Reinhold Friedl and Costis Drygianakis have gone overboard with prepared piano methods – the notorious screws in the stringboard still proving popular – plus ebows, mallets, close-mic placement, and a variety of recording machines, including low-grade cassette player and dictaphone. The process is evidently so important here that all six panels of the digipak release are devoted to showing us, in seductive black-and-white close-up photography, some of the details of how the music was realised. I see the German half of the act is there looking stern and serious behind his laptop hooked up to a mixing desk, and for those who crave more such documentary images, look to the booklet for more generous scads.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than just the set-up – a Bluthner grand piano lies at the heart of it – as these two musicians have been circulating ideas over the wires since they first brushed antennae in Thessaloniki in 2017. It seems Friedl became quite the fan and collected not a few records by the Greek maestro, hopefully including some rarities on the EDO label (Costis Drygianakis has been making music since 1987 and is reckoned to be a master of tape media and computers). While it’s tempting to look for another Greek titan to step into the shoes of Xenakis, the comparison wouldn’t quite be valid; while I never heard Drygianakis’s music before, what I’m sensing on today’s long-form outing is a concern with simplicity of means, and that’s quite some way from the mathematical complexity and layered density of Iannis Xenakis. Even so Two Into One achieves rich results from its simple set-up, due not only to the sound-processing efforts of the Greek genius, but also hopefully many careful hours spent considering the placement of the mics, the choice of the preparations for the piano. That piano’s soundboard has now had its doors flung wide, every corner of its grand space explored as surely as the endless depths of a subterranean cavern.

I’m not always a huge fan of single-track one-hour CDs, but this is one statement that makes the most of the wide-screen canvas. The exciting roaring-rumble avalanche of the opening is uncharacteristic, perhaps, but keep listening and you will feel the chill of the night air with stars appearing overhead one by one – that’s my way of accounting for the sparse notes and sound-events dotted around in a charged, atmospheric tableau. (19/12/2024)

The intention has been to structure the album to ask questions about the passing of time, or our perception of it; there’s one long piece at the start, a major-key mini-rhapsody suggesting our lives are an innocent garden of delights, an Eden; and our existence ends with a ‘Fall’, a piece using staccato and pointillist techniques to evoke an Autumnal air rather than describing an Old Testament Fall Of Man theme. In between these two milestones, comes the ‘Jeu de Vagues’, a lively excursion, but it’s so brief as to suggest that Melaine Dalibert perceives man’s existence as fleeting and uncertain, at best.

I may be finding more depth of meaning than the music actually supports; it’s melodic, pleasant, listenable and well-executed, but doesn’t really take us anywhere, and remains “pretty” when we’re hoping for something more beautiful. (10/06/2024)

In his work, Bjørgeengen explores the potential to transform audio signals into video signals. On A Thought For Two (TRUE BLANKING 003), we’re hearing a concert recorded 5th December 2010 in New York City, where he’s doing it with Keith Rowe’s guitar and electronics in a situation which is evidently a subtle, but quite complex, interactive system of feedback and interplay. Bjørgeengen starts with his audio oscillators and supplies “video reference synch signals” which can transform that sound into video. He wants to stress this is not the same thing as an oscilloscope – an instrument that can present a graphic rendition of any voltage signal; Bjørgeengen’s work, although not visible on this release, is evidently a lot more subtle, and he claims to produce a “direct” correspondence between sound and image. At the 2010 concert, this video was replayed on an old cathode-ray monitor, at which point Keith Rowe starts to engage with it. The actual detail of this engagement is a bit hazy to me – indicated here by the phrase “picking up the debris of the magnetic field” – but it sounds like Rowe was able to participate in a very productive feedback loop of some sort, with both guitar and live electronics being brought into play. There’s also something called a “flood coil”, supplied by a third party Dave Jones, which likewise is able to receive and amplify this “magnetic field debris” in some way, intriguingly using a telephone receiver to do it.

While I was somewhat resistant to this release at first, on today’s spin I’m finding 41 mins just fly by. We’re now a million miles away from 1960s AMM, and it’s also quite some distance from Rowe’s solo records, or even his low-key long-form excursions and collaborations in the “EAI” field so generously documented on the Erstwhile Recordings label. It might not have anything much to do with playing the guitar or even with free improvisation, yet neither can it be dismissed as empty process art. I’ve no clear idea as yet what, if anything, makes this a compelling listen; it might have something to do with the intense concentration of the artists, as if making a detailed and patient exploration of some new and unknown form of life, studying it with powerful optical instruments. With Keith Rowe drawings on the cover suggesting waves of magnetic energy or the paths of electronic signals, we’re got a nicely integrated art statement. (15/05/24)

For Flicker, Scratch, and Ivory (TRUE BLANKING 002) we move ahead to 2018, a date which coincides with the release of the Sissel item – indeed the Cafe Oto event documented here was staged to promote that release. Rowe is now joined by John Tilbury on piano and Bjørgeengen is credited with video and electronics. Most of the press note for this one is taken up with Rowe’s fine art observations and insights, particularly on a specific painting by Nicolas Poussin from the 17th century, which he uses as the starting point for some profound and touching ruminations about death and friendship, and perhaps touching on something about the indifference of the universe; he contemplates “the muteness of trees” in this landscape painting, as if nature was watching our grief in silence.

Well, this is part of the creative approach of these players in this project; Kjell Bjørgeengen suggested this painting as “a possible focal point” for the 2018 Stavanger performance, indicating that their work on stage is assisted by having a shared image, or idea, in mind. What interests me here is how receptive Keith Rowe is to suggestions like this, a near-intangible notion which would probably mean nothing to a lot of musicians. It’s also encouraging how his perception of visual art, and its value, is not restricted, but rather enriched by situating it in a wider culture, the written criticisms of other art experts, and allowing it to resonate with a deeper understanding of experience and life. Flicker, Scratch, and Ivory has the added dimension of Tilbury’s sympathetic piano notes joining the very abstracted, attenuated electronic graininess, and while I enjoy the intent concentration of A Thought For Two and the way it explores a single pathway right through to the end, this 2018 performance takes off in several different dimensions and discovers new haunts and obscure corners in the wraith-like zone it inhabits. I can’t account for it; fragile, mysterious, beauty, steeped in loneliness and sorrow. (15/05/24)

She’s referring directly to the genre-free approach of her compositions here, the way they elude categorisation in a graceful manner without getting insistent about it. But she might also have in mind something about her own identity, allowing a subtext of “who am I” to inform some of these tense, abstract passages of piano music. Not quite jazz, nor identifiable anywhere on the spectrum of classical avant-garde / new music, yet trace elements may show up on the detecting instruments of devoted scientists. Significant gaps between notes, odd sounds emerging from what might be a prepared piano, but prepared in a way that doesn’t owe a huge repayment loan to the estate of Cage, J. Unexpected dynamics, as though she were thinking in real time about her personal philosophy and history, and seeking the mot juste to express it in essay form. I’m particularly taken with ‘After Sun’ the long piece which ends side one of this vinyl LP, which transplants this fragile form of chamber music in an unfamiliar setting resembling an attenuated lower-register motorised whine (actually it may simply result from a distorted foot pedal on the piano), and somehow cultivates new blooms from this replanted bulb.

A palpable sense of doubt has rarely seemed so approachable in accessible in musical form; anyone can generate reams of self-pity and harrowing despair, but here one senses a tough-minded individual who bears her burden with dignity. I may however be discerning more emotional truth and honesty than she cares to admit to, as her own emphasis is on the musical form of Heirloom, referring to “several layers where different textures and rhythms pass through each other”. I like the sense that it might possible to interweave musical passages in this open-ended framework fashion, as if spinning on a gigantic loom. The material is repeated on the B side in variations, making good use of the LP format, and suggesting something about an “in between” state. From 23 February 2024.

Whalt Thisney turns out to be Fernando Cerqueira from Lisbon, who sometimes uses typographical tricks to call attention to his unusual name; may have been making ambient albums since 2014; here today with ‘Dreams are the Seedlings of Realities’. Distorted tones and hazy piano recorded in such a way as to suggest nostalgia, a fantasy world, or a land of benign visions; rich sound; and at least it’s underpinned by a slow rhythmical figure and not simply a drab violet drone. This may be what prompts the press release to hint that it’s “walking” music, and by verbal sleight of hand lead us to a wholly unearned comparison with the greatness of Erik Satie.

Another solo act is The Phlod-Nar from The Netherlands, may be in Belgium just now, real name Randolf Smeets. I think Smeets has sent us some solo releases for consideration at a future date. Phlod-Nar’s catalogue might not be so large, but he is ambitious; blending genres and styles; mixing composition with improvisation; unafraid to put field recordings alongside other layers of non-natural sound. This may make him appear more interesting than he is here with ‘nadie se conoce’, a forgettable piano piece whose textures have been lightly processed and presented alongside wistful burrs, buzzes, backwards tapes and such. There is subtlety and good taste in the overall sound he makes, but the piano playing is very ordinary, never straying from its very simple harmonic parameters.

I’m in a slightly more enjoyable shell for my crab-like form with ‘Illuminated’ by el_masmore, another solo guy Jesús Alfaro from Spain. Large number of file-based releases he has made since 2022; he works with guitars as well as his Korg synths and other analogue keyboards. In his allotted 13:42 mins, he does create the impression of lots of movement, action, and constant change in his tiny pixillated shards of alien-sounding tones, his clusters of processed information emerging from the diamond mines at tremendous speed. But his musical logic is very hard to follow; no root note, no map of the terrain which he intends to stake out for his next excavation of rare minerals. I end up coated with crystals and dust, but for no good reason.

Claus Poulsen is the very able Danish fellow who has been represented on this label before, on Inner Space / Outer Space performing as one half of Star Turbine with Sindre Bjerga. That 2013 grape from the bunch was, I recall, packed with juicy events and a real sense of hands-on discovery in real time. Here, his solo piece ‘Vertical Horizon’ might not be quite as urgent, but there’s a slightly obsessive manner to the way he wrestles with his twisted, snake-like forms that I do enjoy. If he was a plumber by trade, he might twist his taps and spigots with the same restless curiosity, determined to get hot water flowing even from the emptiest of tanks

To return to the “parliament” theme of THING, I fail to see how four soloists (all of them men, I might add) are creating much of a productive dialogue or conversation on this release, but apparently that’s not the point; the idea is that the four artistes will use this record as part of their “networking” strategy, passing it on to their fan base or the audiences at their gigs, thus spreading spores a little further across the meadow. One name will help to sell another. The label are thus hoping for a “virtual” meeting, or THING, which kind of fits these days of online meetings and live podcasts taking the place of real gigs. (18/03/2024)

He’s here today with a solo piano record. The title translates into English as “five little pieces of time”, and there may be some conceptual musings which underpin this – something to do with gaps and spaces. One senses that Toldam likes to pause and reflect about life, and this is embedded in the music here – the meditative silences are punctuated with hesitant propositions (small tinkling notes), or with definitive statements, like when he slams down a powerful chord in the lower registers and lets it echo out into the ether, with the help of the sustain pedal.

I like the suggestions of great empty spaces one can explore – a large white room almost appears as you listen – but the overall scheme of Toldam’s compositions eludes me, perhaps because they’re being played so slowly and in a rather disconnected, diffuse manner, making it hard to join things up. If he has a philosophy of life, it might be one that tends to doubt the solidity of everything, proposing instead the gaseous nature of a vapour floating in the atmosphere. Cold, cerebral, unengaging music results. Available as a transparent vinyl pressing. (02/02/2024)

I like it well enough, but if I have a reservation it’s that the composer is mostly concerned with nuances of form; each piece is almost an exercise to demonstrate his mastery of such devices as repetition, short pieces, miniatures, diptyches, grid shapes, and framing. That said, he clearly cares about content and meaning too, to the extent that certain works translate successfully into mental images or themes – ‘Grand Action’, a highly “eventful” piece, is a tribute to another musician and piano technician, and ‘fiaili ceoil’ muses on the metaphor of weeds and the unstoppable power of nature to take over even the most desolate of ruined landscapes. There are three pieces themed on Winter, and also ‘Drinking The Stars’ – which promises a certain amount of critical thinking as it refers to the “tendency of modern society to digest false beliefs as truths”; this one has potential to tackle such modern issues as fake news, gaslighting, and the spread of misinformation across the internet, but McLachlan prefers instead to keep things decidedly light-hearted.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that John McLachlan is not an enthusiastic experimenter or modernist; I quite liked ‘X’ on the second disc, and its use of a set of chords arranged in the shape of a letter X to determine its form reminds me a little of the sort of thing John Cage might do, or anyone preoccupied with graphical scores. His intellectual ingenuity in knitting together and ordering the elements of this particular miniature has been exquisite, but it still doesn’t quite satisfy my yearnings for severity, or abstraction. It might simply be that the highly talented Mary Dullea has too much expressive technique for my tastes, but that’s a minor quibble. ‘Grand Action’, mentioned earlier, is another high point; I seem to recall finding echoes of Cecil Taylor in its pre-planned complexity and its wild leaps across the keyboard range, which isn’t to say either McLachlan or Dullea have a jazzy bone in their body. ‘fiaili ceoil’, also mentioned earlier, is another strong piece you might find yourself returning to; the prospect of global environmental ruin, a theme which in other hands might have become a solemn or shrill piece of political hectoring, is addressed in a very elegiac fashion, each well-placed melancholic chord falling like another teardrop on behalf of the human race and lamenting our catastrophic failure to act as good custodians of the planet. Interestingly, one starting point for him here was historical baroque keyboard music such as that practised by Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Blue cloudy images on the covers are by Joanna Kidney. From 8th December 2023.

It’s something to do with the “deconstruction” of a grand piano in a highly cerebral manner; every part of the instrument is measured, documented, and analysed in some way, including capturing the sounds in digital storage, and having Nikolaus Gansterer make drawings of parts of the piano body in schematic form. He does this with exacting precision and attention to detail, even adding labels to the diagram which gradually fills up the screen in rich grey monotone. Meanwhile, Klement and the other pianist are working hard to present the 88 pitches of the piano keys in just about every possible way short of playing a piece of recognisable or relatable music. This may sound about as dry as an attic full of sycamore leaves in a dusty season, but there’s something oddly compelling about this very exact marriage of sound and image coming together over the course of 56 minutes. After the diagram-drawing part of the programme is completed, there are some dazzling close-up images of strings and vibrating objects all moving in time to the percussive-oscillating sounds; and the video treatments, resulting in deliciously degraded images, are thrilling. Released in 2005.

Earlier than the above is 13 Miniaturen (KALK CD 01), with a release date of 1996. These are short pieces for piano and tape, composed and recorded by Katharina Klement in 1993-1994. From what I can make out, it’s pretty much a tapework to be played back over 8 loudspeakers, where the prepared piano is only one part of the whole, lurking among the “recorded sounds in their original form”. It’s also something that varies slightly every time she performs it, depending on the concert hall and the arrangement of the loudspeakers. For this version in stereo, she opted to position the piano in the centre of the stereo image, while around the instrument the pre-recorded elements roll forth and resonate.

Although the music and concept may seem challenging, 13 Miniaturen is very direct and quite straightforward, presenting a very coherent and thought-through programmed composition in a very economical manner. Without doubt she had upped the ante on the achievements of Stockhausen and Aloys Kontarsky, who salute her from the grand Bosendorfer in the sky. Taut…precise…severe…just some of the words I’m clutching at as I savour this set, which may contain some elements which “narrate a continuing story”, according to the creator, who also declares the mixage of the record to be “a formula of its own intrinsic value”. I have no idea what this means, apart from the placement of the piano in the centre, but I like the aura of semi-scientific quality which this lends to the proceedings.

In an alternative universe, Katharina Klement would be given her own intrinsic field subtractor, but instead of causing disruption to sub-atomic particles with evil experiments, she would act as a benign force for the human race and somehow make the world whole again.

Friedl and Topelitz are doing it with just piano and electric bass, although swathes of amplifier hum and other evil fizz do seem to swirl in with the rising tides, and the entire suite extends over two hours in a non-stop performance of deathly slowness, informed by a fatalistic torpidity that’s guaranteed to put the listener on ice as they freeze our bone marrow, using sophisticated hospital equipment, by inches. The “composition” word is getting bandied about a lot in connection with this record, and undoubtedly both these gifted Europeans have earned that accolade in their many endeavours, but La Fin Des Terres is almost entirely predicated on the performance – specifically the simple interaction between these two instruments, but after a bout of listening you’ll start to think the piano is the size of a house and the bass is a coffin for a woolly mammoth. It does seem to have some effect of stretching out dimensions, but the one they are most interested in is that of “time” – “the music is clearly built on a double thought of the architecture of time,” we are told, “the creation, disappearance and mutation of textures…”, which seems to be a way of expressing something about the sheer formlessness of these wretched burrs, these cold piano stabs, these non-musical shapes, these menacing lower-register tones, and above all the sense of slowly marching into the abyss, to the tempo of Reinhold Friedl’s left hand. In like manner, the six monochrome images on the digipak depict a land without boundaries, a sprawl of contours and surfaces, too vast to be understood or encompassed.

Well, all of this would be just grand if there was a bit more tension and vif to the music, or if the duo just cut loose and exploded into horrifying, bone-crushing noise, but they take the exact opposite path – restraint, cool, aloofness, are just some of the watchwords binding them in as they undertake their gloomy task of repainting the continents in various shades of grey, and rather than build to an orgasmic climax across the cosmic sky, they prefer to wind it in even tighter and spiral downwards to a nameless grave. Still, this kind of stilted free-improv is an interesting move for Friedl, slightly uncharacteristic of this meticulous control-freak fellow who needs to spend months preparing elaborate impossible scores before he can execute them using lasers and sewing-machines and protractors. French / Polish Kasper T Toeplitz is now, I see, considered to be an important electroacoustic new music interpreter (e.g. Radigue, Niblock), but he started out as a brutal noise guy in the late 1990s, when he worked with Karkowski, Z’EV, Vomir, and Ottavi dishing out nine types of punishment from his whacking stick.

I take heart that it was recorded at Art Zoyd studios, although the actual band Art Zoyd would have really made a meal of this “theme” if they’d tackled it in the 1980s, and would have delivered it in a fraction of the time. From 15th September 2023.