Nachtreisen

Matthew Shaw returns to Glass Modern, after working with Shirley Collins on one of the albums of 2020, with an instrumental tribute to Florian Schneider and Kraftwerk.

"On one afternoon on a bright early April day of 2020 I was listening to Kraftwerk and reading an old interview with Florian Schneider. The part that caught my attention was Florian describing listening to the wireless, late at night, under his blanket, listening to Nachtmusik. Florian would fall asleep to the sound of the music and then dream his own music. It made me consider how this music, these late night listening sessions came to be an influence on Kraftwerk. It also made me wonder what the music Florian was listening to would have sounded like. The act of listening to a radio at low volume last into the night was familiar to me from late night John Peel shows. Over the years I have heard so many people share the same memory, and the generation before talk about Radio Caroline and pirate stations in the same way.

In the summer of 2020 I was listening again to Krafwerk this time on headphones in the garden, it was a hot sunny afternoon and at some point during Tour de France I fell asleep. On waking I was scrolling back to hear a track I couldn’t remember hearing before but it wasn’t there on the tape. This became the beginning of my album Nachtmusik. It is a dreaming and imagining of music I had never heard, that Florian Schneider certainly never heard. Yet it fitted together in my mind into a method of composing, based on the idea of electronic Nachtmusik, imagined rather than heard and now created from that idea. The album has been produced using vintage synths and effects alongside modern equipment and is my tribute to falling asleep to late night radio and to Florian Schneider." 

Listen here