In many ways, 2016 will be the year of fantastic piano albums. Jon Balke’s masterpiece „Warp“ has been the first one, and has started a series of ECM „highlights“ around the world of this ancient instrument that may for some people be a sweet reminder of the „salad days“ of Manfred Eicher’s label in the 70’s.
But this surprisng frequency of outstanding records is not confined to ECM, and thus I like to focus the attntuon of the reader to the new album of „Piano Interrupted“ on Denovali Records. Yes, the label that has released Thomas Köner’s brilliant „Tiento de la Luz“ just a month ago! Recorded partly in Senegal with local musicians playing traditional instruments, „Landscapes Of The Unfinished“ is Piano Interrupted’s 3rd album.
As Denovali Headquarter writes, „this album sees pianist Tom Hodge and “electronician” Franz Kirmann explore a more introspective approach to their sound. The sonorities and recordings the pair brought back from West Africa are deconstructed, mangled and texturised, turned into a pointillist landscape until only a faint and distant souvenir remains.“
„These beds of pulsating soundscapes and earthy textures serve as base for Hodge’s delicate piano phrases and intricate compositions, interlaced with long-time collaborator Tim Fairhall’s fluid double bass playing.“
„Harsher territories are also visited during the 9 tracks that compose the LP; fuzzy Senegalese radio voices and the distant memory of African percussion collide with distorted bass and buzzing drones or screaming textures battle with screeching double bass sounds and tortured piano strings.“
„The album artwork captures one of the numerous half-built structures, infinite and abandoned, surrounding the studio in the suburbs of Dakar, and provides both an unfinished urban landscape and yet when viewed as a single moment in time, one of many compellingly complete landscapes of the unfinished.“
The album lives truely up to the expectations of these descriptions, and is a pure listening adventure from start to end. It will definitely played in my next radio night, and, yes, the broadcasting is „officially authorized“, for a „night marathon“ that will prove, among other things, that 2016 will be „a year of the piano“.