Review | By textura
Resonant Dowland | Matthias Engelke
Classical purists might balk at the idea of giving John Dowland songs an electronic makeover, but they would be wrong to dismiss Matthias Engelke’s project out-of-hand. While his ‘digital recomposition‘ of the Renaissance composer’s material is thorough, it’s not disrespectful, and the results repeatedly reveal the care with which the German sound artist has crafted the twelve productions. Engelke ensures the songs don’t get lost, even when the arrangements re-position them within digitally sculpted spaces. The temporal divide separating Dowland’s time and ours collapses in these treatments; at the same time the electronic intervention can’t help but put distance between them, and as a result balance and tension are both present. Such melding of analog-generated and electronic material has been, it seems, a long-standing area of interest for the producer. […]