Pianos exist in environments, like homes and halls. Grandly stationary, they mark space and take root. In what way does the transient player decide to station themselves against one? How do player and instrument elicit something from each other? And how can this be captured? frome answers these questions outside of a vacuum and in terms of the room. They let the world in. We are listening to the piano and also its place, and the space taken up by the recording, even. The recording is a performance in itself and microphones here have as much of a presence as hands and keys, as do the ambient voices that I want to say are in the background but are actually fore.
These kinds of included textures are similar to what I hear in Daniel Bachman’s recent release, The Morning Star, which, for this reason, among other emotions, was instantly one of my favorite albums of this year. It’s a particular take on capturing “live” instrumentation and what feels like a novel one. It can also be heard in some of Kali Malone’s work and might be an emergent pattern particular to pieces made by composers that are obsessed by the recording act as such.
“expectation” and the other frome pieces I have heard are collecting into a folder overflowing with loose papers: pages grown wild with scribbles and notations, lists, notes, musings, desires, illustrations, streaks of paint brushed idly, carefully and freely.
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