Maldoror (album)

Maldoror
Studio album by Erik Friedlander
Released November 11, 2003
Recorded April 25, 2002
Teldex Studios, Berlin
Genre Avant-garde, Jazz, Contemporary classical music
Length 40:23
Label Brassland HWY-005
Producer Michael Montes
Erik Friedlander chronology

Quake
(2003)		 Moldoror
(2003)		 Prowl
(2006)

Maldoror is a solo album by cellist Erik Friedlander recorded in Berlin and released on the Brassland label featuring music inspired by the French poet Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror.[1][2]

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic [3]
Pitchfork [4]

The Allmusic review by Thom Jurek awarded the album 4½ stars stating "For all its intensity, it is nearly shockingly accessible, even with its far-flung and dramatic sense of dynamics. This is an album created to be listened to as one work, the individual selections all contribute to a haunting, hunted whole, and don't really exist well outside their framework as such. Nonetheless, this is a brilliantly conceived and executed recording, alluringly musical, and decadently humorous in places. As Friedlander's latest chapter, it is also his finest".[3]

Pitchfork rated the album 8.3 out of 10 observing that "The formula is simple: put a piece of Ducasse's text in front of the cellist in the studio, along with a few notes, and let him compose music to match it on the spot. It panned out, more or less, not because Maldoror was conceived as a series of songs, but because Erik Friedlander can do things with a cello that should have a reasonable listener fearing for her life".[4]

Jazz Review's John Kelman wrote "Maldoror is, quite simply, an important recording of solo improvised pieces, regardless of the instrument; but all the more compelling because it shows a side to the cello that has not been seen before".[5]

Track listing

All compositions by Erik Friedlander

  1. "May It Please Heaven" - 3:31
  2. "One Should Let One's Fingernails Grow" - 3:08
  3. "The Wind Groans" - 5:30
  4. "O Stern Mathematics" - 4:54
  5. "The Palace of Pleasures" - 4:33
  6. "Here Comes the Madwoman" - 2:54
  7. "I Am Filthy" - 4:53
  8. "Flights of Starlings" - 3:47
  9. "He Contemplates the Moon" - 3:31
  10. "A Sewing-Machine and an Umbrella" - 3:45

Personnel

References

  1. ↑ Eric Friedlander discography accessed January 8, 2014
  2. ↑ Brassland discography accessed January 8, 2014
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Jurek, T. Allmusic Review accessed January 8, 2014
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Hoffman, J. Pitchfork album review, January 26, 2004
  5. ↑ Kelman, J. Jazz Review review, June 26, 2003