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: 2024
OCEANIC is undulating ambient minimalism floating upon dreamy and somewhat hazy eddies in a slow-moving stream of wonder. Jeff Greinke’s second album upon his return to Projekt — and 24th overall in a 40-year career — marks a departure from last year's post-classical A THOUSAND YEAR FLOOD. Here, the electronic sounds are processed and often stacked to create complex textures, chords and harmonies. The timbres are distinct, formed with subtle detail, capturing the ebb and flow of emotional whirlpools surging like briny ocean turbulence within one’s heart.
"These nine compositions,” Jeff reflects, "involve abundant sonic motion with multiple layers moving from side to side, front to back, and at varying speeds and dimensions. This motion conjures large bodies of water with their long rolling waves, strong currents and cross-currents, and big slow moving tides. Hence, the album title OCEANIC. That said, there’s also a prominent atmospheric aspect to this work — a common thread for me over the years — lending a mysterious and suspended quality to many of these pieces. In this way I think of more than just large bodies of water; the scenery also includes misty mountains, big clouds, steady rain, the jet stream, and far-off frozen places with massive drifting icebergs."
"This music comes from a period of intense exploration intended to expand my musical palette through an empirical process of heavily manipulating, treating and then layering sounds. In this way, Oceanic is perhaps my most ‘experimental’ release; not in terms of genre, but in how I used the studio to push my compositions into new sonic realms. The pieces are entirely sample- and synth-based, less minimal, and don’t involve other players. The timbres are not as clear or clean; they’re more smeared and altered. This nine-month period of deeply focused creativity was an immensely exciting and fertile time of discovery for me.”
As a seasoned artist, Jeff pushed against familiar and comfortable studio work patterns by harnessing a wild abandoned approach to sculpting OCEANIC. The end result is an album of music designed to draw the listener into a richly harmonic and deeply textured, somewhat strange and often beautiful, world of exploratory sound. 

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.