Stephan Thelen is a composer, musician and mathematician originally based in Zürich, Switzerland, now in Bucarest, Romania.
Thelen’s collaboration with RareNoise started in 2018, with the release of Sonar w. David Torn’s Vortex . This was followed by the release of Tranceportation (Volume 1) end of 2019 and of Tranceportation (Volume 2) mid 2020.
Hot on the heels of these three successful releases with Sonar, Thelen presented his first named RareNoise release, World Dialogue. World Dialogue casts a light on Thelen’s work as a contemporary classical composer. It features four works for String Quartet, composed over the last decade, performed by the Kronos Quartet and the Al Pari Quartet.
‘World Dialogue’, ‘Silesia’ and ‘Chaconne’, composed between 2006 and 2018, were performed and recorded by the Al Pari Quartet in Berlin earlier this year.
‘Circular Lines’ was commissioned then performed in 2017 by the Kronos Quartet as part of their ‘50 For The Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire’ series of commissions. These four beautiful compositions shed an important light on Stephan’s work as an important contemporary minimalist, polyrhythmic composer.
Thelen has recently enhanced his collaboration with RareNoise by releasing a number of collaborative albums, mainly Transneptunian Planets with J.Peter Schwalm and, more recently Sky Full Of Hope with the jazz-rock ensemble Fractal Sextet.
Stephan has now further reinforced the collaboration with the release of Worlds In Collision, a set of highly exciting polyrhythmic compositions, where he for the first time introduces the manipulation of voice recordings (as suggested by his long time collaborator Fabio Anile), in the vein of Brian Eno‘s “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts“.
Featured on this album are his most recent group of serial collaborators: David Torn, Fabio Anile, Jon Durant and Yogev Gabay.
