orquesta del tiempo perdido - Stille

The name of this project references Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, but that doesn’t prepare us for the music played on “Stille”. Orquesta del Tiempo Perdido is a wildly eclectic, ‘posteverything’ explosion, taking on aspects of contemporary classical music, jazz, experimental electroacoustic, math-rock, pop, non-Western folklore, exotica and vaudeville. The points of reference are deftly approached on their own terms, and recontextualised in impossible composites.

The album was conceived in the unquiet mind of the idiosyncratic Dutch musician and composer Jeroen Kimman, for whom this represents a first release as producer and engineer. In addition to playing most of the instruments of the Orquesta (although it also features contributions by some of Amsterdam’s most creative musicians), Kimman has produced the sound world of the album in microscopic detail, taking the instruments further into deranged sonic territories.

Despite the scope of the record, there is a unity to the music that owes more to the film soundtracks of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, and the virtuosic experimentalism of early studio pioneers such as The Three Suns, Les Baxter and Martin Denny, than to other contemporary attempts at eclecticism. It comes out of Kimman’s genuine love of, for example, country and western or striptease bands, combined with his experiences writing for theatre, dance and animated cinema. The result may seem bizarre but
it’s a work of genius.