Marianne Nowottny | Strange Weather From the Basement

Description

Originally released in 2005 as a micro-edition of just 100 copies by the UK label Barl Fire Recordings and co-released with Abaton Book Company, Strange Weather from the Basement captures Marianne Nowottny in a rare, instrumental light. While her idiosyncratic voice usually leads her work, this collection presents eight solo compositions for piano, Optigan, and electronic keyboards, a mesmerizing showcase of keyboard improvisation that balances antique beauty with alien strangeness. Reviewing the release for the UK music site Ptolemaic Terrascope critic Tony Dale celebrated it as the exact kind of gem “that CD-R micro-labels were born to do.” The album opens with “Untitled #1,” an enchanted piece of Victorian elegance that feels played at midnight from a cobwebbed parlour. From there, the music shifts between the detached, halting simplicity of Erik Satie (“Untitled #2” and “#3”) and the breathless, showering notes of “Untitled #4,” which suddenly plunges into psychedelic backward tape manipulation. Throughout the record, Nowottny conjures a sepia-toned time machine fuseing gramophone samples with broken carnival Optigan sounds, while “Divinity” captures penny-arcade tinkering and off-stage clatter from a live performance. Closing with brief stops at pure abstraction and disorientation. The release drew high praise from Dale, who hailed it as a “fine departure” from an unclassifiable artist whose DNA encodes beauty and strangeness in equal measure. Issued in a strictly limited physical run, Strange Weather from the Basement remains a haunting artifact of mid-2000s experimental keyboards.

Track Listing

1. Untitled (2:03)
2. Untitled (1:13)
3. Untitled (1:05)
4. Untitled (3:47)
5. Divinity (3:10)
6. Untitled (1:53)
7. Untitled (8:49)
8. Untitled (3:03)