Musique Machine (.COM)

Two years ago, Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner released an album called Post_Piano, a superb encounter between piano and minimal electronic music. This summer, they released the follow-up, and it’s equally nice.

A little while after the release of the first volume, Kirschner added to his studio an old piano, which gave him the desire to work on a second Post_Piano project. On the first one, he used samples; on this one he was to use his own playing. The piece he composed is the fourth and final track of the album. It’s a very sparse, subdued composition, you can hear the piano is rather old and not that tuned. Kirschner’s studio being poorly isolated from the outside world, a lot of its sounds has been put to tape as well.

The piece completed, it was sent to Taylor Deupree who made of the source material three entirely new compositions. Each one is very different from the other. On the first one, the piano source is quite clearly audible, but complements more than it actually leads the track. Deupree gives it a very ambient feel, perhaps akin to the music of Brian Eno. Static noise is more obviously present on the second track. It sometimes feel like listening to a piano piece on a radio station that you can’t exactly locate on the FM band since you’re driving and its frequency keeps on changing. The sound texture is richer than on the first track, and halfway to the track, the noisier elements make way for some really beautiful minutes of music not quite unlike Minamo’s latest recordings. My favourite piece has to be the third track. On this one, everything comes harmoniously together: the piano, static noise, microsounds, drones, it all sounds like a marriage made in heaven. A beautiful, twelve minutes long piece.

This project is opensource, which means that anyone getting hold of this music anywhere in the world can make new music out of it. Nice idea, but it remains to be seen whether someone can actually do better than Kirschner and Deupree.