People have been playing the piano for centuries, but few people have ever made it sound like Celia Hollander does. Her latest album genuinely seems to redefine what the instrument can do. The music made by the Los Angeles-based composer – both under her own name and under the pseudonym $3.33 – is all about digital manipulation: 2020’s Recent Futures saw her mutilating everyday sounds; the sampladelic disfigurations of 2021’s Timekeeper recalled Brian Eno’s ambient works.
Here she uses the same techniques on an upright grand. While serving as composer-in-residence at an arts centre in Nevada, she recorded herself playing a series of piano improvisations – epic, swirling solos, featuring tumbling arpeggios and harp-like cascades – and then brilliantly mangled them in post-production. Fragments of her improvisations are sped up, slowed down, played backwards, pitch-shifted and put through numerous digital effects.
Six short numbered tracks called Sustain are dotted throughout the album as musical punctuation, where the resonant, echo-laden sounds of a chord played with a sustain pedal are artificially elongated, reversed and turned into gentle drones. The other tracks are much more percussive pieces that turn rapid-fire sequences of notes into trembling, quivering, steam-punk electronica.
Receiver is a rippling glissando that resembles rainfall; Messenger sounds like someone turning the piano into a tuned drum kit. The Point turns a piece of fast, repetitive minimalism into the babble of noise from a dial-up computer modem; Illuminator sounds like Philip Glass making music for an 8-bit video game. Best of all are 2nd Wind and Cumulus, like Debussy being remixed in real time by Aphex Twin. Hollander has turned the piano into an instrument that glitters, bubbles and throbs in a way that it has never quite done before. It’s quite an achievement.
Also out this month
Jules Reidy is another musician transforming the capabilities of an instrument, in this case the guitar. Trances (Shelter Press) sees Reidy playing a custom-made hexaphonic guitar, tuned in just intonation, and creating a sensual, zither-like microtonal buzz pitched somewhere between Vini Reilly, Glenn Branca and Kevin Shields. Kirk Barley is a Yorkshire-born artist whose album Marionette (Odda Records) perfects a curious kind of organic minimalism on acoustic instruments – often pieces of junk, or manipulated found sounds, in the vein of Moondog or Lonnie Holley. Bruce Brubaker’s new album Eno Piano (InFiné Music) features rather lovely and soothing solo piano arrangements of ambient pieces by Brian Eno – including pieces written with Harold Budd, Jon Hopkins and Hans-Joachim Roedelius.