Sound of Vinyl

"Leo Svirsky is an American born composer, pianist, and accordionist living in The Hague. Svirsky received a masters in Composition from the Royal Conservatoire studying under Cornelis de Bondt, Martijn Padding, and Antoine Beuger. Svirsky’s works reference Shona Mbira music, ambient, The Necks, Julius Eastman, among others. He has released music on labels such as Catch Wave Ltd., Another Timbre, Emanem, Ehse and Unsounds, and shared billings with such artists as Laraaji and James Blackshaw.

“How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes to Leo Svirsky’s River Without Banks. Dedicated to his first piano teacher Irena Orlov, River Without Banks is a mesmerizing, emotional collection of pieces that are simultaneously complex and fluid. The title River Without Banks comes from a chapter of musicologist Genrikh “Henry” Orlov’s profound work Tree of Music. In said chapter, Orlov traces the history of sacred music from the Western and Eastern tradition and how the forms (of the chant, raga etc.) sought to eliminate the division between the physical and the spiritual--the bank and the river.