carlos cipa & sophia jani - relive

CARLOS CIPA, musician and composer residing in Munich (Germany), has been teaming up with pianist and composer SOPHIA JANI to follow up his highly acclaimed full length debut “The Monarch and the Viceroy“ with a two-piece collaboration record named RELIVE.

Carlos discovered his passion for music very early in his life. At the age of 6 he began taking classical piano lessons with various renowned teachers. Ten years later after he started playing drums in different bands he became more and more interested in composition and improvisation. In the following years he made experiences in different music styles like jazz, hardcore/punk, indie rock and orchestral music. For his debut record on Denovali Records he focused on his main instrument, the piano. Currently, he is studying classical composition at the “University of Music and Performing Arts Munich”.

Since the release of his debut record, Carlos so far shared the stage with marvelous acts like A Winged Victory For The Sullen, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds.

Sophia Jani, being in the beginning of her twenties like Carlos, has discovered her fascination for piano in a similar age. She is classically trained on piano and violin and has deepened her skills at the conservatory of music in Munich before she began studying piano at the conservatory in Bordeaux, France. Sophia left Bordeaux after one year turning away from just interpreting classical pieces to concentrate on writing her own music. Taking this crucial step, a concert of Ludovico Einaudi she attended played an important role. Recently Sophia developed an interest in filmscoring as well as experimenting with vocals. Besides classical composers like Chopin and Ravel, filmmusic especially from Bernard Hermann and Thomas Newman influenced her compositions.

The two pieces “Anouk’s Dream” and “Whatever a Sun Will Always Sing” were written for Carlo’s and Sophia’s performance at the Denovali Swingfest 2013 in Essen. The idea was to jointly compose two piano pieces for four hands, which do not only include playing the ordinary way, but also utilising rather unusual sounds from inside the piano. Carlos and Sophia used all kinds of contemporary techniques to create these sounds, like plucking and beating the strings with their fingers or different kinds of beaters, bowing them with nylon guitar strings, creating harmonics while pressing fingers down on the strings during playing, using the „aeolian harp“-technique (used for the first time by Henry Cowell in 1923) or creating beats on the cast iron frame. Throughout the two tracks nothing other than their combined fingers, the two nylon strings and three different kinds of beaters were used to create the music, the pieces can be played live without using any electronics.

During the recording process of the album RELIVE, neither of the compositions has been changed in any way. They were played exactly as in the live situation, which was a very important theme throughout this collaboration.