New album ‘Silencio’ will be out on November 10 via Tresor Records.
Moritz von Oswald, a producer and musician with a classical education (percussion) and a pioneer of dub techno, started out in 1983 as the rhythmist of the avant-garde new wave band Palais Schaumburg. His musical work since then – as a soloist, but also repeatedly in joint projects with other international greats of the music world – has had a formative influence on the development of electronic music and has shaped generations of DJs. The techno sound he created as a producer in the early 1990s, for example, is considered fundamental to Berlin’s international reputation as a center of electronic music.
In the following years, he and others founded the bands 2MB (and 3MB) with Thomas Fehlmann and Juan Atkins, and worked successfully with musician Mark Ernestus on projects such as Basic Channel, Maurizio and Rhythm & Sound. In the mid-1990s, he opened the D&M studio together with Ernestus, through which he released electronic club music in unusually high sound quality and with the necessary presence on vinyl, thus shaping techno culture in Germany and internationally.
In 2008, based on an idea by label boss Christian Kellersmann, he released “Recomposed” for Deutsche Grammophon together with the American techno producer Carl Craig from Detroit, an innovative meeting of club culture and classical music in which the two techno greats edited original recordings of “Bolero”, “Rapsodie espagnole” (Maurice Ravel) and “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Modest Mussorgsky). In 2009, he formed the “Moritz von Oswald Trio”, a sound laboratory for improvised, jazz-socialized electronic music, which he ran over the years with musicians such as Vladislav Delay, Sasu Ripatti, Max Loderbauer, Laurel Halo, Tony Allen and Heinrich Köbberling. In 2013, he began his collaborative work with the Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer. In 2017, he was commissioned to compose “Reminiscenza” for the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. That same year, von Oswald cooperated with the Kyrgyz ensemble Ordo Sakhna both live and in the studio.
The new album “Silencio”, for which he recorded a 16-voice Berlin choir, will be released later this year on Tresor Records. “Silencio” is a composition in which Moritz von Oswald fuses choral singing with electronic sounds and puts them in an experimental dialog.
