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Stardust Crystals

Yumi Ito

Label: Unit Records
Released: 2020
Duration: 43:00:00
Views: 238

Tracks

Stardust Crystals ; Little Things ; What Seems to Be ; Ballad for the Unknown ; Unwritten Stories ; Old Redwood Tree ; When the Lights Go Down ; Spaziergang in Prag.

Personnel

Additional Personnel / Information

Line – Up: Yumi Ito – vocals, composition, arrangement, lyrics Marina Tantanozi – flute Sam Barnett – altosaxophone Enrique Oliver – tenorsaxophone, bassclarinet Victor Darmon – violin Hugo Van Rechem – viola Jo Flüeler – cello Esther Sévérac – harp Izabella Effenberg – vibraphone, array mbira, crotales Kuba Dworak – doublebass Phelan Burgoyne – drums

Album Description

Everything about Yumi Ito’s new LP titled «Stardust Crystals» is absolutely audacious! It’s a big band record, which she wrote and arranged for an 11-piece outfit. The material traverses neo-classical, art-pop, references progressive electronica and gives a singular twist to a classical jazz sound. And then there’s the choice of topics, each one like a an intimate entry snatched from the pages of a diary. A friend breaks under the pressures of life and is confined to a mental institution («Little Things»). What does this mean about the world we live in? A neighbour dies of a heroin overdose and you don’t even know his name («Ballad For the Unknown»). Who was this human being? And aren’t we all just breathing / living stories that remain unread, way too often? Absinth transmutes the streets of Prague into a Kafka-esque maze («Spaziergang In Prague»). Literary passages literally come to life. Magic! In the grand scheme of things we are just Stardust Crystals! But, why then, are we destroying our planet, especially after proclaiming ourselves its rightful rulers? This project came as a fully formed vision during one particularly sunny summer day, while Yumi was lying in the grass on the bans of the Rhine river. Practically all of the songs were written between 2016 and 2017. The melodies were mostly improvised, with Yumi singing them directly into her phone, whenever the muse would strike. The lyrics usually came on the move – on planes, trains and trams – and had to be quickly jotted down. During the arrangement and recording stages of the process some of these sketches were re-written – sometimes several times – with the objective to get the most colour and texture out of the instrumentation. The final material was recorded in 2018, at the Hardstudios Winterthur, in cooperation with Swiss Radio SRF Kultur 2 and will be available on all relevant platforms in November 2020. (Lukasz Polowczyk) Recorded at Hardstudios Co-Producer SRF 2 Kultur, Peter Bürli All compositions by Yumi Ito Recording Date: 9.11.-11.11.2018 Studio engineer Andy Neresheimer, Aurélien Marotte and mastering by Zino Mikorey Label: www.unitrecords.com

Album uploaded by Yumi Ito