Vital Weekly (NL)

This is the follow up to Post_Piano, which appeared on Sub Rosa a couple of years ago. Kenneth Kirschner is a man who loves the sound of a piano. Recently he got the piano in his studio on which he started to play it, when he was five years old. But his studio is mainly electronic and not suitable to record acoustic instruments, so here the piano recordings must be seen as field recordings: the piano, the space it’s located in and all the extra sound that runs high and low around the studio. The basic recording was then handed out to Taylor Deupree, who composed three longer pieces, keeping a balance between the piano sound as well as the environmental sounds. In the final stage, Kirschner and Deupree edited the material together, so we can say this is collaborative work. Although computer processing plays no doubt a big role on these recordings, one could easily say that this is an ambient album, one that could fit the tradition of Brian Eno very well. The sparse piano notes, send off to space, bouncing back and the ambient sounds of the environment. In “01.09.2005” the computer treatments take control and the Eno-element is moved to the background. But in the other pieces this sounds very much like a twenty-first century Eno/Budd record, and that is a compliment. Here the update that microsound needs works well on the ambient level. (FdW)