Vert / New Thing At Novara

Sonig

On May 6, 2006, in the Broletto courtyard in Novara, Italy, a unique event took place, conceived by Luca Cerizza: one of the most intriguing talents of contemporary electronica, Adam Butler, performed a remix of all of the music that had appeared during the course of the festival, while the courtyard's medieval setting became the backdrop for the video installations of artist Luca Trevisani. The Sonig label, which in the last ten years has asserted itself as one of the most innovative labels, not just in the field of electronica, but in a multiplicity of styles, now presents a CD (dedicated to Jelly Roll Morton) of this event.  Adam Butler, a Brighton native in exile who has spent the last seven years in Cologne, Germany, is something of a curiosity in the electronic music world: playing the piano since he was six; quoting Cage and Pynchon; deconstructing Keith Jarrett's Koeln Concert (2000's The Koeln Konzert, one of The Wire's CDs of the year); reprising utopian architect Buckminster Fuller's "Everything I Know" lecture by performing all his own music that he could still play or remember; and then, after losing all his equipment, computers, and data in a studio burglary, reinventing himself as a junkyard ragtime hip-hop singer-songwriter, in cahoots with other mavericks such as Noel Akchote and DJ Elephant Power (2006's Some Beans & an Octopus).  In between, Butler also recorded two more CDs of exquisitely crafted chamber jazz electronica (9 Types of Ambiguity and Small Pieces Loosely Joined), remixed artists such as Dieter Roth (commissioned by Bayerischer Rundfunk and broadcasted live) and composers such as Michael Nyman (at the Approximations 7:1 festival in Duesseldorf), and toured throughout Europe, Asia, and the US (either supporting Mouse On Mars, or alone, or with one of his many backing bands--he currently has three).  New Thing at Novara, despite having been constructed in a one-week frenzy in a hotel room in Novara during the festival, incorporating recordings of each of the concerts immediately after they took place, is simultaneously two things: a richly representative document of the singular breadth of Vert's music, at once groovy, noisy, tender, beguiling, and slyly humorous; and a respectful testimony to the huge variety of musicians who performed at the Festival, without whose support this CD would not have been possible.

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