This month’s Carhartt WIP Radio show places a spotlight on Rotterdam and the influential record label, store and distributor Clone!

Founded by Serge, Clone launched in 1992 with the EP “Coördinated Sounds & Sequences,” under Serge’s moniker Orx.

What began as a platform for Serge’s own music and his friends’ has grown into a worldwide operation, with Clone’s current roster of artists including Finland’s Aleksi Perälä, Germany’s Roman Flügel, and Legowelt from The Netherlands, as well as Detroit’s Drexciya, The Other People Place, and Der Zyklus. Under Clone Records are also several sub labels including Basement Series, Royal Oak, and Clone Jack for Daze.

In 1995, Serge launched Clone the record store, as well as its distribution arm, which specializes in electronic music, original soundtracks, jazz, funk, and Italo disco from a variety of international labels.

For this episode of Carhartt WIP Radio, Serge offers an insight into Clone with a mix featuring tracks from its most recent catalog, while paying tribute to the birthplace of techno – Detroit.

As ever, the mix is accompanied by an interview, where Serge discuss the need for labels in the modern music industry, the early days of Clone, and his passion for biking. Read the interview via www.carhartt-wip.com/journal/music.

For this release we’re heading back to Claude Debussy with his classic recording “La Mer” conducted by Jun Märkl and performed by Orchestre National De Lyon!

In 1903, Claude Debussy, one of the greatest innovators of Western music, went through a tumultuous period in which he lost some of his best friends. In order to escape the chaos at home, the impressionist composer and his mistress Emma made a trip along the coast of France. This gave him the necessary inspiration to complete La mer, an ode to the turbulent sea, within two years.
La mer (1905), which carries the subtitle ‘three symphonic sketches for orchestra’, has an exceptionally visual character, and evokes associations with the shine of the midday sun on the sea surface, the breaking of the waves, the splashing of foam and the sparkling of water droplets. It is known that Debussy was an ardent lover of impressionist painting and Japanese prints, and drew inspiration from the colorful seascapes of William Turner and Claude Monet when composing La mer. In addition, he chose a Hokusai print to adorn the front cover of the original edition of La mer, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, on which two boats are ruthlessly swallowed by a wall of seawater.

La mer is a musical painting that makes the different faces of the sea audible, the lovely and magical, but also the restless and grim. The opening sounds of the first part, De l’aube à midi sur la mer (‘From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea’), are energetic and uplifting, but have a somewhat threatening undertone, so that the listener immediately understands he is confronted with a majestic, unpredictable natural phenomenon. The waves alternately swell and weaken, while in the meantime, the sun gradually moves towards its highest point in the sky, casting its burning, dazzling rays over the turbulent surface of the water.

In the second part, Jeux de vagues (‘Play of the Waves’), the sea shows itself at its friendliest. It is the sea as we desire it when we go on a beach holiday, a sea that is pleasantly rippling and babbling, and inviting us to meditatively stare at it. Debussy composed La mer for a relatively large symphony orchestra. He did not do so in order to achieve a high dynamic range, but rather to have a comprehensive palette of orchestral timbres at his disposal. Thus, he could ‘paint’ all individual waves, swirls, gusts of wind, breezes and drip effects through an appropriate musical instrument.

The third part, Dialogue du vent et de la mer (‘Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea’), has a dialogical structure in which each musical image sounds in duplicate, as if the wind and the sea were entangled in a mirroring dance. The water surface is again tumultuous, and the listener could get the impression that the sea of ​​Debussy is subject to mood swings. Therefore, it is not surprising that La mer is often regarded as a metaphor for life as a whole, which is just as capricious as the sea, and subject to the same dynamics of ebb and flow.

Myrthe Meester

Pre-order vinyl: https://clone.nl/item58713.html
Artwork by Lost Communication

We’re proud to announce our 2nd release! A classic recording of one of Johannes Brahms greatest works, Symphony No.3 conducted by World Famous conductor Jaap van Zweden on vinyl for the very first time!

The Conquest of Freedom

Frei aber einsam, this became the life motto of violinist Joseph Joachim after he divorced his wife. Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote a melancholic violin sonata for his friend Joachim, in which the notes F-A-E (Frei Aber Einsam) were central. In his Third Symphony, however, the great German composer decided to reflect his own life motto, Frei aber froh, which he did through the sequence of the notes F-A flat-F. This makes the Third Symphony one of the few instrumental compositions to which Brahms gave an extra-musical meaning. “Free but happy” expresses his independent attitude to life: Brahms never got married, but devoted his entire life to composing music, studying the music of his classical predecessors and to his beloved solitary walks in nature.

Brahms went down in history as a neoclassicist, who – contrary to his revolutionary, theatrical contemporaries Liszt and Wagner – wanted to stand up for classical form principles and abstract, “absolute” music. Still, he was unmistakably a Romantic and an original composer. Since Brahms grew up in a time when great composers from the past, such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, were rediscovered and honored, he had to find a way to relate to that glorious past. Unlike Wagner and Liszt, who wanted to take a radically new course, Brahms developed a personal musical language that built on the principles of his precious predecessors. Sometimes, however, he experienced this “ancestor worship” as a heavy burden. “I shall never compose a symphony!” he claimed in 1870. “You have no idea how someone like me feels when he hears such a giant marching behind him all the time.” Brahms was referring to Beethoven, his greatest idol. By that time, however, he had already started writing his First Symphony, which he did not finish until 1876, at the age of 43. Soon after that a Second (1877), Third (1883) and Fourth Symphony (1885) followed, which became a success among the general public and earned him the honorary title “third B” in the list of the big B’s, after Bach and Beethoven.

Brahms’s Third symphony opens with the aforementioned Frei aber froh-motif in F minor. This is remarkable, since the symphony itself is written in F major. An innovative aspect of the Third Symphony is precisely this continuous, restless conflict between major and minor, which adds an intoxicating tension to the work. Immediately after the F-A-F-motif, Brahms introduces a second melody, which has a heroic, majestic character, and is interspersed with an airy, lyrical motif in which the clarinet plays the leading role, to be heard for the first time in the second minute. It takes a great effort to conquer freedom, the music seems to suggest, but that effort is richly rewarded by light and happy moments.

The second part in C major has a rural atmosphere, and Brahms’s well-beloved friend Clara Schumann called it “a pure idyll; I can see the worshippers kneeling about the little forest shrine, I hear the babbling brook and the buzz of insects…” Here too, the clarinet, one of Brahms’s favorite instruments, plays a central role. The third movement in C minor opens with one of Brahms’s best known and most poetical melodies, evoking associations with the darkness of the night and the longing for a loved one. The mysterious opening motif of the fourth movement, in the ancient Phrygian mode, is interspersed with a fierce, heroic melody that makes it understandable why Hans Richter, the conductor of the symphony’s premiere, spoke of “Brahms’s Eroica”. Only in the final measures do these wildly succeeding motives come to reconciliation, when Brahms concludes his hopeful freedom symphony with the slowly dying away of the Frei aber froh-motif.

Text by Myrthe Meester

Pre-order vinyl: https://clone.nl/item57653.html

We’re are happy to announce the first release on our new subsidiary Edit.Futurum, with a focus our favourite classical music on vinyl!

We will start with one of the greatest innovators of Western music, Claude Debussy.

No one can resist the seductive singing of the sirens, according to classical mythology. Claude Debussy (1862-1918), one of the greatest innovators of Western music, was the first to bring the illustrious siren singing to the concert hall, accompanied by rippling waves and the silver glow of the moon. In doing so, the impressionist composer proceeded like a visual artist: he did not compose elaborate harmonies, but sought a dreamy interplay of ‘sound patches’ that evoke associations with colour, texture and light. For many, listening to Debussy is therefore a synesthetic experience in which hearing, vision, touch and of course the imagination come together.

Trois nocturnes (1899), inspired by the atmosphere of the night, consists of three acoustic poems in which Debussy wanted to ‘paint’ the light of the moon on the clouds, on a festive procession and on the sea around the siren island. He was inspired by the impressionist moonlight paintings by James Whistler, also called Nocturnes. In the first part of his experimental composition, Nuages, one can hear silvery-lit clouds slide slowly past the moon. In contrast to traditional Western music, this nocturne has no tension build-up, no development towards a climax, no abrasive dissonants that require a solution. No, Debussy’s music does not work towards a goal, but floats steadily and unperturbed, like clouds. ‘Music is a free, vibrant art which measures up to the elements, to the wind, the sky, the sea!’ Debussy wrote. He wanted to ‘take a lesson in freedom from the blossoming of the trees’. In this way, he hoped to rid music of the rigid confines that had stuck to it over the centuries, but also of the bombastic grandeur à la Wagner.

Debussy found another important source of inspiration in the Javanese gamelan music, with which he came into contact during the Paris World Exposition in 1889. From that meditative, self-contained music, he learned to regard instrumental timbre and simple musical motifs as ends in themselves, which do not necessarily have to be in the service of an overarching structure. The nocturnes of Debussy do not tell a story, but rather breathe an atmosphere, a state of mind, a fleeting impression.

In the second nocturne, entitled Fêtes, one hears cheerful, festive sounds rising from the night like flaming torches against a moonlit sky. Note the march-like sounds that suddenly interfere with the festivities, and evoke associations with a solemn procession, in which bombastic brass and percussion are not absent. The third nocturne, Sirènes, is the most ethereal of the three. Just like Nuages, it does not move towards a climax, but the sounds swirl aimlessly through the night, waving and repeating themselves – sometimes slightly varied, sometimes literally. It is not difficult to imagine beautiful, naked female figures with lush hair, who enchant passing sailors with their wordless singing and lure them into their deadly arms.

In fact, Trois nocturnes is an intoxicating siren song from start to end. ‘All people come to music to seek oblivion’, Debussy believed. ‘It is necessary to abandon yourself completely and let the music do as it will with you.’

Text by Myrthe Meester

Artwork by Lost Communication

Pre-order https://clone.nl/item57271.html