Dan Melchior
Hill Country Piano
UK PENULTIMATE PRESS PP66 LP (2024)
For some reason I have tended to peg this fellow Melchior as a singer-songwriter, but that’s probably because the first thing we heard from him was that madcap spree of zaniness he released on Northern Spy in 2011. In the few other manifestations we’ve been lucky to receive, he has revealed himself as a highly idiosyncratic electro-acoustic and tape collage composer, collaborating with the mad Italian genius Ezio Piermattei after they met up at Colour Out Of Space, and his gift for personal, unique art music indicates that the songwriting thing was perhaps uncharacteristic of this talented fellow. The press blurb gives me an overwhelming list of other projects, collaborations and comparisons that confirm his exceptional stamp.
On today’s item he simplifies still further, recording four stripped-down piano pieces…he did it not in a studio but possibly in the residence of his girlfriend and made the recording with a single cheap microphone just using the natural reverb of the empty room in Austin TX. Each tune has some overdubs and additions, but at heart this is a minimal piano record made of very short, simple repeated keyboard phrases and executed with a very single-minded determination and vision. In many ways it reminds one of the Advent solo LP made in 1990 by Richard Youngs, which I think was one of those placed in a seraglio with the music of La Monte Young and John Cale by the New York musician Alan Licht, when he was prompted to make a “favourites” list by a journalist. (Also see the not-unrelated Lake double LP on the same label and same year, which Youngs made with Simon Wickham-Smith).
When I think about Hill Country Piano in the context of the little Melchior music I have heard, which has often been quite opaque and rich in its strangeness, today’s item emerges as positively transparent – in its recording, execution and presentation, the artist hides nothing, but comes to the instrument bringing the full force of his uncommon personality, and before your very eyes he creates something new. Which is another way of saying it’s neither “minimalism” nor “free improvisation”, but something we can’t quite account for with our tags and our categories. All the music is informed by, that rare thing, a genuine emotional truth and empathy; it conveys melancholy and sadness without once turning sentimental. There’s a lot more going on under the surface of this very simple record, but I can’t fully apprehend it; it’s very likely the achievement of Hill Country Piano, and the genius of Dan Melchior, will only emerge after a few more years as it percolates into the culture. Astonishing – another great one from Mark Harwood’s superb label. (Arrived 05/02/2025)