Label: true blanking

箔押し印刷の厚手のリサイクルボール紙による美しいジャケット!!Morton Feldmanの楽曲を最高峰ピアニストJohn Tilburyが演奏!!1966年結成の英国最強の即興アンサンブルAMMの現行メンバーである百戦錬磨のピアニストJohn Tilbury。過去に高橋アキを含む様々な演奏家により録音されて来た、フェルドマン晩年の作品の中でも宇宙的イメージを持つと言われる超大作[バニータ・マーカスのために]の2CD。時折、足音、咳払い、喉を鳴らす音も聞こえたりしますが、浮遊感や透き通る音色に容易に吸収される名演。





Technique and art both take time, so nothing durable happens by accident. But, is durability enough once appearance and disappearance become important? Can ebb and flow be set in stone? Or cut to vinyl? Or digitised? Perhaps we have only become habituated to the possibility.

A pianist depresses a key, strings are hammered. At what point does the sound begin? It is not quite right to say that, in this moment, there was no sound but that now, in this moment, there is. Too much is happening in the transition to be glossed over like that. More than any other musician I can think of, how Tilbury makes sound begin remains a mystery to me. It seems that he has spent a lifetime on a single, highly complex, problem: how to touch?

This recording is – as uncomfortable as it might be to say – brimming with sensuality and eroticism; but, what makes it so beguiling is that there is no yearning for possession, nor claim, nor any demand being made. It is, rather, a sort of sustained excitement born from the fact of being alive, a playful attentiveness and quivering awareness. The tense sensitivities of time, pushing and pulling and pulsing, in which rhythm is never quite where one expects it to be. The mystery of the harmony comes from the manner in which the notes are made to come into the air, refracting through one another, making audible a scintillation of intervals and overtones, before finally going out of the air in turn.

Sometimes we hear shuffling, a cough, or clearing of throat, but these are only unsuccessful attempts to let off a little steam, easily absorbed and dissipated by the floating weight, the diaphanous density, of the music. This music, this recording, this sensuality from time and technique.