David Krakauer & Kathleen Tagg - Breath & Hammer (2020)

For this album, we created the raw material by recording thousands of our own clarinet and piano sounds. We then wove together extended techniques and our completely untreated samples to create a large scale quasi-orchestral tapestry. No other instruments or samples are used, and many of the pieces are made up of 40 or more layers of prepared “piano orchestra” and clarinet. Fundamentally Breath & Hammer is about connections between people and a celebration of identity through music. The album is a mix of our own compositions along with our arrangements of song-form pieces gifted to us by our brilliant friends and collaborators from totally different backgrounds, genres and musical points of view: New York saxophone maverick John Zorn, Syrian clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh, Cuban percussionist Roberto Rodriguez, accordionist and forró specialist Rob Curto, and traditional master of Moldavian music Emil Kroitor. Our journey is global yet somehow very personally connected to the two of us; with our own pieces that reflect on cultural heritage, Curto’s Brazilian forró tune which we cast over a “drum circle” (all made of piano samples) inspired by Nigerian traditional musicians, a danzón from Rodriguez’s collection of imaginary Cuban Jewish music, Azmeh’s haunting evocation of the feeling of home and belonging, two pieces from Zorn’s magnum opus: “The Book of Angels” and Kroitor’s poignant ode to his homeland.