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I Am Piano posits the piano as strange chimerical beast - capable of expressive language and conducive to displaying masterly control, yet equally capable of generating an abject 'piano-ness' which states nothing more than "I am piano".

For some, the piano is universal, natural, organic, essential. For others, it is problematised by its history - particularly its 'frozen history' which implies that there is such a thing as its inalienable 'acoustic' sound. I Am Piano hears the piano in this latter way - as a noise machine which appears to speak language but which ultimately generates complex sono-musical encodings of time, place, action and activity whose surface is read as music. John Cage discerned the overtones of the piano and 'excavated' them via his prepared-piano processing. I Am Piano discerns those same tones in the phonological documents of piano recordings, and accordingly works with their materiality in the name of composition.

"There may have once been a time when musical instruments sounded like they came from somewhere. They would have peculiarly reverberated in space, accruing their sonic identity from the way their mechanics forced sound throughout and within that space. You could have sat there and said: yes, that piano over there does sound like a piano indeed.

But who listens to pianos these days? In fact, who has really heard one? And more importantly: what is there to be gained by identifying a piano anyway? Inasmuch as sound can never be separated from space - from that specific phenomenological acousmonium which provides the frame and realm within which we identify sounds and soundings - all recordings of sound ultimately document the space of those occurrences. Put simply, whenever you hear a recording of an instrument - a lingering piano chord in a hall, a snare rim shot close-miced, a muted trumpet diffused from a stage, a fender guitar through a Marshall stack - the recording is defined by the characteristics of the space in which the instrument was performed, and the means by which the instrument was recorded. The materiality of this phonology is obvious enough in any age of mechanical reproduction, but what is of deeper interest is how sampling culture has affected ways of hearing space while identifying sounds."

(From Sonic Occupancy)

BUY I Am Piano directly through Sound Punch Records online using PayPal in June 2009.

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