Search - Christian Kiefer :: Czar Nicholas Is Dead

PITCHFORK 7.4! "A beautiful musical evocation of a page of Americana. Environmental recordings and electronics wrap up a slow-changing bed of loops consisting of simple folk guitar lines, banjo, accordion, and voices (both singing and reciting)."ÐAMG on "Exodust" (Extreme, 2002). A soundtrack to a tundra wasteland filled with lonely soldiers, ornate towers crumbling into ruin, and desolate, blood-soaked snowscapes written from the confines of Kiefer's Northern California home. An essentially ambient project with minimal instrumentation, "Czar Nicholas Is Dead" captures Russia as a fever dream, a strange and disorienting place that lay on no map, but rather resides entirely in the authorÕs imagination. On the one hand, the subject of KieferÕs project is a strange one to be sure, particularly since most of his recorded outputÑincluding the similarly epic and minimalist instrumental project "Exodust" (2002) Ñhas been rooted strongly in American soil. But Kiefer's work has always also been rooted in history and in academic and intellectual pursuits. For research, Kiefer turned to thick volumes on the assassination of the Romanoff family, the tradition of Russian folk music, and to early Russian silent film. Kiefer brought in a handful of his favorite musicians and asked them to improvise with him live in the studio with a handful of simple instructions. The material was then worked over further in the studio, edited, rearranged, and produced, often with additional parts being added or subtracted as the musical force of the album began to reveal itself. The end result is part collective improvisation on a conceptual and musical theme, and part constructed and composed musical work. "I have one thing to say about Christian Kiefer: It's GREAT to hear new music!"ÐThurston Moore