#2164 Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and Strings

Fact I learned: the Bosendorfer piano has an extra set of low strings that add richness to its sound, not so much because the performer necessarily hits the extra keys, but because the strings incidentally vibrate slightly as the piano is played, adding subtle harmonics and tones.

There's probably no purer demonstration of this effect than Strumming for Bosendorfer Piano. Palestine wangs on the piano repetitively, slowly shifting his technique and focus, until you loose track of the notes, and the singing, ethereal tones of the major and minor vibrations of every string on the piano slowly coalesce and shift.

This's perilously close to being wanky process music, where the concept is a substitute for anything interesting about the sound itself, but there's three important points here:
1) the sound itself is just straight up more beautiful than most. So rich and layed and otherworldly, never quite the same over the course of its hour
2) there's a human element here. I love Andy Battaglia's description of Palestine's physical coaxing of the notes from the piano. This is not just wailing on a piano by rote: there's a real sense of interaction, interplay, seduction.
3) you can feel the piano, know the piano. I've long thought of repetitive music having a physicality, and here's a sonar map of the piano itself. You come to feel hammers, strings, fiber, wood. It's intimate.

A gorgeous, subtly fascinating recording.

The other two tracks are less effective on all three counts: the sounds simply aren't as beautiful, Palestine's absence as performer is noticeable, and the instruments' physicality isn't as thoroughly embodied.

The harpsichord succeeds somewhat, because Harpsichords are weird. You can start to see the physical/sonic relationship of their little picks as the notes bloom and blend - but without the same ability to reverberate the entire object, the same sense of wholeness never arrives.

Same goes for the strings. Being played repetitively and constantly is kinda their thing already, and no new sense of them arrives - it's just arty classical music.

But the piano piece is plenty: an hour's worth of truly successful experimental music that's essential for anyone with the patience for such nonsense 4.5/5