Interview with Hans Christian on "Journeys To The Infinite"
April 2023, 23 min interview plus 56 min of select music.
Produced by Marius-Christian Burcea.
April 2023, 23 min interview plus 56 min of select music.
Produced by Marius-Christian Burcea.
Watch: Hans Christian plays the cello in the historic grain elevator (video)
Echoes February 2020 CD of the Month- by John Diliberto
Hans Christian – After the Fall
Some albums are a journey. And the great ones have moments of both darkness and light, remorse and redemption, pain and joy. Hans Christians’ After the Fall has all of that in a collection of electro-acoustic expanses that border on symphonic.
Hans Christian is a veteran artist. He is a classically trained cellist from Germany who emigrated to Los Angeles where he became a session musician recording with Robbie Robertson, Sparks, and Victoria Williams among others. But he had his own voice that was neither classical nor rock. He began sculpting one-man solo works of looping cello, electronics and ethic touches on the albums Phantoms and Surrender. A few years late he formed the duo Rasa with singer Kim Waters. They created a string of six beautiful albums, between 2000 and 2007, one of them, Temple of Love, an Echoes CD of the Month. Rasa ended, but Christian kept going with several eastern-inflected journeys, three of which were CD of the Month picks, You Are the Music of My Silence with guitarist Harry Manx, Hidden Treasures, and in 2015, Nanda Devi.
With After the Fall, Christian moves the eastern elements into the background. They are present, and eastern phrasing is part of his cello vocabulary, but they’re more subtext than text. In their place is Christian’s earlier sound which emerges on the opening track, “Cryogenic Dreams,” with a swirl of darkly-textured electronics, gurgling sequencers, and a groove that merges merging electronic beats with a looping tabla rhythm that itself becomes electronic in its affect. “Cryogenic Dreams,” as its title suggests, creates a suspended state of elements unmoored in time, floating across his liquid landscape. Other than the tabla, there are no eastern sounds and I don’t think there’s a cello in there either unless it’s tuned-down into the submerged drone.
Christian creates an immersive space with each composition, a sound world full of liquid shifts of mood and perspective. “TransMutate” brings in more darkness with a looped middle eastern percussion groove and sighing harmoniums surround a searing solo that could be cello or sarangi, a bowed, stringed instrument from India. His free solo over these throbbing grooves dances in ballet-like pirouettes. I keep picturing the rave scene in The Matrix Reloaded.
Some of this sound harkens back to Christian’s 2014 album, Hidden Treasures, in its use of electronics and darker moods, but After the Fall goes further. The title track, an 18-minute epic, begins with a single, deep water-drop that becomes washed in swirling electronics and rumbling percussion. The music sounds like it’s emerging out of a fog, melodies revealing themselves through the haze. At about 8-minutes, an eight-note sequencer pattern reveals itself and the synths go into a higher glissando wash, only to fall back into the dark abyss with the water drops and distant rumbles creating the feel of a dark cave with no exit. Just as there seems to be no hope, Christian opens up the skies with a gorgeous cello soliloquy over sustained synth pads, offering hope and maybe redemption in the darkness.
You can hear Christian’s time growing up in the church showing up on After the Fall . His father was a minister in Germany and Christian spent his youth in the sixties and seventies absorbing in the church’s gothic and haunting spaces. He brings that sense of awe and foreboding, not to mention the reverberant echoes, to After the Fall
There is a sense of space and imagery to Christian’s music that many might call cinematic. That’s most evident in “Spyres of Desires,” whose pensive intro could be the opening of a horror or action film or the moment leading up to crucial, dramatic event
After the Fall isn’t a cello album like a few of Christian’s other recordings, but the instrument is featured in beautifully emotional solos on tracks like “Flutamin” (i.e. flute in A minor) and “Momentarily” something of a star turn for Christian, framing a long, free-wheeling cello solo in ethereal, swirling ambiences.
Hans Christian doesn’t leave you in this beautifully immersive but often roiling space. He brings you out with a surging groove and multi-tracked cello over a spare piano motif on “Reaching Back.” It’s a joyful and triumphal ending to this engrossing journey.
Hans Christian’s After the Fall is an ambitious and detailed aural painting with sound design and musical elements revealing themselves on each subsequent listen. It’s an album to be immersed in over and over again.
Hans Christian – After the Fall
Some albums are a journey. And the great ones have moments of both darkness and light, remorse and redemption, pain and joy. Hans Christians’ After the Fall has all of that in a collection of electro-acoustic expanses that border on symphonic.
Hans Christian is a veteran artist. He is a classically trained cellist from Germany who emigrated to Los Angeles where he became a session musician recording with Robbie Robertson, Sparks, and Victoria Williams among others. But he had his own voice that was neither classical nor rock. He began sculpting one-man solo works of looping cello, electronics and ethic touches on the albums Phantoms and Surrender. A few years late he formed the duo Rasa with singer Kim Waters. They created a string of six beautiful albums, between 2000 and 2007, one of them, Temple of Love, an Echoes CD of the Month. Rasa ended, but Christian kept going with several eastern-inflected journeys, three of which were CD of the Month picks, You Are the Music of My Silence with guitarist Harry Manx, Hidden Treasures, and in 2015, Nanda Devi.
With After the Fall, Christian moves the eastern elements into the background. They are present, and eastern phrasing is part of his cello vocabulary, but they’re more subtext than text. In their place is Christian’s earlier sound which emerges on the opening track, “Cryogenic Dreams,” with a swirl of darkly-textured electronics, gurgling sequencers, and a groove that merges merging electronic beats with a looping tabla rhythm that itself becomes electronic in its affect. “Cryogenic Dreams,” as its title suggests, creates a suspended state of elements unmoored in time, floating across his liquid landscape. Other than the tabla, there are no eastern sounds and I don’t think there’s a cello in there either unless it’s tuned-down into the submerged drone.
Christian creates an immersive space with each composition, a sound world full of liquid shifts of mood and perspective. “TransMutate” brings in more darkness with a looped middle eastern percussion groove and sighing harmoniums surround a searing solo that could be cello or sarangi, a bowed, stringed instrument from India. His free solo over these throbbing grooves dances in ballet-like pirouettes. I keep picturing the rave scene in The Matrix Reloaded.
Some of this sound harkens back to Christian’s 2014 album, Hidden Treasures, in its use of electronics and darker moods, but After the Fall goes further. The title track, an 18-minute epic, begins with a single, deep water-drop that becomes washed in swirling electronics and rumbling percussion. The music sounds like it’s emerging out of a fog, melodies revealing themselves through the haze. At about 8-minutes, an eight-note sequencer pattern reveals itself and the synths go into a higher glissando wash, only to fall back into the dark abyss with the water drops and distant rumbles creating the feel of a dark cave with no exit. Just as there seems to be no hope, Christian opens up the skies with a gorgeous cello soliloquy over sustained synth pads, offering hope and maybe redemption in the darkness.
You can hear Christian’s time growing up in the church showing up on After the Fall . His father was a minister in Germany and Christian spent his youth in the sixties and seventies absorbing in the church’s gothic and haunting spaces. He brings that sense of awe and foreboding, not to mention the reverberant echoes, to After the Fall
There is a sense of space and imagery to Christian’s music that many might call cinematic. That’s most evident in “Spyres of Desires,” whose pensive intro could be the opening of a horror or action film or the moment leading up to crucial, dramatic event
After the Fall isn’t a cello album like a few of Christian’s other recordings, but the instrument is featured in beautifully emotional solos on tracks like “Flutamin” (i.e. flute in A minor) and “Momentarily” something of a star turn for Christian, framing a long, free-wheeling cello solo in ethereal, swirling ambiences.
Hans Christian doesn’t leave you in this beautifully immersive but often roiling space. He brings you out with a surging groove and multi-tracked cello over a spare piano motif on “Reaching Back.” It’s a joyful and triumphal ending to this engrossing journey.
Hans Christian’s After the Fall is an ambitious and detailed aural painting with sound design and musical elements revealing themselves on each subsequent listen. It’s an album to be immersed in over and over again.
‘Hans Christian’s music is unique.
It marries sumptuous classical elegance with a raw and profound spiritual passion.
Anyone who listens to it will find in it the voice of their longing and ecstatic soul.’
- Andrew Harvey
It marries sumptuous classical elegance with a raw and profound spiritual passion.
Anyone who listens to it will find in it the voice of their longing and ecstatic soul.’
- Andrew Harvey
“Hans Christian continues to break new ground with his latest production ‘Nanda Devi’. It is sacred instrumental music of the highest order.........i.e. absolutely mesmerizing and instantaneously puts you into the here and now. It’s quickly become my new favorite sound track for yoga and deep meditation.” GuruGanesha
Mike Watson - Online Hans Christian, AMBIcon 2013, Sunday, May 5th, 8pm
I’m a little ashamed to say I knew next to nothing of Hans Christian’s music before Ambicon and so I came to his concert with zero preconceptions. What followed was the most astonishing use of looping by a live performer that I’ve ever seen.
His largely improvised set featured cello, sitara (an adapted sitar), Tibetan singing bowls, a Swedish instrument called the nyckelharpa, and the sarangi. At times he layered his playing up to 3 or 4 levels using loop boxes. Many of these loops had a rhythmic structure, which meant that in order to stop the others drifting out of sync his timing had to be absolutely precise. And to my amazement, it was. So technically his performance was astonishing, but musically and emotionally it was also a revelation, especially when he played cello. He was totally involved in his performance and the final applause was long and loud. For me, this set was the highlight among eight concerts at Ambicon that were all of very high quality.
I’m a little ashamed to say I knew next to nothing of Hans Christian’s music before Ambicon and so I came to his concert with zero preconceptions. What followed was the most astonishing use of looping by a live performer that I’ve ever seen.
His largely improvised set featured cello, sitara (an adapted sitar), Tibetan singing bowls, a Swedish instrument called the nyckelharpa, and the sarangi. At times he layered his playing up to 3 or 4 levels using loop boxes. Many of these loops had a rhythmic structure, which meant that in order to stop the others drifting out of sync his timing had to be absolutely precise. And to my amazement, it was. So technically his performance was astonishing, but musically and emotionally it was also a revelation, especially when he played cello. He was totally involved in his performance and the final applause was long and loud. For me, this set was the highlight among eight concerts at Ambicon that were all of very high quality.
Hans Christian Nanda Devi September 2015 ECHOES CD of the Month
Hans Christian's Top of the World Fusion Trek ~by John Diliberto
It’s hard to believe that Hans Christian used to play bass with artists like Sparks, Robbie Robertson, and Victoria Williams. Even though he was a classically trained cellist, he rocked out in Los Angeles when he first arrived in America from Germany in 1992. But that’s not the Hans Christian we know. He had moved to the San Francisco Bay area when we first heard of him in 1994, when he released his debut CD, Phantoms. That recording of electro-ambient chamber music hinted at the east-west fusion he’d later create with the duo called Rasa, where he married luxurious orchestrations of sarangi, tablas, cello and electronics to singer Kim Waters’ divine Hindi chants.
As a solo artist for the last eight years or so, Christian has been charting his own path, creating sensual, languid instrumental tracks that bring together an ensemble of cello, Swedish nyckelharpa, Indian sarangi and sitara, lap steel and electric guitar, bass, zithers, percussion and more. It’s just that Hans Christian is the only member of this group.
Christian has been living in Northern Wisconsin for many years now, but the cold climate hasn’t altered the sultry heat of his music which is as eastern as ever. Following up on his last album, Hidden Treasures, also a CD of the Month, he takes another journey into mystery with Nanda Devi.
Christian is a master of space. He creates silken ambiences that waft around seductive loops of tabla, temple bells and shakers. With just percussion and ambiences this would be an enveloping sound, but Christian adds melodies that often alternate between instruments, like the cello and sarangi on “First Light.” As one interwoven instrument creates a melodic arc, the other picks it up in mid-flight and continues in a Mobius strip of melody.
Christian’s mix of East and West is among the most subtle and refined you’ll hear. Listen to the way an acoustic guitar forms a folk basis for the languid refrain of sarangi and cello on “My Inner Ascent.” It’s ancient music from the future, especially a track like “Between Dusk and Dawn” which takes the lap steel guitar and sends it to the other side of the world, from Nashville to Mumbai in a duet with the sitara.
Nanda Devi is a bit more subdued even by Hans Christian’s meditative standards. Tracks like “Sunanda” are steady-state mood pieces with rippling zithers and backwards chimes. On “Eternal Spring,” an organ-like synthesizer sustain underpins a ruminating solo on the Swedish keyed fiddle called the Nyckelharpa. Christian improvises a forlorn melody made even more plaintive by the clacking action of the instrument’s wooden keys. Its medieval tone sounds like a lament for the last battle at Game of Thrones’ Castle Black.
Located in the Himalayas, Nanda Devi is the 23rd highest mountain in the world. A few of the titles, like “Sunanda” and “Valley of Gori Ganga” come from the region. But Hans Christian hasn’t merely charted a geographical journey, he’s created a travelogue for the soul.
For More on Hans Christian:
Echoes May 2014 CD of the Month: Hans Christian–Hidden Treasures.
Echoes Oct 2012 CD of the Month: Hans Christian & Harry Manx–You Are the Music of My Silence
Hans Christian's Top of the World Fusion Trek ~by John Diliberto
It’s hard to believe that Hans Christian used to play bass with artists like Sparks, Robbie Robertson, and Victoria Williams. Even though he was a classically trained cellist, he rocked out in Los Angeles when he first arrived in America from Germany in 1992. But that’s not the Hans Christian we know. He had moved to the San Francisco Bay area when we first heard of him in 1994, when he released his debut CD, Phantoms. That recording of electro-ambient chamber music hinted at the east-west fusion he’d later create with the duo called Rasa, where he married luxurious orchestrations of sarangi, tablas, cello and electronics to singer Kim Waters’ divine Hindi chants.
As a solo artist for the last eight years or so, Christian has been charting his own path, creating sensual, languid instrumental tracks that bring together an ensemble of cello, Swedish nyckelharpa, Indian sarangi and sitara, lap steel and electric guitar, bass, zithers, percussion and more. It’s just that Hans Christian is the only member of this group.
Christian has been living in Northern Wisconsin for many years now, but the cold climate hasn’t altered the sultry heat of his music which is as eastern as ever. Following up on his last album, Hidden Treasures, also a CD of the Month, he takes another journey into mystery with Nanda Devi.
Christian is a master of space. He creates silken ambiences that waft around seductive loops of tabla, temple bells and shakers. With just percussion and ambiences this would be an enveloping sound, but Christian adds melodies that often alternate between instruments, like the cello and sarangi on “First Light.” As one interwoven instrument creates a melodic arc, the other picks it up in mid-flight and continues in a Mobius strip of melody.
Christian’s mix of East and West is among the most subtle and refined you’ll hear. Listen to the way an acoustic guitar forms a folk basis for the languid refrain of sarangi and cello on “My Inner Ascent.” It’s ancient music from the future, especially a track like “Between Dusk and Dawn” which takes the lap steel guitar and sends it to the other side of the world, from Nashville to Mumbai in a duet with the sitara.
Nanda Devi is a bit more subdued even by Hans Christian’s meditative standards. Tracks like “Sunanda” are steady-state mood pieces with rippling zithers and backwards chimes. On “Eternal Spring,” an organ-like synthesizer sustain underpins a ruminating solo on the Swedish keyed fiddle called the Nyckelharpa. Christian improvises a forlorn melody made even more plaintive by the clacking action of the instrument’s wooden keys. Its medieval tone sounds like a lament for the last battle at Game of Thrones’ Castle Black.
Located in the Himalayas, Nanda Devi is the 23rd highest mountain in the world. A few of the titles, like “Sunanda” and “Valley of Gori Ganga” come from the region. But Hans Christian hasn’t merely charted a geographical journey, he’s created a travelogue for the soul.
For More on Hans Christian:
Echoes May 2014 CD of the Month: Hans Christian–Hidden Treasures.
Echoes Oct 2012 CD of the Month: Hans Christian & Harry Manx–You Are the Music of My Silence
YOU ARE THE MUSIC OF MY SILENCE (Oct. 2012)
Stephen Hill - Hearts Of Space "A rich fusion of Indian and western music by two masters of exotic acoustic instruments. Harry Manx's mohan veena gives the album an enjoyable melodic twang, while Hans Christian's multi-instrumental contributions and studio expertise create a seductive sound."
- Stephen Hill, Hearts of Space
Stephen Hill - Hearts Of Space "A rich fusion of Indian and western music by two masters of exotic acoustic instruments. Harry Manx's mohan veena gives the album an enjoyable melodic twang, while Hans Christian's multi-instrumental contributions and studio expertise create a seductive sound."
- Stephen Hill, Hearts of Space