Keir Neuringer is a musician and interdisciplinary artist who is involved in creative arts communities in Poland, Holland, and the US. He has cultivated a personal and intensely physical approach to saxophone improvisation, plays analogue electronics and Farfisa organ, and sings and narrates text. After training as a composer and saxophonist in the US, he spent two years on a Fulbright research grant in Krakow. He then moved to The Hague, where he spent eight years, curating performative audiovisual art and earning a masters degree from the experimental ArtScience Institute. He lives in Philadelphia and continues to travel widely to present his work, collaborating closely with Rafal Mazur, Ensemble Klang, and Julius Masri, among many others.
“Ceremonies Out of the Air is the premiere double-length solo album of virtuoso Philadelphia-based saxophonist Keir Neuringer. Consisting of five extended improvisations performed before an invited audience in August 2013, the album presents the widely-travelled composer-performer’s raw emotions laid bare in sound. These ceremonies are physical exhalations of grief at the loss of his mother months before the recording – by turns contemplative, ecstatic, restrained, and unbridled. They reveal Neuringer’s prodigious technical vocabulary and physical stamina, as well as his idiosyncratic compositional influences and sensibilities. Central to all of it is the uncompromising urgency that is a key facet of Neuringer’s creative work.
Between the album’s opening okay we can go now – an uninterrupted 21-minute meditation on the harmonics of the alto’s lowest pitch – and the keening closing folk rhapsody we had mostly good timesover an hour later, the sound of the saxophone ceases only between tracks, as Neuringer’s use of the circular breathing technique is set in relief against a wide emotional palette and a wealth of sonic history and musical practice.
Ceremonies Out of the Air is released on CD and double-vinyl gatefold LP by New Atlantis Records in April 2014. Recorded by Eugene Lew and mastered by Kato Hideki, it features specially-commissioned art by Brooklyn-based painter Erin Rice and a deeply personal text by Neuringer. The album takes its title from a passage in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: ‘Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.'”
-New Atlantis Records
http://keirneuringer.bandcamp.com/album/ceremonies-out-of-the-air
website:
http://keirneuringer.com
