“I love finding the essence of something,” says Schwarz. “I see it like working on a sculpture that someone else began, and to make it visible, you have to cut away until you can see what’s really there. So you find this balance between free and controlled. We would begin with this totally open vibe, and condense the freeform music into this finished work.”

CCMYK

The story of CCMYK is the story of chance, communication and control. In 2013, after performing with the Dutch Chamber Orchestra in Amsterdam, Henrik was approached by Marc Daniel of the Alma String Quartet.

In 2015, Henrik invited the four players to his studio in Berlin, where they began a series of improvisations. Henrik would suggest a musical phrase, and one of the Alma Quartet would play in response, with another then taking up the idea: highly trained classical musicians recording like a jazz band.

Schwarz would record, replay and respond to their classical phrases with his own electronic production. These half hour jams would then be taken home by Henrik. There, he would edit them down, sculpting their form into coherent tracks. During this process he added electronic melodies and beats, even inviting the players back to respond again, thus building and refining these variations on a theme until the songs were fully formed.

Plunderphonia

The idea behind Plunderphonia, a term which was coined in the mid-80s by composer John Oswald, is the “plundering” of pieces of music resulting in the creation of a new compostion.

The idea behind Plunderphonia is this: the artists who are summoned to “plunder” are required to select solely from classical music pieces from every era and recreate something new, unique and unprecedented.  The musicians charged with this task to create a new way of approaching classical music were none other than one of the most revered, influential and forward thinking contemporary German producers,  Henrik Schwarz, along with the internationally acclaimed string quartet The Alma Quartet (Holland). After the orchestra’s production of “Scripted Orkestra” with the Metropol Orkest of Jules Buckley, the new Plunderphonia musical project, is another representation of the evolution and synchronisation of the classical and electronic scenes.