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Pastorale

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East of West

Label: 4000 Records
Released: 2025
Duration: 00:41:56
Views: 206

Tracks

Where is Your Accent From; Quiet Days in West End; Small Eyes; Takt; At the End of the Tunnel; Pastorale

Personnel

Album Description

This album began with a small piano being crammed into the back of a family car. Malindi, our percussionist, was on a mission to buy a piano that could fit in our tiny apartment. After visiting and rejecting a number of them, Malindi found a beautiful old spinet upright. She called the owner, we drove to the suburbs, walked behind the house - and there was the piano, sitting on the grass, covered in a tarpaulin, in the middle of the rainy, sweaty Brisbane summer. Our hearts sank deeper than our feet into the suburban floodplain mud. The owner's ex had turfed the piano and all his music gear out of the house to the mercy of the subtropical summer weather. He offered it to us for zero dollars. Malindi bargained the price up, three of us somehow loaded it into the back of Subaru Forester and took it home. The piano tuner worked hard to give the piano back some self-respect, and on it I sketched out the compositions on this album which were played by the remarkable Romano Crivici to complement East of West's oud, double bass and percussion. We recorded on a beautiful Steinway piano with an equally interesting story, but we'll leave that for another time. —— - - Recorded live in Brisbane by the extraordinary sound engineer Siiri Metsar, this collaboration further extends the band’s unique sound and style, inviting listeners to immerse themselves in its finely-crafted soundscapes and improvisations. Over the seven years of their collaboration, East of West have developed an intuitive musical relationship, flourishing through their dynamic interplays, virtuosic unison melodies and expressive soloing. Gajić’s compositions explore gentle melodic motifs nested in uptempo passages set to Balkan-influenced rhythms, interspersed with moments of mesmerising musical sparseness.

Album uploaded by John Russell