Moritz von Oswald

presents “Silencio"

Released on Tresor in late 2023, “Silencio" gave us the most wonderful of reasons to see Moritz von Oswald again, after his appearance at the Semibreve Festival in 2016, accompanied by Rashad Becker. First composed in his Berlin studio on synthesisers that conjure up pure analogue magic — for whom this subject is too important to leave out: EMS VSC3 & AKS, Prophet V, Oberheim 4-Voice and Moog 15 — and later decoded for choir by Finnish composer and pianist Jarkko Riihimäki, Von Oswald then returned to the studio to create a new electronic score for the choral composition. With old questions drifting in the air once again: what distinguishes human sound from the artificial, voices from amplifiers, acoustics from electricity? It is with these tensions in mind that von Oswald creates “Silencio" as a reductionist reflection that oscillates between the light and the dark, or the ethereal and the dissonant, drawing on the teachings of Varèse, Ligeti or Xenakis. In a live context, all these ingredients seem to converge into something beautiful and unique, where time and space defy the laws of the universe. A remarkable feat that explains why we've waited so long to see him again.