Artist: Mikael Strömberg
Title: My Life as Erik Satie (Gnossienne No. 8-15)
Format: CD + booklet
Label: Lamour records
Cat nr: lamour148cd
Genre: Modern classical/Piano
Tracklist
01 Gnossienne No. 8 (The Paris Version)
02 Gnossienne No. 9 (The Paris Version)
03 Gnossienne No. 10 (The Paris Version)
04 Gnossienne No. 11 (The Paris Version)
05 Gnossienne No. 12 (The Paris Version)
06 Gnossienne No. 13 (The Paris Version)
07 Gnossienne No. 14 (The Paris Version)
08 Gnossienne No. 15 (The Paris Version)
09 Gnossienne No. 8 (Clean Version)
10 Gnossienne No. 9 (Clean Version)
11 Gnossienne No. 10 (Clean Version)
12 Gnossienne No. 11 (Clean Version)
13 Gnossienne No. 12 (Clean Version)
14 Gnossienne No. 13 (Clean Version)
15 Gnossienne No. 14 (Clean Version)
16 Gnossienne No. 15 (Clean Version)
New Satie music by Mikael Strömberg at Lamour.
Erik Satie lived as an eccentric in Paris 1866-1925. His music can be achingly beautiful, nostalgic, mysterious, searching, elegant, stripped down, mockingly poetic, gravely humorous, disturbing, and hypnotic. In a way, as illogical as a three-year-old’s games. Like the Cubist painters in Paris around the turn of the last century, he wanted to capture everyday fragments in new patterns. But it is only now that he has been accepted by a large audience.
One can get both tired and sad at Satie for his aberrant behavior in practically everything but also feel deep sympathy for his backward-looking future music, laugh at his self-image as a pear or light-sensitive sea cucumber, and feel pity for a sad outsider who didn’t fit in.
Nowadays, the musician and artist Mikael Strömberg thinks he knows him well enough that he thinks he knows how Satie would continue to write his piano music, especially the quiet Gnossians, if he had lived another hundred years.
Therefore, without asking permission, Strömberg has taken up where Satie left off. In total, there have been eight new piano pieces all influenced by real and imagined finds. He thinks he heard these Gnossiennes in his head when he followed Satie like a sensitive tracking dog, up and down the street to the catacombs of Paris.
Sometimes he has found signs of Satie’s presence behind the wallpaper joints and floorboards in one of Satie’s old apartments and pub settings in Montmartre – where he tried to eat Satie’s favorite food; sandwiches on white bread and kidney in white sauce.
One can of course question whether it is Satie’s thoughts that have taken up space in Strömberg’s head. That everything is just vivid imagination. A white lie. In any case, he takes the liberty of appointing Gnossienne No 8-15 to Erik Satie’s hitherto unknown piano pieces. And it was Strömberg who found the music.
In addition to the music, the beautiful edition in neo-Dadaist design by RolfCarlWerner includes photos taken to capture Satie’s aura and a short story in which Mikael Strömberg wanders around Paris in search of Satie – without opening his umbrella!
Mastered by Joakim Westlund
Artwork by Rolfcarlwerner
English translation by Bridget Marsden
