Burnt Friedman

Burnt Friedman - First Night Forever - 2007 - Nonplace

First Night Forever uses a motley crew of guest vocalists to sing Friedman's skeletal dub scores. This is a wonderful collection of dub, jazz, and funk-infused electronica. by a master of production skills. Famous for collaborating with top-notch electronic musicians and vocalists, Friedman here, is up to his usual high standard of excellence. Funkstörung vox contributor Enik, and Grace Jones-meets-Eartha-Kitt Berliner Barbara Panther are but two musicians who contribute to this brilliant polyrhythmic work. It is complex at times, but it's a very enjoyable album, and very accessable. Check out the Nine Horses album, "Snow Borne Sorrow," which is a great album and features sme beautiful jazzy arrangements by Friedman, and David Sylvian . If you can find it, try to hear Burnt Friedman's "Con Ritmo" album which is a unique blend of digital-age and latin lounge fusion. Marvellous futuristic electronica of the highest quality.

TRACKS

1. Where Should I Go - (with Steve Spacek)
2. Machine in the Ghost
3. Walk With Me - (with Steve Spacek)
4. Need Is All You Love - (with Theo Altenberg)
5. First Night Forever - (with Daniel Dodd-Ellis)
6. Healer - (with Theo Altenberg)
7. Western Smoke - (with Enik)
8. Thumb Second - (with Enik)
9. Chaos Breeds 1
10. Chaos Breeds 2 - (with Daniel Dodd-Ellis/Barbara Panther/Theo Altenberg)

CREDITS

Acoustic Guitar - Tim Motzer (tracks: 7)
Acoustic Guitar, Guitar [Electric Rhythm], Bass - Mandjao Fati
Backing Vocals - Adulis Ghebru (tracks: 3, 5, 6) , Don Abi (tracks: 4) , Sascha Cohn (tracks: 1, 9)
Bass - Daniel Schroeter* (tracks: 4)
Drum Programming, Bass, Percussion, Keyboards - Burnt Friedman*
Drums - Jochen Rueckert* (tracks: 5, 7)
Guitar [Electric Rhythm] - Richard Pike (tracks: 1, 8)
Guitar [Electric] - Joseph Suchy
Lead Vocals - Barbara Panther (tracks: 2, 10) , Dodd-Ellis* (tracks: 5, 10) , Enik (tracks: 7, 8) , Steve Spacek (tracks: 1, 3) , Altenberg* (tracks: 4, 6, 10)
Producer [Backing Vocals] - Enik (tracks: 7, 8)
Recorded By - B. Friedman* , James Fletcher (tracks: 1, 8) , Jochen Rückert (tracks: 5, 7) , Steve Spacek (tracks: 1, 3) , Tim Motzer (tracks: 7)
Recorded By [Intro, Transition Field Recordings] - David Franzke
Saxophone, Clarinet, Flute - Hayden Chisholm
Strings - Alexander Meyen (tracks: 3, 7) , Claudio Bohórquez
Voice - Burnt Friedman* (tracks: 2, 9)
Written-By - Friedmann* , Dodd-Ellis* (tracks: 5, 10) , Enik (tracks: 7, 8) , Steven A. White* (tracks: 1, 3) , Altenberg* (tracks: 4, 6, 10)

REVIEWS

Burnt Friedman has a rep for flirting with the funk. Early on, his approach and his output-- intricately polyrhythmic, meticulously crafted "hypermodern jazz" tracks full of shimmering vibraphones and cheeky Latin percussion-- often found him branded as an ironist. But his productions, whether solo, with Atom Heart (as the duo Flanger), or alongside a growing cast of collaborators-- like Root 70 saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, improvising/experimental guitarist Joseph Suchy, vocalist Theo Altenberg and, perhaps most importantly, Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit-- have never been reducible to kitsch. Listen to Burnt Friedman & The Nu Dub Players' 2003 album Can't Cool: for all the obvious digital traces (oddly truncated hi-hats, drum patterns physically impossible for a single percussionist to play) there are no winks or nudges. To say that "Fuck Back", the record's lead cut, is a postmodern take on Afrobeat is hardly to deny its ferocity: no matter how many steps removed from the source, urgency remains coded in the music's DNA. Indeed, it's in the collaborative work that Friedman has really dug into the groove, particularly on his two records with Liebezeit: both volumes of Secret Rhythms offer an approach to polyrhythm rarely heard in electronic music. By slowing everything down, the two amplify the wiggle room, leaving more space for drum hits to bounce beyond the strictures of quantization, allowing for rhythms that restore liquidity to the idea of pulse. After 2006's sublime Heaps Dub-- in which the jazz quartet Root 70 performed acoustic versions of Friedman and Flanger classics that Friedman, in turn, remixed into 10 tracks of exactly five minutes apiece, a sort of dub of a dub of a dub-- Friedman, aided by an expanded cast of characters, returns with a far more conventional album. Formally, it's probably the most conventional of his career: these aren't krautrock jams or ambient dub meditations or electro-cumbia dustups, they're proper songs fronted by a rotating crew of vocalists. Longtime Friedman collaborator Theo Altenberg lends a Tom Waits-like croak to three songs; Hamburg soul singer Daniel Dodd-Ellis, Berlin's Barbara Panther, Funkstörung collaborator Enik and UK broken-beat veteran Steve Spacek all guest on two apiece. All of them dusky, throaty singers, they give First Night an unmistakably late-night vibe. The closest reference point might be to the acoustic-guitars-and-edits approach to soul practiced by His Name Is Alive on 2001's Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, which might not be as surprising as it first seems: Friedman actually covered "Someday" on Can't Cool, and he also remixed H.N.I.A.'s "Nothing Special" for a set of Someday-derived singles. Timbre and voicing play a central role, because these songs hardly live and die by their chord changes: propelled by scraggly guitar figures and dub's ruminative bass lines, they remain classically minimalist in spirit, splitting the difference between Steve Reich and Roy Ayers' RAMP (or Philip Glass and Tony Allen). What makes even the most static of the songs so engaging is the way they seem to shimmer in place, as diverse lines of winds, strings, guitar, accordion, synthesizers and effects weave porous webs. It's somewhat shocking that only two tracks are credited to a session drummer, Root 70's Jochen Rückert-- the majority of the record's rhythms are presumably Friedman's own programmed creations. If true, it's one hell of a percussive coup; for all their understatement, these are among the most sophisticated beats Friedman's ever come up with. Like virtually everything on the album, they never call attention to their own virtuosity. The whole record, in fact, has been put together so subtly that at first it may fail to stick. For a long time, I thought of First Night Forever as a nice, relaxing mood piece, and bided my time for a new Friedman/Liebezeit collaboration. But somehow I kept coming back to the album; where most records on my review-assignments list find their way back to the shelves, this one crept into regular rotation in those rare slots I listen to music for pleasure: morning coffee, cooking dinner, the bedtime wind-down. Such domestically functionalist music often gets the short end of the critical stick; 30 years after Music for Airports, we still have an innate distrust of music as wallpaper. First Night Forever's trick is that it functions on two levels at once: behind that calming, rippling, jazzy veneer there are strange forces at work, peeling back the wallpaper to reveal a passageway to points unknown. © Philip Sherburne, February 06, 2008, © 2008 Pitchfork Media Inc. All rights reserved

Veteran producer and master of electronic kraut-funk, Burnt Friedman returns for another solo album after his acclaimed collaboration with David Sylvian, Stina Nordentsam and Arve Henriksson on the Nine Horses project. First Night Forever finds Friedman recruiting a number of vocal contributors, including Australian singer Steve Spacek, Funkstorung collaborator Enik, Berliner Barbara Panther and Daniel Dodd-Ellis. The productions themselves are the real stars here though, Friedman's multi-layered studio excursions sewing together detailed drum edits, misty horn sections and even the odd burst of strings when needed. There are some very peculiar moments on the album though, most of which come on tracks lent vocals by Theo Altenberg, an artist whose roots lie in the Berlin commune scene of the '70s. He makes a number of appearances on the album, seemingly styling he's hollered, gruff vocals on a hybrid of Tom Waits and James Brown, resulting in the screeching electro-gospel mania of 'The Healer' and dub freakshow 'Need Is All You Love'. Good stuff. © www.boomkat.com

BIO (Wikipedia)

Bernd Friedmann (also Burnt Friedman) (born 1965 in Coburg, Germany) is a german musician and producer who works under a variety of project names in the fields of Electronica, Dub und Jazz. Friedmann was raised in Kassel where he studied painting, performance and video at the Kunsthochschule from 1984 to 1990. His first recordings of found and self-built instruments, done with Wolfram Der Spyra from 1978 to 1982, have been released under the name TOXH in 1989. Since then the ever-growing list of projects includes: Some More Crime (1990 - 1995, Friedmann and Frank Hernandez) ; Drome (1991 - 1995, Friedmann and Frank Hernandez) ;Nonplace Urban Field (1992 - 1997) ; Flanger (1999 - , Friedmann and Atom Heart) ; Nine Horses (2005 - , Friedmann and David Sylvian). Friedmann's music defies easy categorisation. His instruments include ambient noise and speech samples, analogue synthesizers and organs, as well as toy piano, steeldrum, kalimba, vibraphone or Melodica. Over the years his trademark sound became easily recognizable even in his remix work for other artists. Often complex polyrhythmic patterns stand beside long passages without audible drums. Since 2000 Friedmann runs his own "nonplace" label. He lives in Cologne.