam emails are given musical honors in it). Is it experimental literature? Indeed, at least in part, because one of the actors from the Oulipo circle of authors around Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec is involved in it. Is it film music for an abstract film with letters instead of actors? In a way, that too. When musician and composer Pascal Schumacher, typographer Michel Welfringer and writer Ian Monk join forces to write variations on CTRL (control? the control key? the sounds C, T, R, and L? the letters?) for the ensemble United Instruments of Lucilin, a kind of controlled loss of control is preprogrammed.

Pascal Schumacher, vibraphone
United Instruments of Lucilin
Pit Brosius, direction

Pascal Schumacher
studied classical percussion, jazz vibraphone and musicology at music conservatories in Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Brussels and The Hague. He holds a Master’s Degree in musicology from the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, and another in music with a focus on jazz vibraphone from the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague. He has won many awards, including the Belgian Django d’Or (2005), Music:LX (2012), ECHO Jazz (2012), JTI Trier Jazz (2014), was selected for the Rising Stars program organized by the European Concert Hall Organization (2009 / 10) and appeared as soloist in ECHO Klassik 2017 awarded project Überbach.

He played with many of exciting musicians such Francesco Tristano, Bachar Mar-Khalifé, Jef Neve, Kenny Barron & Magic Malik, wrote music for theater and film and leaded a jazz quartet. Today he mixes emotional classical music with minimal electronic sounds, although Schumacher himself considers each classification obsolete. To him, music is a single, limitless playground.

2018 also marked a new beginning for Pascal Schumacher, who upon invitation to play at Jazz & The City Festival In Salzburg, started to develop his own solo material. The experience opened up an entirely new path for the composer culminating in his debut solo album, SOL. SOL captures Schumacher’s newfound passion for solitude in all its magnetism all the while remaining true to the main characteristic of his relationship with the vibraphone; intimacy. SOL has been released via Neue Meister in June 2020 followed in 2022 by the next album LUNA. While SOL carried in it a sense of spontaneous discovery as Schumacher, after years of playing with bands and ensembles, ventured out in his first solo endeavour, LUNA captures a more meticulous side to the musician’s work which involved once again composing for other players; more specifically for the Belgium post-classical ensemble Echo Collective, who lends to the album its many layers and textures. Despite the contrasts, SOL and LUNA aren’t in any way antagonistic to each other, much on the contrary, their duality feels wholly comple- mentary, expressing a natural musical progression much like day gently feeds into night.

Pascal is a Yamaha Artist and a Professor for Jazz and Classical Percussion at the Conservatoire de Musique de Luxembourg. - He is the Artistic Director of the innovative 'Reset' Music Festival at Abbaye Neimenster and an Ambassador for SOS Children's Villages International - Luxembourg.

This album contains no booklet.