Category Archives: Press

The Four Seasons.Altered

Alimori (Mischa Blanos) & Dragusin – The Four Seasons.Altered LP

Remember Vivaldi’s concerti The Four Seasons? Well, in our quest to make our own part of the job in raising awareness of Earth’s situation, we remembered that famous work as well. Together with Dragusin, we reimagined 4 pieces for Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, telling a different story of those seasons through piano, synths, computer and modular. Enjoy this ambient album signed under my alias Alimori and Dragusin released today.

A four piece ambient & downtempo album shaped by the cycles of seasons, where Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are embodied through piano, synths, computer and modular. This collaborative project of Alimori and Dragusin is equipped with our modern gear – acoustic manipulation by electronic means and charged with the pressing activist message – altered nature. If you think climate change doesn’t exist or that our relationship to nature doesn’t drive pandemics, this piece of work will not make you a believer. But if you do, you may feel a part of a larger we.

Alimori, aka Mischa Blanos, is one of those artists who are tirelessly working to escape the tedium of composing around a single genre. With each migration he brings something new into the next one as if hunting down moods, feelings and soundscapes in a nomadic way of life. This is his first migration into the ambient genre.
With his extensive expertise as a sound engineer, Dragusin is meticulously weaving the complex fabric of percussion, loops and modular synthesis, as well as creating rich and organic sounds with his own field recordings. Purchase

November 3, 2020

Crossrhodes Album

Mischa Blanos & Khori Ander – Crossrhodes LP

Few more days until my collaboration with the clarinet performer Khori Ander will finally be shown into the shape of a full contemporary jazz album. Piano, synths, rhodes and the clarinet bass tangle and disentangle in tens of threads of patterns and improv lines. Be mindful about it, because there is a chance that it’ll put you in a delicate position, where gentleness and vulnerability are in the realm of physical sensitivity.

Mischa Blanos is one of those artists who are tirelessly working to escape the tedium of composing around a single genre. It’s boredom that makes him rage against the creative plateau; it’s fatigue that drives him to immerse himself into manifold richly-hued projects. With each migration he brings something new into the next one as if hunting down moods, feelings and soundscapes in a nomadic way of life.

In Crossrhodes, he brings contemporary classical music from his neoclassical acoustic-electronic solo project and gracious patterns from his techno endeavors. Here you have a gentle Mischa Blanos struck in awe by the sounds of the clarinet, sometimes weaving around threads with his Rhodes, so careful not to touch the fragile silky core and sometimes lending a child-like hand smoothly guiding the story with his piano and synths into places of sincere curiosity.

Khori Ander embodies the alias of Horia Dumitrache, triggering the leap to cross the borders of the familiar. While the contemporary clarinet performer got his international kudos on well-known stages and along with much acclaimed classical orchestras around the world, Khori Ander is convinced that focusing in a single musical direction would make him feel a stranger in his own house.

In Crossrhodes he dives headfirst into composition and improvisation quenching that intense thirst of discovering what his wind instruments would sound like in the hands of a liberated performer.
Purchase

June 4, 2020

Music Activists #2 InFiné

During my whole month of complete isolation, there were times of profound ennui. But then I remembered what Mary Anne Hobbs from BBC Radio 6 Music wrote me a while ago and I kept coming back to those words. She wrote to me “Anything truly worthwhile in this life is a struggle. I’ve never met a talented artist to whom success has come easily. The people who make it are those who simply cannot imagine another life. They have no plan- B“. The piece “Geradeaus”, “straight ahead” in German, means exactly the vigour and optimism of these words.
New compilation Music Activits #2 curated by InFiné Label is out now on all platforms. 34 Tracks, 34 Artists, 5 Continents, and more than 2 hours of new music.

To create is to resist.

After our astonishment, and in order to overcome the violence of the situation, it was necessary to unite, to feel that we were alive, to emancipate ourselves from the news that shears through our days. Very quickly, our desire to act became apparent. Which underpinned a feeling of urgency to follow up our first compilation ‘Music Activists’ released in 2018 which brought together lullabies for a suffering planet.Today, the planet is still mistreated and we are accelerated life that endangers creation and artists.

The value of creation

We are all actors in this new world, and we must revaluate the scale by which we measure the value of creation, currently ravaged by the imposed digital model. No, music is not a decorative element that a brain reaction is enough to alternate. It is the fruit of human memory, rich in differences, sometimes a painful learning process, a palimpsest of emotions, anger and love, risk-taking and encounters..

As said by David Byrne «music can help us cross deserts.» Who can say what we would resist without it? For that, we need artists to invent it and passionate teams to help make it blossom. It’s time, now that the tours have been stopped in their tracks, to consider the abnormality that has been developing since the start of the death of the CD format domination: the time to listen, and the number of people listening to music, is rising exponentially everywhere, but the income for its authors and producers is melting as fast as Antarctica.
We regret that we do not have our ‘credits,’ as they do for films: this is one of the roles of the vinyl cover, to list the names and functions of all the actors involved with the process. Maybe you have ignored that if you have grown up through this digitised music world, but the energy needed to create and distribute a musical works still exists. Purchase

May 28, 2020

Walking in a museum seems like binging on movies, sliding from one story to another, searching to untangle threads of narratives, and feeding your eyes and mind with whole worlds in a single instant view. With each track, A chair in the museum invites the listener to take the dance floor and move himself to techno as if contemplating in front of a painting. Sounds become visual, stillness becomes motion, unfolding four stories guided by kicks and beats, diffused themes and twisted fibres of melodies.
Purchase

May 1, 2020

Lockdown

Because I had an airport stopover in a red zone, I’m self-isolating at home for 14 days. I take it as a civic and moral duty and make my own part in the effort of reducing the spread. Sure, I am young and fit and maybe the chances of taking the Coronavirus in that short window in the airport are small, but it’s not worth the risk. I am staying put. So, thank you family and friends for bringing me groceries to my door.
It’s kind of odd that my latest album is called Indoors. I was reflecting that we are becoming more and more isolated, making our homes beautiful and cosy so that we can stay comfortably inside. Little did I know that in six months I will have the full blown experience of an indoor being. But I’m determined to make the best of it. So I surrounded myself with all these indoor creatures.
Stay safe!

March 14, 2020

ARTE Concert in collaboration with Sourdoreille made this recording possible at Eurosonic Noorderslag Festival in Gröningen. I want to say thank you both for putting your energy into this concert! Enjoy the track Rocoma

January 27, 2020