Vision Of Contentment

Description

Acclaimed pianist Joep Beving and cellist Maarten Vos share their first collaborative album, Vision of Contentment, via Nils Frahm's LEITER label. This follows their collaboration on Henosis, Beving's third album released in 2019, which came about after the two musicians shared the stage in Amsterdam in 2018. Mixed by Frahm at the LEITER studio in the renowned Funkhaus complex in the German capital, the LP features eight new compositions and is available on vinyl as well as on all digital platforms. Although Beving has never recorded a full album with another artist before, Vos has regularly engaged in such activities, sharing credits with artists like Julianna Barwick, Nicolas Godin (AIR), and Alex Smoke. For Beving, it was a natural step to take, and undoubtedly long awaited. Most of Vision of Contentment was written and recorded in July 2023, after Beving and Vos unpacked their gear—recording equipment, various synthesizers, a cello—to join the upright piano that awaited them in the berenpan, a hidden shed in the forest outside Bilthoven, a small village in the Dutch province of Utrecht. The friends had already spent time together in Beving's Amsterdam studio as well as in Vos's Funkhaus facility, sessions from which two other tracks on the album are drawn, but their week in the countryside proved particularly fruitful, albeit for uncomfortably poignant reasons. From their sometimes dark work emerged a universal tribute to what the pianist calls "finding comfort in the acceptance of the inevitable," but the album represents much more than that.