On April 24, Bach Artillerie will release their self-titled album on Ernest Jenning Record Co. The album features Curt Sydnor and Greg Saunier of Deerhoof playing the Goldberg canons of J.S. Bach. The band has shared the album's lead single “Canon à la neuvième des Variations Goldberg” along with its accompanying live video. The song is available now on all digital platforms for playlist shares.
On the album Curt Sydnor says:
Bach Artillerie is pretty obviously an expression of our love and fascination with the music of JS Bach. We both like to approach classical music on our own idiosyncratic terms, just as those composers did in their own lifetimes with the music that inspired them. We both benefited from conservatory training but reject the notion that classical music is somehow privileged, deified, and off-limits to creative reinterpretation. With Yonatan Gat and Mikey Coltun we had the rich experience a decade ago of reimagining Dvorak's "American" string quartet for improvising rock quartet (Greg and I had earlier collaborated on my 2020 album Deep End Shallow and several keyboard compositions of Greg's). Ever since that experience I've been imagining other projections in that vein. Bach Artillerie is just one of those imaginings and I'm overjoyed that it's finally been realized.
My hope is that the uninitiated listener will be turned on to the infinite possibilities of music that is formally controlled to this almost absurd degree. In the hands of a musician like Bach the immense inward pressure of canonic composition compacts musical expression to produce diamonds upon diamonds upon diamonds.
Bach Artillerie is an absurdist take on the nine canons from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations and his Brandenburg concerto no. 5. Inspired by 20th-century Bach interpreters like Wendy Carlos and the Swingle Singers, the canons are arranged for live synthesizers and drums while the concerto movements are reimagined and rendered via MIDI technology, showing the potential for fully human and fully computer-based reimaginings of these peak musical compositions.
Sydnor and Saunier tracked the album on March 31, 2025 immediately following the Big Ears Music Festival at the Knoxville studio of engineer Jake Smith. Saunier created his parts using only Bach’s keyboard notation and later created the MIDI arrangements of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 to complete the album. Musical introductions and transitions were supplied by Sydnor who recorded his parts live on analog synthesizers. Some arrangements were crafted in the studio and some minor overdubs were added later.