TSM Productions Signs Gerald Krampl
Date: Monday, December 21 @ 01:00:00 UTC
Topic: Band News (tours, comings/goings, etc)


Gerald Krampl, born 1954 in Vienna, Austria, started his musical career in his youth by first taking classical piano lessons. In the 70s and 80s he formed two prog-rock bands, Kyrie Eleison and Indigo, which gained a high reputation worldwide in the prog rock circle. Gerald played keyboards and wrote all songs for these bands, and several LPs, CDs and singles were successfully released. The company Indigo Music was founded in 1983 mainly to market these band works, but soon this was expanded with various side projects ranging from disco to folk, which were produced in the own studio for various record companies.



After a break from the music business for some years, he started in 1999 a new project together with his wife Hilde - Agnus Dei. Inspired by their yearlong experiences with Reiki (master degree), Runes, Blossoms and Meditation, this project combined their two skills by creating spiritual fantasy tales expressed through all-instrumental music on the audio CDs, and Hilde?s unique poetry in the "value- added" CD booklets. Gerald's compositions, in a neo-classic piano and keyboard orchestrated style, are often compared to the spiritual instrumental musings of Michael Hoppe, David Lanz, Vangelis, Andreas Vollenweider or Rick Wakeman. In 2002, due to a cancer disease, he lost Hilde.

Many critics also emphasize that the instrumental melodies are not simply "light and fluffy" as so many other New Age recordings are, but possess serious substance and show remarkable keyboard skills. In 2006 followed a new musical challenge, with an emotionally very intense electronic/neo-classical soundtrack work for an educational internet and TV documentary about the Holocaust in WW2 -- very recommended to visit in the web at www.31Projects.at31Projects-The Music.

As somehow an antipode to this very dark and sad music, you can see his follow up solo work, which was finally released in winter 2008, settled between electronic and prog-rock in a kind of "vintage style of the 80's" it is best to describe as "electronic soundscapes for mind movies," titled Timediver. Using only vintage sounds it is also a kind of reminiscence to his former prog rock days. But there was still evident a strong concern with meditative, healing music, and therefore Gerald has also released early in 2009 a CD with spoken classical fairy tales (in German, by Corinna Steinb?ck) combined with especially composed relaxing piano based music. This album is mainly sold in family hotels as branded CD, kindergartens etc.

Out of the lot of material composed for this project, immediately developed the idea for a new solo album. But this time with the effort in mind to keep away from all commercial and genre orientated concessions, stay as minimalistc and close to the roots as possible (only piano + max. 2 more synthetic strings), and also to try a combination with electronic and nature soundeffects which should add something like a soundtrack effect to the whole. Another aim was that this music should become easy to perform live in a trio version, which is a plan in mind for the near future. Influenced by people like Preisner, Max Richter, Ludovico Einaudi, Erk Satie etc. the album Innocent Wasteland is now the result, and is released in December 2009.

It has become a somehow dark and melancholic, nearly to say concept album about the endless cycle of destruction and reawakening around us, to categorize somewhere between classic, minimalism and electronic Andreas Pflanzl, the producer of the ?31Projects? documentary, has done the cover artwork for the CD, and also immediately used some of the music for his brand new web project - www.7minuten.at (with the topic "Disability"). The cooperation with him will lead to some interesting new film and web projects in the future.

Tracklisting:

1- Innocent Wasteland
2- Afterwards Just Memories
3-Intimate Ghosts
4- This Brave Land
5- Colors Of Night
6- Thinking Of You
7- Red Moon Passing
8- Like Leaves In The Wind
9- Creeping Shadows
10- Long Way Home
11- Wallflower
12- Morning Breaking Through

[Source: TSM Productions]







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