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(via Theo Alexander)

“Haunting” is a lazy and inaccurate way to describe one’s sound, except when you’re talking about London composer Theo Alexander. Layers of piano echo on top of each other to create an ancient, claustrophobic sound that sounds eerie and beautiful – imagine if My Bloody Valentine tried writing a piano ballad. Alexander is currently based in Prague and has taken inspiration from the Charles Bridge and Kafka to heart and to excellent results. Haunting, indeed.

From Bandcamp:

“‘Points of Decay’, is an album of deconstructed piano pieces that have been manipulated and re-spliced through a series of tape loops. Each piece makes use of a recording technique that runs a single recording through a seccession of different mediums, to achieve a heavily degraded sound that is unfamiliar to most piano recordings.

As each layer reveals or obscures another, textures are heard that would not otherwise be possible without the experimental studio techniques that drove production and writing respectively.

A major inspiration for album was the portrayal of memory in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’.”

Theo Alexander:

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(via Sun Ra – “That Changing Wind”)

Year: 1968

Album: Monorails and Satellites, Vol. 1

Sun Ra, a piano man not of this world. “The Changing Wind,” like most of Monorails and Satellites, sounds like honky-tonk at some Ziggy salon. With a piano that comes from Saturn, Sun Ra plays aggressively, but with care. He knows he can slay the piano, and he knows that you know that he can slay. Yet he holds back, choosing emotion over flash. Wobbly, yet oddly comforting.

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(via Franz Liszt – “Bagatelle sans tonalité”)

Before there was Beatlemania, there was Lisztomania. This Hungarian virtuoso pianist was considered the most technically skilled player of his age and, at one point, the greatest pianist who ever lived. His live performances were widely popular in his lifetime, comparable to how popular the Beatles were when they first came to the United States. It helped that he was an over-the-top guy who knew how to put on a good show. Alex Ross called him the Lady Gaga of his time, though I’m sure Gaga can’t play piano as well as Liszt.

This 1885 composition is just one example of Liszt’s crazy hands and taste for flair. Some critics hate his flashiness, but it’s hard to deny the man’s talent. This piece is also famous for being one of the first pieces by a major composer to explore a theme of atonality that Schoenberg would later perfect. Underneath its quick playful tone is a lack of structure that challenges the ideas of concrete organization in classical composition.

And now you know what that Phoenix song is about.