Kagel, Mauricio

***MAURICIO KAGEL’s 1970s film Ludwig Van, a rather critical piece of avant-garde cinema, asked pointed questions about the ways in which later audiences appropriate and interprete Beethoven’s music. Pianist FREDERIC BLONDY and turntablist DJ LENAR reclaim and reinterpret the soundtrack in this post-modern mashup that includes source material such as Herzog soundtracks, a lecture by Alfred Cortot, samples of string playing and percussion from contemporary improvisation records, and numerous other unknown sounds—all recorded at the Warsaw National Art Gallery, produced the same day as its premiere. “It’s an indescribable puzzle piece,” marvels our friend at The Sound Projector, “A crazy-quilt knitted together from mosaic-fragments of music, and virtually every second of sound appears to have a subversive intent or hidden meaning, one quote leading to another quote. It’s also glorious to listen to…. A fabulous thirty-two minutes of delirious complexity which bends 19th century classical music into 20th century atonal composition, by way of very contemporary techniques (editing, turntabling, mixing, layering).” The second release in Bôłt’s Populista series of radical reinterpretations of historical music, curated by MICHAL LIBERA.