Kairos Collective | Ripplets (single)
Some of the world’s most beautiful art is deceitfully simple. Just a few of the right words, strokes or notes may grab you by the throat and stay with you forever. Achieving this requires a combination of inspiration and restraint. Restraining oneself takes discipline, and confidence to not come across as unimaginative or unskilled. Such confidence is proportional to your trust in, and respect for, the ingredients you work with on the one side, and people knowing the difference between simple and trite on the other.
Ripplets is an exercise in restraint. Its rhythm (curcuna, a 10/8 metre counted 3+2+2+3) and mode (makam Hüseynî) are a seasoned combination that’ll do the work for you if you let them be. The title is inspired by the interaction between rhythm and melody, which evokes puffs of wind that ruffle water.
Michiel van der Meulen
Tsoutsouros, August 2023
Information and credits
Composition
Michiel van der Meulen
Musicians
Danai Loukidi – violin
Dimitris Karnachoritis – bağlama saz
Pavlos Spyropoulos – double bass
Ripplets in the Bandcamp player: listen, buy, share.
Production and release
Arrangement – Pavlos Spyropoulos and Michiel van der Meulen
Recording, mix and mastering – Vangelis Apostolou (Kima Sound)
Production – Michiel van der Meulen
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to: Christos Barbas, Pavlos Spyropoulos and Vangelis Apostolou for guidance and inspiration • Labyrinth Musical Workshop for creating the opportunity • Tasos Damagianos for suggesting saz power chords • The musicians for their beautiful interpretation of the piece • Brendan Smith for proofreading the liner notes • Martine van der Meulen for always rippling my surface.
TouMilou #7 / EAN 8714835183167
© 2023 M.J. van der Meulen/TouMilou
Get the single
Ripplets is available on Bandcamp: € 1.00
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Downloads / Terms of use in the footer
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Album art / 1000 x 1000 px jpg
Score / pdf
About the artwork
French painter Claude Monet (Paris, 14 November 1840 – Giverny, 5 December 1926) was founder of the impressionism art movement. Ripplets‘ cover art includes a fragment of his ‘Bateaux Navigant sur la Seine à Rouen’ (‘Ships riding the Seine at Rouen’, 1872/73, oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm), showing how he needed just a few brush strokes to evoke ripples on water. This web page’s cover image is a fragment of ‘Impression, soleil levant’ (‘Impression, sunrise’, 1872, oil on canvas, 46 x 63 cm), from which impressionism would take its name.