Rohan Drape Anthony Pateras – Ellesmere (Immediata)

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This quote adorns the inner sleeve of the gatefold cd:

“Is thinking in music like ignorance, endowed with unconscious delights, sorrowful and splendid?”

It feels like a challenge. Enough of the joys of the unthinking imbecile, sometimes great rewards can come from a touch of chin stroking.

It’s a warm album, there’s a real bottom end massage from the two organs building density on top of each other, submerging or subsuming their individual identities within each other, holding sustained single notes. It’s drone music with periodic note changes, perhaps drone music not that much interested in the drone. Instead they seem content to lose themselves, both audibly within the whole, but also as individual performers or composers.

Within the extensive (but pretty confusing) liner notes someone speaks of losing awareness of the notes of a keyboard, losing awareness that the keyboard is even there. This is music about losing yourself as both a listener and a performer. It’s not about what should happen or what should be. It’s not about what was done or who is doing it. It’s just music that is. Pateras (I’m assuming) speaks about the duo playing together for 6 days before they got the take, he speaks about rules, ideas, notions, challenges all falling away until they were left with what just is.

Rohan Drape is a composer/keyboardist and computer music specialist who is a founding member of the Slave Pianos collective. He has been making music for over 25 years. This is his first commercially released recording. He is playing the Yamaha YC45D organ. Anthony Pateras is a Europe based Australian composer and this recording appears on his label. He is playing the Farfisa Compact Duo organ.

The liner notes fold into a giant score of the two pieces. This is released in a limited edition of 300. It consists of two long pieces St John’s Wood (36:38) and Harleian (12:58). The second piece Harleian moves to a higher more difficult frequency, no longer do you feel the warmth, the bottom end massage, rather there’s a shrillness, tempered somewhat by the fact that its emanating from vintage organs, yet it’s still somewhat difficult. The modus operandi however does not seem to have altered much, sustained layered notes, yet the warmth of St John’s Wood has been replaced with tension. To some extent for the listener it’s a lesson in what a difference frequency makes, though to be fair this feels like an album not so much for the listener as for the performers. It feels like a form of catharsis, the exorcism of consciousness and self in the process of creation.

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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