Piano Music 1-7

Editions Mego welcomes Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new album of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

As an extension of an intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions (using probabilities to compose music), various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work.

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, “In writing electronic music,” Robin Mackay once wrote, “you also have to direct the invention of new tools.” Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu.