TR133 114.59MB FLAC
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Jim O'Rourke / Brunhild Ferrari - (2020) Le Piano Englouti
Black Truffle – BT055
Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between
Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O’Rourke: two side-long realisations of
Ferrari’s tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe
in 2014, revised and mixed by O’Rourke in 2019.
The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded
piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean sea, the
tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar of a pachinko
parlour. Far from a slice of audio vérité, these geographically distant
sites intermingle in an unreal space where they often become
indistinguishable. Shadowed by electronics and reverberant snatches of
piano, the field recordings rise up and recede like ocean waves,
creating a constantly shifting texture that is nonetheless warmly
inviting. Chirping birds are confused with their electronic doubles;
snatches of footsteps and voices are engulfed by ambience of unclear
origin. Increasingly present throughout the piece, the piano rises up
one last time before being swallowed up for good by the pachinko
parlour.
Tranquilles Impatiences (Quiet Impatiences) takes as its source material
the electronic sounds produced by Luc Ferrari for his 1977 Exercises
d’Improvisation, seven tapes intended to be heard alongside instrumental
improvisation. Brunhild Ferrari’s piece layers Luc Ferrari’s sounds
into a dense new work that emphasises the insistently pulsing rhythms of
the source material. In this realisation with O’Rourke, the piece
becomes a monumental sound-object, a slowly shifting mass of skittering
electronic tones, shimmering reverb, and growling bass from which
field-recorded events occasionally arise. At times, the placement of
these fragments of real life in a pulsing, insistent musical landscape
calls up Luc Ferrari’s classic Petit Symphonie; at other points, the
swarming electronics bring to mind O’Rourke's Steamroom work or even the
vast expanses of Roland Kayn.
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