Max de Wardener is an established composer and musician with a broad palette spanning contemporary classical through to jazz and electronica. For this piano-focussed project with a difference, he identified Kit Downes as the keyboard played with the corresponding breadth of vision to interpret and perform the ten pieces that make up the album. This is their first collaboration and de Wardener, in our conversation about the album, described Downes as having ‘super open ears’ and ‘the sense of pulse that jazz musicians have … with a brilliant sense of time and touch and the ability to make [the pieces] not sound like notated music.’ Downes, an organ scholar, had worked with detuned organ so was no stranger to de Wardener’s ideas.
The project took up four years with the recording spanning two years in a range of studio locations. The premise was to work with detuned pianos, with retunings based on harmonic series tuned to naturally occurring overtones, inspired by James Tenney’s intensely textured pianola work dedicated to Conlon Nancarrow, and to complement these with live, acoustic, one-take pieces with ‘normally tuned pianos’ (known as Equal Temperament).
Pianos were variously detuned to take in unconventional tuning systems used by La Monte Young, Harry Partch and Tenney, and the final recordings involved overdubbings and subtle insinuations of synthesiser and tape delays to create additional spatial dimensions. The challenging detunings were carried out with great skill, often attended to between takes, by Laurence Fischer.
The album, subtle and sensitive as it is, thrives on changes of pace and texture, yet works as a unified, flowing entity – originally forty-eight minutes, pared down by de Wardener to an essential thirty-four.
The delicacy of the lead in to the opening track, The Sky Has a Film, is quietly overtaken as Downes improvises a light piano solo over a repetitive, rhythmic piano figure, recorded with the damper down, with peripheral electronics underscoring the mood and blending with the mildly unsettling detuning to set down the marker. The electronics return to background, then to reshape as foreground washes in Redshift as the melody is carefully picked out by Downes, then contrasted by the gently abrasive disharmony of Blueshift, with its off-kilter feel, followed through in Deranged Landscape where recordings of the same piano detuned two ways are combined for an ethereal, marginally out-of-body sensation.
Kit Downes (L) and Max de Wardener. Publicity photo supplied
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