By: Will Pinfold
Mats Gustafsson | website |
The title of this technically quite short album is a clue to the fact that avant garde/jazz musician Mats Gustafsson has stepped away from his saxophone to play the highly peculiar and (perhaps not surprisingly) rarely utilised Dubreq Pianomate. Rather than using the Pianomate as intended, to electronically treat the sound of a piano, or even applying it to the saxophone, Gustafsson plays the instrument as is, creating a massive, primitive wall of non-aggressive electronic noise, something like an organ playing all its notes at once. Although still improvised, the limitations of the Pianomate necessarily curb the intense inventiveness that usually characterises Gustafsson’s work, while opening vistas of microtonal/textural experimentation, which he explores with a surprising amount of restraint, given the wildness of some of his previous work.
There is mostly very little musical content as such; at its most intense, the timbre of the Pianomate is not unlike an air raid siren, a kind of vast, not-quite dissonant sliding chord that’s somehow slow, despite the lack of any actual tempo. As with LaMont Young’s experiments of the mid-60s – or even Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music or Merzbow’s immeasurably harsher noisescapes – the microtonal changes, especially at loud volumes, create overtones with almost-imperceptible near-melodies – or at least changes in mood and atmosphere – which can be surprisingly viscerally powerful.
The album consists of two nameless pieces, each over 15 minutes long. The first is tonally light, but powerfully immersive, with the occasional ghostly rustle of something percussive and at times a bright, Springlike musicality. The second is brooding, moody and monolithic and occasionally reminiscent of the dying wheeze of bagpipes.
It would be perverse to say that Piano Mating is good or bad; the key to the album is that it has the power to reflect the listener’s mood; it can be intense, powerful, oppressive or a boring endurance test. While it’s playing it simply is, in a way that’s probably best appreciated by fans of extreme, non-dramatic noise. Nice when it stops though.
