ORGANIZIM by Jakob Rehlinger

In 2011 I recorded a CD ('ALPHABETA' released 2012) of music composed using the letters that spell words for the notes of each piece. For instance the melody of "Defaced" went D-E-F-A-C-E-D.

About half the album turned out exactly as I intended. The other half... eh, I guess I was never happy with it. Some pieces were too embellished in the arrangements, others too cutesy in my attempt to tie the dictionary definition of the word thematically to the piece. Often that approach resulted, I felt, in some hamfisted results where the music suffered as I forced it to conform to the concept of the project.

Still, other pieces disregarded the literal meaning of the word altogether and because of this, it seemed, the work as a whole was disjointed.

In 2015 I returned to the concept and reduced it to its basic elements: the notes themselves.

To aid in this, I've used the same synthesized organ voice for each track and used echo loops in the manner of Terry Riley. This time, I've let the notes speak for themselves and ignored the literal meaning of the word. And so, in titling the pieces, I've incorporated the "note word" but haven't tried to force the issue as far as having their literal meaning represent the music or vice versa. Save for the final track "BE" could be used as an aid to a meditation on simply "being".

I feel these compositions work better than the original album as any correlation between title and the music was purely serendipitous; the music came first, the cutesy gimmick followed along behind.

"On Organizim, [Rehlinger] has embraced the inevitable drone of this mad experiment and allowed a brilliant idea to take control of the creation. This series of recordings is pure synthetic authenticity." ~ Weird Canada

* This album was previously released as "ALPHABETA III: ORGANIZIM" under the moniker BABEL in 2015.

Jakob Rehlinger works in many genres. This account spotlights his music as a composer / improviser working in the nexus of ambient, jazz, kosmische electronics, electro-acoustic, new age, and more recently, orchestral works.