Selected Signs III - VIII ECM Box Set by Various Artists

For any other record label of stature it would be an unbelievable shock to take 44 years to release any sort of comprehensive anthology or overview of the recorded output. The closest we got from ECM was two single discs in 1997 and 2008 (they were Selected Signs, I and II, hence the unwieldy title of this collection), and two slip-cased boxes collecting the label’s individual artist best-of’s. Selected Signs, I and II are long-deleted, and connoisseurs of this most iconoclastic of labels will be unsurprised to hear that Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Arvo Part and various other ECM mainstays were unrepresented in those collections.

The new incarnation of Selected Signs is the most inclusive ECM anthology (over seven hours) we are ever likely to see, although it could be more accurately described as the soundtrack to an exhibition – again this is not likely to surprise the ECM collector. In 2012/13, the Haus der Kunst in Munich – one of Europe’s most important museums for contemporary art – hosted the exhibition ECM: A Cultural Archaeology. The goal of the curators was to showcase ECM’s artistic endeavours in music, graphic art and photography, and its creative interchanges with film, theatre and literature. To coincide with the exhibition, ECM owner Manfred Eicher and producer Steve Lake created this set as a thematic journey, exploring various directions in ECM’s musical story. Rather than cherry-picking a piece or two from each of the biggest artists, the set flows like a river, or perhaps like a person wandering from room to room in a gallery. Streams and themes touched upon include the range of composition in the classical and contemporary ECM New Series, music for and from films, imaginative historical reconstructions, trans-cultural music, ambient minimalism, and jazz and improvisation of many hues.

Again, you won’t get any of Jarrett’s Koln Concert or Garbarek’s Officium here (although both artists feature), but you will get extensive sections of Andrey Dergatchev’s beautiful score to The Return leading into Nils Petter Molvaer’s hypnotic, electronically manipulated trumpet, and swathes of Eleni Karaindrou’s magnificent film music. You’ll also get an extraordinary disc of New Series covering Reich, Part, Shostakovich, Haydn, Tavener and Silvestrov, among others. And you will get a couple of the most imaginatively sequenced discs of ‘jazz’ you will ever hear. As you would expect with ECM, the packaging is handsome, sturdy and utterly minimal: the music talks for itself.


Richard Mohr