NEW CD - AFRIKAN MACHINERY - OUT NOW ON TZADIK
Order at www.tzadik.com or at www.lukasligeti.com
"This is remarkable music...Ligeti represents, under a Clark Kent exterior, a new generation of musical Superman -- a globally minded, technologically adept, technically sophisticated composer who also happens to be a virtuoso performer and accomplished improviser...There wasn't a dull second." -Mark Swed, reviewing a recent LL solo concert in the Los Angeles Times
(...see below for more press quotes.)
Composer-percussionist LUKAS LIGETI is developing a style of music uniquely his own, drawing upon Downtown New York experimentalism, contemporary classical music, jazz, electronica, as well as world music, particularly from Africa. His CD "Mystery System" (Tzadik Records) has been hailed as "the future of music" (Jan P. Dennis, amazon.com), and he has been called "a distinctive and energetic voice...that walks a skillful line between the comprehensible and the unpredictable" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "a young musician with enormous imagination and energy" (Fanfare Magazine), The Wire writing that "Lukas Ligeti...practises what many other composers only preach in the abstract". His collaborations with African musicians have been described as "a new dimension in the dialogue between Africa and the Western world" (Ulrich Olshausen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).
Oblivious to categorizations such as “classical”, “pop”, etc., Lukas' main interests include cultural exchange, new forms of interplay between musicians in an ensemble, polyrhythms/polytempo structures, and non-tempered tunings, and his music ranges from the through-composed to the free-improvised. Other major sources of inspiration include experimental mathematics, computer technology, architecture and visual art, sociology and politics, and traveling.
His concert music has been commissioned by Bang on a Can, the Vienna Festwochen, Ensemble Modern, Kronos Quartet, Colin Currie and Håkan Hardenberger, the American Composers Forum, New York University, ORF Austrian Broadcasting Company, Radio France, and many others. He has just completed a concerto for electronic percussion and orchestra commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and is currently working on a piece for solo marimba commissioned by a consortium of marimba virtuosi, and on music for "The Elegant Universe", a dance performance choreographed by Karole Armitage inspired by the book of the same title by Brian Greene.
He frequently performs solo on electronic percussion, and as a drummer co-leads several bands, such as Burkina Electric, Hypercolor, and the Raoul Björkenheim/Lukas Ligeti Duo; a number of new projects are in the works. He has also performed and/or recorded with John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Marilyn Crispell, Michelle Makarski, Gary Lucas, Eugene Chadbourne, Daniel Carter, John Tchicai, Pyrolator, Elliott Sharp, Jonas Hellborg, Jim O’Rourke, Robert Dick, Massimo Pupillo, Borah Bergman, and many others. A CD of his quintet featuring Gianni Gebbia, Aly Keïta, Benoît Delbecq, and Michael Manring will soon be released on Innova Records.
In 1994, commissioned by the Goethe Institute, he conducted a workshop in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and co-founded the experimental, intercultural group Beta Foly, leading to numerous residencies in that city, much touring in Europe, and the release of his first CD as a bandleader, “Lukas Ligeti & Beta Foly” on Intuition Music in 1997. He has worked on a project involving the Batonka people of the Lake Kariba area, performing in Zimbabwe and Mozambique; collaborated with Nubian musicians in Egypt, culminating in a joint concert at the Cairo Opera; composed a piece for musicians of different Caribbean cultures which premiered in Miami Beach; and, since 2000, has collaborated with singer Maï Lingani from Burkina Faso. Their newest joint project, Burkina Electric, began in 2004 and combines the traditional music of that country with dance-oriented electronica; the band is currently touring in the U.S. and recently released the double EP "Rêem Tekré" with remixes by DJ Spooky and others on Atatak Records (Germany). In 2005, Lukas was featured at the Unyazi festival in Johannesburg, South Africa, the first ever festival for experimental electronic music in Africa, and in 2006, he was composer-in-residence at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 2007, he traveled to Uganda to collaborate with that country's premier music/dance/theater group, the Ndere Troupe; in 2008, he taught composition at the Unviersity of Ghana at Legon (Accra).
Lukas Ligeti was born in Vienna, Austria into a remarkable artistic family with ancestors such as violinist Leopold Auer (teacher of Heifetz and Milstein), architect/designer Marcel Breuer, and, of course, his father, the great composer György Ligeti. Lukas himself focused on writing and science during his school years, taking up the drums only after graduating from high school. He studied composition and percussion at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, obtaining a masters degree, and then moved to the U.S. After working for two years at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, he has lived in New York City since 1998.
PRAISE FOR AFRIKAN MACHINERY:
“One of the world’s top classical composers…”; “the rhythms grow wildly complex, as if African music had been chopped and split apart, and the pieces reassembled at odd angles to each other. But still there's a typically African sense of community in each of the album's … tracks…. It's absorbing to hear, from start to finish.” -Greg Sandow, Wall Street Journal (U.S.)
“sophisticated music that has communicative directness yet retains a sense of mystery…he really knows sound and how it lives in the mind.” –Julian Cowley, The Wire (U.K.)
“eine kühne Musik…lässig tanzt Ligeti auf dem Seil, das er zwischen Tradition und Zukunft spannt.” –Christoph Wagner, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)
“brilliant CD – which neatly bridges the classical-modernist-world-music divide… If his art represents a melange of Europe, America, and Africa, it does so with unique finesse… The whole thing keeps you on the edge of your seat, waiting to see what comes next.” -The Scotsman (U.K.)
“Lukas Ligeti has crafted an absolute masterpiece… Easily record-of-the-year thus far, and slowly becoming one of my favorite records of all time,” - http://www.adrian-clement.com/blog (Australia)
“…grandiose kosmopolitische Sample-Choreographie…sehr innovative Musik, deren Spannung nie abläßt, da sich hinter jeder Biegung und jedem Bruch neue Farben, Bewegungen und Sounds eröffnen. Große Klasse.” –DeBug (Germany)
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