AlbumRelease date:
28.06.2019

Henning Fuchs

A New Beginning

As sources of inspiration for an album, silence and stillness are unusual qualities. For Henning Fuchs and his debut "A New Beginning", however, they are a constant that represents both a virtue born of necessity and a creative impulse. Back in 2002, soon after returning from Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts to live in Berlin, the Bonn-born composer is drawn to the cold, vast spaces of Finland. There, in the midst of untouched nature, he begins work on what, seventeen years later, will become the definitive recording entitled "A New Beginning". "After a break of nine years, 'A New Beginning' marks the continuation of my vision from 2002, when I came to Berlin full of enthusiasm and euphoria with a degree from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts under my belt and took the decision to produce regular albums and give concerts around the world." Fuchs employs the technique of live performance and tape recording in analogue format to create a warm, flowing sound aesthetic. "A New Beginning" is devoid of breaks in content or composition – a credo that is central to what Henning Fuchs is trying to do: "I wanted to create a world in which you could immerse yourself and let your feelings and fantasy run free." The songs interlock in a circle of inevitability, somewhat like a spiral staircase, one inexorably leading to the next – awakening a feeling, at every moment and with every successive note, that this album was destined to take one incontrovertible, irresistible form. The counterpart to this, amidst the rural landscapes, is his ongoing work on the solo album, a work in which intensely tangible fragility and delicate melodic lines abound. "A New Beginning" bridges the centuries, combining a classical grouping of piano, harp, and strings with progressive sound design and samples of urban and natural sounds. In the process, Henning Fuchs works with a glut of first-rate musicians such as Elfa Rún Kristinsdóttir, an award-winning Icelandic violinist he knows through Max Richter, or Hanns Eisler Award-winner Emmanuelle Bernard. The ensemble is completed by Lotte Dibbern from the Netherlands, cellist Andreas Voss, harpist Maria Todtenhaupt, and London-based Hang player Manu Delago.