Also Irmin can put together a well working melody, and does this, let's say, occasionally also here. The composition level here is high and goes well beyond the 19th century aesthetic that characterises some such work. Irmin certainly knows what he is doing, and he is in a rather unique position to come up with something like a "rock and classic synthesis", which has of course also been tried out by other prog musicians, and is something that some prog listeners appreciate well. You may think about opera style singing whatever you want, but I think the combination with Irmin's electronic sounds works quite well here. There are some hints at the use of electronic rhythms in his following works with Kumo. Whereas I like the creativity of the rhythm programming, it comes over as a bit robotic (it features about half of the run time), and I wouldn't have complained about more Jaki, but here we go. It's really vocals, electronics, and orchestra in the first place. There are contributions of Can's Jaki Liebezeit and Michael Karoli, but it's not much, and even hard to pin down. Electronic percussion, informed by the sampling technology of the day, also is a strong element here.
There is hardly any piano, but some of the sound harks back to his electronic Toy Planet album. Apart from conducting the orchestra, Irmin himself her mainly shows his electronic side. This one combines classically composed orchestra parts and opera singing with modern elements. A lot of information is on the opera's website, where we can also read that it combines "romance, comedy and futurism into an adventure of epic strangeness peopled by unforgettable characters." As I am fairly exclusively interested in the music and not so much in the story (which is not necessarily the story's fault), I won't comment more on that.Įx-Can keyboarder Irmin Schmidt is a studied conductor and composer, and I'm actually surprised that this is the only work of this kind he did. The music was composed by Irmin Schmidt, the libretto was written by Duncan Fallowell.
Gormenghast is an opera that was commissioned by the Wuppertaler Bühnen, and premiered at Opera House Wuppertal in 1998.
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