♫♪  Erik Griswold - “Over”

Erik Griswold controls the piano like a puppet master. His solo compositions are so illusory as to be some form of corrupt magic — as if he were a traveling performer with a top hat and a push cart, mesmerizing the audience when they realize the puppets have no strings, just tiny clockwork gears, piston arms, automatonic eyebrows. Beneath the shiny black lid of his piano is probably more wonders that bridge the organic/mechanic divide. No wire or strings, but a city of steam-powered houses, dog-walking parks, horse race track, train station, coal mine, and bustling town square. Every person in this little piano city is set into a loop, a snapshot of life, which they repeat, striking their note with an eerily robotic timbre and off-kilter precision of a grandfather clock. Griswold is also an accomplished composer, with many contemporary chamber compositions (think vibraphone) and albums of solo work to his name — but the prepared piano is truly his miniature universe.

The works themselves on Pain Avoidance Machine, his first album for Room40 in more than a decade, are process-orientated snapshots; different configurations of the same instrument that invoke wildly different environments. The scores are meticulous and repetitive, and an immense amount of preparation must have been required for Griswold to achieve the electroacoustic effects on “Over.” The debut video for this track is an inverted domestic scene, but with the music, it is a freakishly brilliant reflection of the wordless symphony of noises we emit and interact with in a humming, buzzing, quantizing world. You can cruise on over to Room40 to stream more songs off the album, and purchase it on a crow’s least favorite music format: the compact disc.

• Erik Griswold: http://www.erikgriswold.org
• Room40 Records: http://room40.limitedrun.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

Most Read



Etc.