The leap from producing rhythmic electronic music to player piano compositions isn’t a large one: both use sequencers to map events in time. Eight Studies finds Seth Horvitz aka glitch/microhouse producer Sutekh following in the footsteps of Wolfgang Voigt, whose Freiland Klaviermusik of last year paired wildly dissonant chord clusters on player-piano with occasional kickdrum. It’s not Horvitz’s first foray into the ‘classical’ realm, last year’s On Bach took that crown, but this hems more closely to classical instrumentation than did that digital Wendy Carlos update.
Recorded on a modern Yamaha C7 Disklavier Mark III, the sound is much richer than on that used by Nancarrow, and Horvitz’s studies more refined. Horvitzs is less concerned with throwing us into the maelstrom of inhuman unplayability, as Nancarrow frequently does, but rather to focus on particular compositional aspects and perceptual effects, often of simplistic musical structures. ‘Study No. 21: Bells’ for instance centres on a repeated single note, around which competing intervals are stabbed, like Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata. ‘Study No. 29: Tentacles’ chops Debussy’s impressionistic flurries into meaningless repeated cul-de-sacs, delicate wisps made jagged. In ‘Study #2 An Approximate Series of Approximate Harmonic Series’ the piano sounds like resonant metal, sustained chords and rapid runs jangly like gamelan, while ‘No. 99: Strumming Machine’ explores the techno pulse of Voigt with more traditional minimalist patterns, building a drone from repeated bass notes.
Joshua Meggitt
