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RM 4101CD
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Room40 stalwart Erik Griswold returns with Yokohama Flowers, his latest collection of works for prepared piano. For over two decades, Griswold has been crafting a particular and utterly personal language around his instrument of choice. His preparations, which are in a state of perpetual refinement, are like a kind of lens; it is through them that a certain audio reading of his instrument is made possible. It's understandable, then, that Griswold would be inspired by the work of Australian experimental film maker Louise Curham. Like Griswold, she too reveals a very personal reading of her surroundings through a range of preparations and expanded techniques. Discovering her work through a series of collaborations hosted by Room40, Other Film and other groups, the pair slowly developed a strong approach to joint performance. In many ways, these recorded works reflect upon those performances. Similar to her filmic works, which maintain an unfamiliar, yet tangible beauty; Griswold's compositions remind us that the piano is never truly knowable, or known. Each composition collected here reveals another detail or way of knowing the piano. The preparations release something in excess of the instrument itself. It's in these extensions, these ruptures of familiarity, that the language of the piano is born and reborn. It is a state of perpetual discovery and resolution, framed in composition. Griswold on the music: "There's a mystical aura surrounding my old piano. I imagine the 19th century workshop in which it was hand-crafted and the German parlors in which it played Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Satie, or Joplin. I imagine its journey from Stuttgart, by ship to Sydney harbor, and overland to the semi-tropical heat of Brisbane. Playing it I feel connected to its 131 years of history -- the people, places and music that have come before. The beautiful, hand-treated Super 8 films of Louise Curham are a perfect visual counterpoint to my music. In her Yokohama Flowers (2018), a sense of fragility, intimacy and nostalgia emerges from the superposition of location footage with delicately hand-drawn and painted layers. Her method closely mirrors my own, which combines tactile exploration at the piano keyboard with layering of foreign materials (preparations) onto the strings. By altering and repurposing old technologies in this way, it is as if we are squeezing the last drops of nectar out of these fading flowers."
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RM 468CD
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"In late 2014, feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat, I turned to the prepared piano as a refuge. I was coming out of an intense two-year period of composing for every conceivable instrumental combination, and not sure where to go next. I felt the need to get back to basics, and create something essential, elemental. These pieces are meditations, each with its own mood, but constructed in a similar way. The piano is the pain avoidance machine" --Erik Griswold. America-born, Australia-based composer and pianist Erik Griswold is a master of the prepared piano. Since the late 1980s he has forged a deeply personal approach to transforming the piano from a tonal hammered instrument into a device that transgresses acoustic music traditions. Uniting robotic rhythms of almost electronic timbre, uncharacteristic evocative melody, and metallic murmurs, he transforms the piano with a restless and rigorous curiosity. Pain Avoidance Machine is an intimate set of miniatures. The listener is invited inside the piano, exposed to the instrument's raw materiality. Griswold offers an invitation to explore the prepared piano's sound-world in a detail that reveals an entirely new dimension. Mechanistic motifs and rhythms are layered one atop another to create fragile musical collages. Like a broken pianola, the subtle nuances of the prepared piano have an off-kilter quality, full of unexpected resonances, buzzes, and percussive strikes.
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RM 407CD
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"Bolts, screws, paper, rubber strips, and bits of cardboard are wedged, laced, and screwed between the piano strings to create layers of interlocking microtonal scales. These form a matrix of possibilities that are explored, sounded and discovered in a series of improvised musical moments. Cross rhythms. Imperfect memories. Currently based in Brisbane, Australia, American-born composer and pianist Erik Griswold has been a leading force in Australian contemporary composition for prepared piano for many years."
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