"A Violent Sky" is a bit of a departure from the largely IDM and electronic catalogue of music I associate with Apparat, the stage name of Berlin-based musician Sascha Ring. However, given the experimental trajectory of his career and collaborations, I guess change shouldn't be wholly unexpected.
"A Violent Sky" is part of a recent release of tracks called
Krieg und Frieden (war and peace, if you haven't been keeping up with your German 101). The record is based on performances of a score Sascha was commissioned to compose for what appeared to have been a pretty avant garde theatrical adaptation of Tolstoy's classic
War and Peace.
From reading reviews of the project, it sounds like there's a lot of artsy subtext at work here. Since the play was in German, and a lot of the reviews were too, I don't know much about all that. What I do know is that I really like this song. It has a great cinematic quality, and it's piano driven orchestral build plays like an analog parallel to some of Apparat's earlier ambient electronic work. Ring's plaintive vocals provide impactful punctuation to
Krieg und Frieden's otherwise almost totally instrumental tracklist.
All in all, "A Violent Sky" is a refreshing and somewhat unexpected find from an artist always worth keeping an eye on.