Charlemagne Palestine is an American composer, performer and visual artist, born in Brooklyn as Charles Martin to a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and long based in Brussels. As a young man he played the carillon at Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan for several years, and the experience of ringing bells fed directly into his music.
His signature technique, strumming, is a rapid and relentless alternation of notes and chords on the piano until the instrument’s resonance swells into a single roaring mass. He found his ideal instrument in a Bösendorfer Imperial grand, first encountered in 1969, and recorded Strumming Music on it in his Manhattan loft, issued by the French label Shandar in the mid-1970s without any written score. From the late 1960s he also developed sustained organ works, later known as Schlingen-Blängen. He rejects the minimalist label, and his performances are attended by stuffed animals he treats as companion divinities, carried from concert to concert.