Landwerk No. 2

Description

Landwerk No. 2, by American composer Nathan Salsburg, is a second volume of compositions built from samples of 78 RPM records – in this case, two klezmer tracks, a Yiddish folk song, and a piece from a miners' orchestra from northeastern Pennsylvania, the homeland of six generations of Salsburg. While the first volume coincided with the early months of 2020, the second was undertaken in late summer and early autumn, when political, social, and existential despair was at its peak. These are musical attempts to translate the past into the present, or to redeem the present through the past, or to discover, in the words of Michael Löwy, a "critical constellation formed by a particular fragment of the past with a particular moment of the present."