Greinke, Jeff

Artist: Jeff Greinke + Anisa Romero
P: 1999
This is a superb collaboration between the "sky cries mary" singer Anisa Romera and electronic music composer Jeff Greinke. You can expect gentle electronica aura superimposed though not pierced by excellent vocals. Think "dead can dance" with a distinct "Orb"-like background. For the electronic music afficiados out there, many of the pads and lead sounds that Jeff Greinke uses seem to come from a Nord, I think a Nord Lead 2. Anisa Romero may have the lushy most beautiful voice,combined with the tribal,almost trance like rhythms.will make you a fan with just one listen.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 2023
Turning shadows into sonic emotional rivers, synthesist and composer Jeff Greinke’s A Thousand Year Flood skirts the edges where modern classical, electronic and ambient music converge. Working with cellist/violist Heather Bentley, Greinke’s first record for Projekt in 26 years is a hybrid of ambient chamber music and electroacoustic beauty. Throughout the near-hour-long set, atmosphere is critical to the impact as Greinke locates his paired-back minimalism within a setting of spaciousness and sensitivity.

“A Thousand Year Flood,” Greinke explains, “represents further explorations in composing electroacoustic music which I began over a decade ago. This time rather than working with an ensemble I focus on one instrumentalist – cellist/violist Heather Bentley. It became clear early on in the process that Heather’s understanding of my approach, sound, and sensibilities had deepened since we began working together in 2019 for the album Other Weather. Whether working with scored parts, improvising under my direction, or freely exploring her own ideas over my sketched out sections, Heather’s thoughtful expressions fit seamlessly within my own. Heather’s voice is unique, lending a more expansive breadth of harmonic richness and emotional body to these compositions.”

“I am greatly fascinated by the mixing of synthetic and acoustic sounds, sometimes blurring them to create an hybrid of timbres and textures as evidenced in the title track, ‘The Forest,’ and ‘Upon a River that Still Flows,’ whereas other times keeping them very distinct yet cohesive as in ‘Earth and Sky.'”

“Although in the last four-plus decades my work has veered in a few different directions, the exploration of raw sound itself and the treating and layering of such sounds to create complex and interesting textures, moods and atmospheres, has always been my primary focus. With A Thousand Year Flood, there’s a richness and evocativeness I achieve by utilizing less sonic material, paring back the amount of instrumental layering which is something I’ve strived towards for a long time. It’s a pleasure hearing it come together like this. It’s quite rewarding and exciting!”

On his 23rd release, Jeff Greinke realizes an engaging balance between consonance and dissonance, timbre and shade, ambience and aura. His impressionistic ambient chamber music shimmers in the passing light of melodic stringed textures and shifting electronic shadow.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 2018
Rich with harmonic texture and delicate detail, sound-sculptor Jeff Greinke’s BEFORE SUNRISE presents an exquisite arrangement of ambient chamber music. The album follows a natural progression from the composer’s previous works, featuring abstract soundscapes and emotive passages of effortless beauty, created with an abundance of acoustic instruments. Piano, cello, viola, winds, brass, and vibraphone, all blend fluently with Greinke’s own sampled textures, synthesizers, and other electronic elements, resulting in an expansive palette of rich timbres that underscore a nuanced display of ambient impressionism. Spanning the genres of modern classical, electronic, and ambient, BEFORE SUNRISE gently evolves, flowing through a predominately non-linear structure. The music is characteristically slow-moving, and the balance between composition and improvisation reveals an organic sound that is vital for a dynamic listening experience. The string instruments are recorded in such a way as to highlight the sound of the bow moving across the strings, and this attention to both acoustic details and performance techniques feeds the music’s natural quality. Greinke explains, “I instructed the musicians not to shy away from squeaks and scrapes that sometimes happen while playing such instruments. It’s the first time I’ve really paid attention to those sounds and I made sure to bring those qualities into the mix when appropriate. I find that those sounds evoke a lonely, abandoned landscape that appeals to me.” Indeed, the recordings conjure a desolate, and at times melancholy terrain, while the warmth and depth of the electronic textures offer a lush, comforting blanket of sound. Greinke takes deep inspiration from the sights, sounds, sensations, and atmosphere of his natural surroundings, and as a result BEFORE SUNRISE is an intimate and spacious work that unfolds with the majestic subtlety of a pre-dawn sky.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 1993
Dreamy, far away loops and distand sounds of calm environments. A beautiful ambient music release from the early days of Greinke.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 1992 / 1999
This 1992 entry from Jeff Greinke is strongly suggestive of some of the works of Harold Budd and the cooler ambient pieces of Brian Eno. The often opaque shades of "Changing Skies," his previous release, give way here to culturally flavored hues that drift through dreamlike states with similar theme variations. A journey into night, Lost Terrain has the feeling of exploring forgotten landscapes of both inner and outer worlds. The first cut, "Terrain of Memory," will strike a sympathetic chord with those who like Budd's The White Arcades in its cool, dark ambience. "The Cry," with its Indonesian-influenced percussion, sharpens the senses, like walking into the pitch-black entrance of a strange forest at dusk. Fans of Eno's Ambient 4: On Land will like "The Moor" in all of its deep-space/alien grandeur. "River of Wood" couches the listener in an almost psychedelic sea of bamboo percussion and voice, while "Falling Away" touches with gentle strokes of synthesized moonlight, lulling us into the twilight of consciousness. This is truly an album for intrepid masters of introspection.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 2021
With Other Weather, composer and soundscape artist Jeff Greinke presents an elegant musical landscape comprised of delicate compositions and harmonically rich ambience. The twelve slowly unfolding tracks offer multi-layered textures that weave acoustic and electronic instrumentation into a gossamer soundscape that shimmers with the stillness of a perfectly calm atmosphere in the warm light of early dusk.
As with 2018's Before Sunrise, Other Weather spans the genres of modern classical, electronic, and ambient as it gently evolves through a refined set of impressionistic ambient chamber music. Blending electronic ambiences and effects with an acoustic ensemble that includes piano, cello, viola, violin, French horn, clarinets, flutes, and small percussion, Greinke realizes his musical vision through an empirical process of improvisation and experimentation, combining tracks and layering sounds, and uncovering the magical moments as they reveal themselves.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 1984/1986
Over Ruins/Moving Climates is a re-release on Projekt's Archive subsidiary of two early tape-only releases of Jeff Greinke's dating from '84 and '86. These early pieces have a dirty ambient sound, occasionally broken up with sparse pensive percussive intrusions. Over Ruins has an elusive subterranean muted quality; quiet synthscapes burrowing lazily through rich dark soil which hits at something potentially menacing, but never striking. Therein lies the tension of the work. "Difficult Worlds" oppens the Moving Climates half of the disc and it resembles Jon Hassell's trademark effects laden sound; the main synth almost perfectly mimics Hassel's trumpet. Moving Climates is slightly more rhythmic and features more obscure vocal samples than Over Ruins. The sound of Moving Climates is cleaner, yet still foreboding in its opaque soundscapes. These two releases compliment each other quite well, with only subtle differences in production. Anyone who is a fan of Greinke's other insidious ambient work will want to hear this, as well as anyone who enjoys being seduced by troubling sounds environments.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 1987 / 1998
This new, remastered release includes three previously unreleased tracks from 1988, complementing the 12 originals from 1985-86. The mood here is dark, indeed quite menacing at times. Some use is made of strangled, gutteral voice samples. The opening track, "Uprising", sets the tone with busy percussive patterns and whoops - a mock tribal rebellion brewing? The rest of the original tracks present assorted drones, groans and muffled rhythmic patterns. On the whole, it feels like a collection of stylistic studies of various shades of darkness and dissonance - Robert Rich territory - before the artist gained the headier heights of his near-perfect, airier work _Changing Skies_ in 1990. The three bonus tracks from 1988 attached to this re-release seem indicative of this change in course. Be that as it may, Places of Motility will surely please both fans of Greinke´s work and lovers of dark ambient alike."

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 2009
Jeff Greinke's many years of working with pure sound to create interesting textures has informed the more melodic/harmonic approach he has been exploring in recent years, resulting in a satisfying collection of multilayered cinematic musical landscapes.
“This music is informed by my visual surroundings, primarily the landscapes, big skies and weather of the desert Southwest,” confirms Greinke, who currently resides in Tucson, Arizona, where the Virga phenomenon is common during the monsoon season. Greinke continues, “With Virga I have returned to a textural and ambient approach to composing music, similar to my work of the 80’s and 90’s, and merged that with the more harmonic / melodic sound I’ve been exploring in recent years. After completing the title track I was struck by how the sonic fabric of the music resembled curtains of rain falling from the sky, so I was inspired to call it Virga. Virga sometimes occurs at the onset of dangerous and dramatic weather. The mood present preceding an intense storm is similar to the subtle foreboding quality of some of the pieces on this album.”  The music on Virga takes shape as strata of slow moving melodies stream their way through expansive atmospherics and pastoral passages of ambient chamber music, highlighted by cello, trumpet and piano on many selections; all drifting together to construct complex harmonic musical skyscapes. The cumulative result is a collection of vast, textural, cinematic, and melodic compositions with a strong sense of mood and place that gently evolve and drift… like the clouds themselves.

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P: 2002
This beautiful new work represents a change both from his earlier nocturnal ambience, and his later jazz-tinged and rock-influenced, more structured music, though it is closer to the former. WIDE VIEW, as one might take from the title, is more open and direct without being in any way "light." Call it a more open and musical ambience. Comparisons with Harold Budd might still be made to WIDE VIEW, for its gentleness, restraint and poetic mode of expression, though the instrumentation is wider than just piano.This is a most noteworthy recording, a welcome return to the genre for one of its truly vital artists. It is certain to change what people think Greinke is capable of, and will doubtless give new ambient music fans an introduction to one of the great names who has been inactive for a while.
"Jeff Greinke usually focuses his creative lens on concepts external to the self and the art of capturing a moment in time. Yet, on WIDE VIEW, Greinke turns this spatial element inward to produce nine probing and intimate musical explorations as well as a narrative trajectory that leads the listener through a range of themes in tonality, coloristic range and contrast. The compositions seem basic: slow, open melodies over a shifting foundation of swelling harmonies. But WIDE VIEW is more than system driven modernism, ruled by its compositional system; it is introspective, personal and deliberately widely spaced. Its mood ranges from norish and nocturnal to idyllic and beautiful. The searching, tenderly spare, melodies suggest that Greinke is seeking something more than the conquest of form and articulation. With WIDE VIEW, we see Greinke attempting to unify the artist's identity, the labyrith of the human condition and the deep contents of sound. The definition of each note, the emphasis on peripheral details, the inflectons of his slow melodious strains, proves this to be Greinke's most inviting work."

Artist: Jeff Greinke
P:  2007
Persistently evolving his use of sound, Jeff is never one to settle for a particular style or to retread familiar territory. For this most recent body of work, he retreats to a remote, wintry landscape. Alternately distant and inviting, Winter Light is a body of work that captures elements of baroque chamber music, infused with Greinke s own unmistakable sense of texture and visual suggestion. Winter Light consists of mixed instrumentation, samples and electronics. Balanced between a study in classical chamber composition and ethereal ambience, Winter Light evokes a distant, icy, and occasionally somber landscape, peppered with the visages of some long sought after memory.

Artist: Robert Rich, Steve Roach,
The Ministry of Inside Things u.a.
P: 2002
Tracks 1-6 recorded live at The Gathering concert series, Houston Hall, Philadelphia, PA.

Here the last copy!

Artist:  Vidna Obamana, Ron Boots
Alpha Wave Movement, Jeff Pearce, u.a.
P: 1998
This double CD features 142 minutes of previously unreleased material by musicians exploring the non-physical realm. This 2-CD set released on the Hypnos label is a must for devotees of drifting space synth music.

Artist: Vidna Obamana, Steve Roach,u.a.
P: 1994
Just look at the names in the tracklist above - if you are into this type of ambient music you know without a doubt that this is a winning formula. And this fine collection of artists totally fail to let us down. Weird but fascinating ethnic rhythm with electronic enhancements-a-plenty, O YUKI CONJUGATE's track with it's breathy human voice punctuation serves us well as a starting off point, and establishes the high quality of the album. VIDNA OBMANA follows perfectly with a whispy dream vision accompanied by minimal percussion which could have been taken directly from the previous track. Relaxing and just that little bit mysterious. STEVE ROACH takes a similar ethnic percussion and accompanies it with electronic drift and the sound of a thunder storm. JORGE REYES takes us on a journey through the past, making a music evocative of ancient civilizations and the sounds of nature which accompanied those who lived in such ancient times and places. HYBRYDS take us somewhere else, away from more 'primitive' cultures. Although I have never heard their music for aquariums, this strikes me as being along similar lines, with water gurgling and whale-like sounds wailing away in the background. TEMPS PERDU? forgot to nip to the loo before recording this, so had to go during it's creation. Besides the last few drops shaken out, we drift through a place not dissimilar to VANGELIS's take on the "Blade Runner" future, with pattering ethnic drums and a variety of wind instruments all combining into a passive, calming atmosphere. DINO OON & KONRAD KRAFT head more towards a growling Isolationism without losing the overall string of effect this album seems to create. The tune is more forward, more obvious, less atmospheric. VOICE OF EYE's piece, although drifting and calm, has dark and disturbing edges which remind me of NIN's theme to "SE7EN". JEFF GREINKE attempts to calm our nerves back down with a gentle tube of shifting sustains. Simple as it is, there's a whole lot going on here, although it sounds like one moment frozen in time. ALIO DIE, those purveyors of unimaginable beauty, bring us a dark and disturbing revisit to the land JORGE REYES took us to, now infected by VOICE OF EYE's darkness. Dark, mysterious ethnic world in which a thing - dragon or malign beast - dwells in the shadows, waiting for night. PAUL SCHÜTZE brings us up to date with a Jazz which seems to combine the elements of all those mentioned above, keeping a slightly disquiet, unnerving feeling to the music. His is a world not of peace and calm, but of hidden dangers, of eyes watching your every move. Easy listening doesn't guarantee ease-of-listening. HUMAN FLESH are something else again, with an orchestrated mirror-vision of calm. Very different from anything previously. Lighter, brighter, a balm for the ears and the nerves. And finally, of course, TUU take us for one more visit to the ethnic realms. Almost as calming as the previous track, TUU make a beautiful music which, with it's Asian-sounding drums, makes for a fascinating listening experience.
An album which was probably darker than anticipated (which is no bad thing). Combining beauty and ugliness in equal shares.And of course well worth investing in.

Artist: V/A
P: 2000
A good view at the releases of the BSC label arround the year 2000.