The four guitarists who make up Gitarrenarmee have a backwards approach to music making. The four part composition titled Composing After Playing was first set in motion as the musicians played and improvised in a two day recording session. Christopher Abée then sampled, spliced, and twisted passages with his computer into a totally new musical work. The result is an atmospheric and ever-changing soundscape. It is a thoughtful balance between live improvisation and electronic manipulation, neither one existing on his own, each complementing the other.

Genre: Modern Composition, Avant-Garde, Improvisation

When Darjush Davar listens to the finished music for the first time, he denies that the Gitarrenarmee played certain passages. Indeed "Composing after Playing" is a computer product. From a two-day-recording-session Christoph Abée extracts very different passages, which in their inspiration span from Robert Fripps "Crafty Guitarists" up to Neil Youngs "Dead Man". Listening, cutting and pasting make up for a strongly compressed sound world, which could have neither be composed before playing nor be performed at all by four guitars at once. Two concepts of working, which usually fear to get in contact with each other, are combined: sampling and remixing from the world of electronic music with the free flow from jazz, fusion and psychedelic. The result resembles a "Memory play" - with the crucial difference that the individual motives and their mating are not made clear. Each motive from "Composing after Playing" unfolds and changes its character when combined with the next motive. Now and then apparently well-known motives emerge again, get changed within the new context and will be replaced by completely different motives.

"Composing after Playing" nevertheless simply wants to be just music, which functions without intellectual background or the knowledge of the listener around its emergence. In this sense the guitar army wishes much fun when hearing a musical work that the four musicians would have never been able to compose or to play.