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watch round 1, day 1 Of the 2024 Orléans competition here:
‘nightvision’ music video: now out!
March 10, 2024
Music by Daniel Schreiner
Animation by Enereph
Mastering by Alex Ring Gray
‘channel’ EP now out on all platforms
With Channel, Pianist-composer Daniel Schreiner makes ambient music expressive
Pianist Daniel Schreiner has spent recent years expanding upon his Western Classical-steeped upbringing by diving headlong into genre-blending creative waters. Following collaborative features on modular synth guru Enereph's Premoniss (2022, Production Unit Xero) and Schreiner's own austere, full-length release stillrise (2022), Channel further underscores the eclectic and unexpected nature of Schreiner's artistic output.
"The process of making Channel felt like, for the first time, I was really letting myself go and designing music from an intuitive place," Schreiner acknowledges. While listening to field recordings of cicadas taken by his childhood home in North Carolina, Schreiner "began to imagine a subcurrent of piano sound co-existing with, and metaphysically commenting on, the beautifully unfathomable music of nature," subsequently adding several layers of piano improvisation to this soundscape source material.
The result is a singular, 24-minute piece that feels both oblique and intimate -- undulating ambient textures interspersing with expressive lyrical flourishes. Divided into two distinct sonic halves, Channel morphs gradually from high-register immediacy to a more spacious, reverb-laden wash, moving unhurriedly forward, yet with frequent repetitive, spiraling episodes that seem to eschew all sense of linear time. The opening track, "Parfum," evokes the lazy, humid-thick inertia of summer, from which a mysterious ennui emerges; "Nightvision" recalls a restless search through wilderness, perhaps of the mind; the album-closer "Delta" builds into a boundless current of sound that signals a profound sense of departure.
States Schreiner: "The meaning of Channel is open to interpretation, but for me it's about finding moments of transcendence in daily life, embracing the unexplainable or uncategorizable, and learning to relinquish control over the ultimate flow of existence."
mattingly’s stranger love given critic’s pick by the New York times!
I’m still reeling from the experience of having performed Dylan Mattingly’s six-hour (yes, it’s that long) opera, Stranger Love, with Contemporaneous at Disney Hall in LA. Learning, rehearsing, and performing this gargantuan score was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done - stretching us all to the limits of technique, concentration, and stamina. Despite these “making-the-impossible-possible” challenges, or perhaps because of them, being a part of this epic production was a once-in-a-lifetime, transcendent experience that I’ll never forget, and I’m so grateful to have spent time immersed in Dylan’s cosmic, time-bending artistic vision. Check out the New York Times review here.
‘STILLRISE’ OUT NOW ON ALL PLATFORMS
stillrise is a single, inexorable process that extends beyond the confines of its composition. It’s a snippet of something cosmic, unending. It is a gentle, subtle process of unfolding. It is geologic.
It is an inquiry into the nature of sound as a raw sensory experience. It is a paradox of linear progression and disorienting cyclic motion. It is music about the mystery of time: how time transforms the world inside you and outside of you, imperceptibly with the passing of each moment, but leaving you profoundly changed once enough moments have passed.
It is the rhythm of raindrops falling from trees and plants after a summer deluge. It is the rhythm of brushstrokes.
I wanted to create music that simply passes serenely, inviting differing levels of conscious listening. You can empty your mind of all thought other than the attack and decay of each piano chord, or you can let it become a backdrop for waking dreams, or you can let it become a soundtrack to your daily life.
I wanted to create music that is completely outside of myself, outside of being human, and yet still carries unidentifiable emotional poignancy. I wanted to create music that could heal my anguished soul, could take me away from myself, could help me tap into a greater unity.
INFRASOUND “WORDS AND MUSIC” CONCERT VIDEOS OUT NOW!
bluedreams livestream now available - watch below:
Rounding out this crazy month with a concert collaboration that means a lot to me. Playing Indian Classical/jazz fusion music with the amazing musician and virtuoso Vishnu R and drummer Joey van Leeuwen. Rockwood Music Hall concert listing here: https://rockwoodmusichall.com/event/vishnu-r-strings-beyond-borders/
It feels surreal to finally be going back to Paris to perform at the Fondation des États-Unis after a two-year hiatus! Playing a recital featuring a world premiere by Luciano Leite Barbosa and my dear Parisienne friend Sato Matsui’s Oiseau Lunaire and Oiseau Solaire. Also works by Gabriel Fauré, Olivier Messiaen, and Amy Williams.
Beth Morrison projects: next gen concert at national sawdust
Making my National Sawdust (and opera!) debut playing my friend Elizabeth Gartman’s new opera, It Is a Comfort to Know, about a death cult. With Beth Morrison Projects and Contemporaneous. Check out more info here: https://bethmorrisonprojects.org/current-season/new-york/bmp-next-gen-2022-round-2/
lavender nights: a queer cabaret with infrasound!
Happy Pride - save the date! More info on my concerts calendar.
Announcing: Bluedreams
Excited to be presenting a new interdisciplinary piano recital at three different venues in NYC, LA, and San Francisco!
This eclectic program is comprised mainly of solo piano pieces I’ve learned over the past three years, both while living in Paris from September 2019–July 2020 and in Brooklyn since July 2020. Associated with a state of isolation and quarantine, these pieces—even those that are fast and extroverted—feel intimate to me, intricately bound to my disoriented, insular, and often anguished state of mind during these difficult years. In particular, these works got me thinking about the relationship between sound, memory, and time, and how for many of us, time has seemed highly subjective: some moments seem to have lasted forever, emblazoned in memory, and others have slipped by like water through fingers, making it a challenge to form a coherent narrative to life since 2020.
Bluedreams, then, attempts to draw connections between our collectively disjointed experiences of reality and the “logic” of dreams—and the way these seemingly paradoxical states of mind can intermingle and blur with one another. I feel that this tension between dreams and reality is compellingly represented by sound and resonance, which, when perceived in a live setting, can both ground us in our physicality and, at the same time, induce fluctuating (or even trance-like) states of consciousness. I’ve always been fascinated with this juxtaposition, and tried to harness a kind of oblique sense of narrative with the curation of piano repertoire interspersed with video/sound art projections, which serve as synesthetic “interludes” of sorts: commenting on the sound worlds of the piano works preceding and succeeding them.
My goal with Bluedreams is to immerse you in a sensory experience, to give you a different take on the Piano Recital as a societal construct, and to posit sound as a powerful, enveloping modality for healing and introspection.
More info here: https://www.oldfirstconcerts.org/program-danielschreiner-bluedreams-may22/
sinew to pith (2021)
Premoniss | Bukimi no Tani Gensho out now on Heterodox Records - featuring my collaboration “sinew to pith” with Enereph! Bandcamp link here.
soundband 1 (2021)
Graphic score for three instruments/instrument groups. Acrylic paint on nine canvas panels. Developed/written for OneBeat Virtual Residency. Email for further inquiry or performance requests!
stillrise for piano solo (2020, revised 2021)
“stillrise,” composed July - December 2020 and revised in June 2021, is a 36-minute-long work for piano solo tracing a gradual, constantly transforming process of accumulation. Inspired by one stage of the water cycle, this work features a hybrid notated/graphic score and intricate aleatoric procedures at micro and macro levels, endeavoring to shape parameters of sound, rather than choosing the sounds themselves. As such, evaporation/educe is an exercise in relinquishing compositional control, endeavoring to suffuse the self-ego and reveal the locally random, but globally inexorable processes of nature, mediated through sound.
This work will be released by Off Latch Press as part of their third-edition quarterly Zine, releasing December 3, 2021 in physical and digital formats. Head over to Off Latch Press’s website to order a Zine copy and learn more about this radically open, RAD new press platform!
ocean
the infinity of one moment
time fractals, shards
i dwell to heal
composition, piano, guitar, video by Daniel Schreiner
September 2021
