Manafonistas

What makes Abandoned City all the more impressive is that every sound on the album was created on a standard piano, using the ‚prepared piano‘ technique, mastered by Bertelmann over the last decade. „A prepared piano is a method that involves taking a piano sound and adding an object – it could be metal or felt or plastic – to a piano string or between the hammer and the string to create a new tone on top of the piano note,“ Bertelmann explains. „By using the prepared piano method, I get to use every single element of the piano, which gives me the freedom to do very modern, almost electronic, sounding music without using electronics as a sound source. On Abandoned City I used only delays with a little distortion to process the sound – everything you hear was played on a piano.“ (Source: The Quietus)