Songs & Movements is a portrait album curated by the music- and performance ensemble Scenatet celebrating the music of the Danish composer Jeppe Just Christensen, a composer with a penchant for homemade and prepared instruments, toys, kitchen utensils, and other everyday objects, as wells as for compositions that seem as inspired by sea shanties, drinking songs, children’s rhymes, lullabies, and street corner organ grinders as by the canonical tradition of western classical music.

The pieces on Songs & Movements are performed by Scenatet alongside the composer’s usual “band”, Jeppe Just Insituttet, who can be heard playing egg slicer, coffee grinder, toy piano and melodica among other things. Together, the two ensembles create a unique and idiosyncratic world of sound that encapsulates not only the strange and whimsical quaintness of Just’s music but also its gripping beauty. Songs & Movements is a reminder that all music originates from the capacity to be moved by the sounds that inhabit our world.

“[Songs & Movements] is strongly anti-aesthetic and gives new meaning to the old Viennese phenomenon Schrammelmusik. But it’s also a piece of modern, sustainable urban culture that sounds really funny. The soundscape is unique, and I can honestly recommend this meeting with a composer who returns to his childhood and rummages with the remnants of the 1980s sounds he grew up with”, wrote the magazine Klassisk.

Released October 2015 at Dacapo.

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Composed by Jeppe Just Christensen
All tracks is performed by Scenatet & Jeppe Just Institutet
Recorded at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen
Recording producer: Peter Barnow
Sound engineer: Peter Barnow and Renato Vieira
Editing by Jeppe Just Christensen and Peter Barnow
Mix and mastering: Peter Barnow