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Apparat, aka Sascha Ring, announces the release of “Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre)”, an album of music based on Sebastian Hartmann’s theatre production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Sebastian Hartmann is considered one of the big innovators of contemporary German theatre, and asked Ring to contribute to this mammoth project, which was commissioned by the renowned German arts festival Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen.

During the first meetings with Hartmann it became clear that there was no script or anything comparable, Hartmann instead develops the whole text with the entire ensemble. After time spent with Tolstoy’s original text Ring returned to Germany and spent four weeks in an old abandoned factory building and rehearsed with the whole 30-piece ensemble. Says Ring, “This is anything but conventional theatre. It’s a free space, where a bunch of freaks can go wild. It starts with the lights and stops with the actual actors. At night, we worked on the music in the empty hall. It was kind of magical.”

Featuring artwork by Tilo Baumgärtel, whose work forms part of the theatre production, Krieg und Frieden was recorded with Philipp Timm (cello) and Christoph Hartmann (violin), who form part of Apparat’s live band.

The project was intended to be over with the last performance of the play, a release was never planned, but they found they hadn’t fully exhausted the potential of the songs yet. “Because it evolved out of a process, and transformed all the time, there’s always been a certain freshness to it.” explains Ring.

Beautiful motifs only popped up for seconds before they faded again in the performance so the trio decided to give it a try, went into a studio and drifted, meandered through their musical achievements: “In the studio the material got another twist, became a real piece of music. I took the recordings with me, wherever I was – at home, at a hotel room, in an airplane, and straightened it up. I decided to not go completely crazy about the editing, I didn’t want the music to become demanding. Every record tends to become mere work at some point. Euphoria then turns into the feeling that you are standing in the middle of a huge construction site. I actively wanted to avoid this feeling this.”

For Apparat, aka Berlin-based Sascha Ring, experiments in sound are strongly linked to exploring emotions. Over the course of seven album releases he has developed a multifarious, emotional universe. From early works, such as “Multifunktionsebene“ (2001) and “Duplex“ (2003), which took the abstractness out of electronic music and introduced a new spectrum of feelings beyond electronics’ well-tested modes, through collaborations with Ellen Alien (Orchestra of Bubbles) and Modeselektor (as Moderat), Apparat is always in transition. In 2010 he founded the Apparat Band and opened himself to a new sonic cosmos that culminated into “The Devil’s Walk” (2010), his first release on Mute.

- Mute

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