A superbly crafted album, flowing seamlessly between moods. Painting pictures of serenity, unease both abstract & concrete
For Fans of: Cendre – Christian Fennesz & Ryuichi Sakamoto
The track names from Pieces for Processed Piano are complex, multi-lingual compounds, but they draw on relatable imagery such as flowing water and glowing lights. They suggest that aesthetic and mood is key to this album but also, in their complexity, they don’t paint the picture for the listener – who is left to find their own imagery and interpretations.
This feels apt, because Breachlight has crafted a purposeful yet evocative and abstracted narrative throughout this beautiful album. Starting with the serene alpyrean, grounded piano embellishments echo through cavernous reverberance, on vast beds of rich sonority. Laminality continues these themes and it becomes clear that Breachlight has a vision much beyond grouping 7 loosely connected reverberant ambient moods – but is more interested in presenting an interconnected story through the medium of sound.
In dypvannfluoroskap, the enveloping richness of the drones thins just a little, introducing just a little loneliness, isolation & uncertainty. By the end of luminnalgia, the piano itself starts to become more muted. The loneliness and isolation has culminated in becoming somewhat lost.
Flecks of darkness continue to enter the palette, culminating in the disquieting anskiljafèinity. These shifts are all accompanied by a consistent instrumentation & timbre – hearkening back to an older approach to constructing an album, which was much less focussed on the individual track which might show up on streaming or shuffle, but encourages the listener to perceive it as a whole.
By (de)fragmentia, things are truly falling apart. Flickers of melodic material that you’ve experienced over the last 30 minutes expose themselves as fragments, decoupled from their initial context. There’s a power in Breachlight’s ability to develop significance out of small, seemingly passing, motifs and his ability to develop an overarching structure out of them.
The final track, Spacial Drift, seems to serve as both a palate cleanser & coda. It is easy to zone into the gentle aesthetic of it’s sorrow-tinged drone and lingering piano. Yet, something uncertain remains – it is not a full recapitulation of the opening music, but as if by virtue of undergoing all these changes it could never truly return to what it once was. The album ends on a haunting, lightly noisy, reverberance as it fades into nothingness.
Summary: Pieces for Processed Piano is a sumptuous album, with its strength lying not just in individually rewarding pieces but the way they effortlessly weave together into a cohesive whole.
For more from Breachlight check out their tunes on Bandcamp.
~ Review by Chris Hobbs
