Melbourne based multimedia artist Philip Brophy may be piano, but in his mind piano is not an instrument of melodious beauty; rather it’s a fragment of sound to be mercilessly manipulated and deconstructed. And he does this repeatedly, created a clipped stuttering collage of reorganised piano sounds that he has sampled from old jazz records. The five pieces collected here are clearly named from whence the samples came. So we’ve got ‘I am Bill Evans’, ‘I am Thelonious Monk’, ‘I am Red Garland’ and so on. The pieces were all performed live in quadraphonic sound at various festivals between 2005 and 2009 including Liquid Architecture and weekly experimental night Stutter at Horse Bazaar in Melbourne.
So what we’re hearing is real time playing, unsequenced midi keyboard, one of the most unique and highly conceptual forms of remixing you are likely to hear. It’s definitely not easy listening, but it is fascinating. The sample sizes are clearly very small and occasionally he appears to adjust the pitch of them, such as towards the end of ‘I am Thelonious Monk’ which takes on the guise of an experimental electroacoustic work. As does the ‘Red Garland’ piece in which any sense that the sounds originally came from piano is totally lost. There’s a certain abrupt joltiness to the way many of these sounds are collated, where any sense of groove or emotional resonance (soul) has purposely been completely destroyed.
Bob Baker Fish
