So deep and gentle! Thank you for this beauty!

This year, piano and coffee turns five, and to celebrate, we are releasing our first compilation: Realismo Mágico — a conceptual project featuring unconventional works by new and old friends we have made along the way.

Inspired by magical realism, an artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy, this special release presents unheard material by twelve exceptional musicians — from experimental sound artist Martyna Basta to award-winning film composer Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres, and from poly-instrumental duo Brueder Selke to prolific pianist and producer John Hayes.

Each artist has contributed with a new track that invites the listeners to submerge into their very own musical universes, which, at the same time, have been re-shaped by their interpretation of magical realism. We start off on our journey with the delicate nostalgia of Tim Linghaus, passing through Jakob Lindhagen and Vargkvint’s modern take on the story of a Norse mythological creature, followed by the harmonic ambiguity in Simeon Walker’s pleasingly strong dialogue between felted piano and drums. Later on, John Hayes shares with us a chaotic composition born out of samples from an old clock in his parents’ garage and saturated voices, which precedes Lucy Claire’s processed hydrophone recordings of seaweeds and starfishes in Australian waters. Ondes Martenot, pump organ, zither, analogue synthesizers, vocal processing, musical saw, and bowed gongs are some of the unusual elements to be found on this eclectic yet coherently unified record.

Realismo Mágico has been conceptually crafted and musically curated by Peruvian composer Sergio Díaz De Rojas, and beautifully depicted by illustrator Jordan Amy Lee and graphic designer Celia Fernández González.

Lucy Claire - Kelp

Eliot James & Tom Hobden of @petraleksander have been working away on new music for the last year, and we’re thrilled to be releasing the resulting LP ‘Collage’ this September! 

The record's sparkling first single ‘Fireworks in G’ is out now, and you can give it a listen wherever you find your tunes: IDOL.lnk.to/pa-fireworks

“A crackling modular synth, reminiscent of a firework display in the distance, provides what we can imagine as a spectacular backdrop for the unfurling of a far more intimate scene, played out between a mournful viola and its string family counterparts…”

Collage

Fireworks in G

Pre-Order 'Collage'

Pêtr Aleksänder - Fireworks in G

Tomorrow, January 28th, Norwegian composer and pianist Julia Gjertsen is set to release her sophomore LP on the one and only Moderna imprint. I’ve covered Julia before, in particular, her collaboration with Nico Rosenberg (including the latest release on Constellation Tatsu), but for Formations, it’s nice to hear her play alone again. Besides the solo piano pieces on the album, which are entangled with reverb, some echoes and looped repetitions, the passages are processed with a rhythmic, borderline percussive brush. My favourite piece on the album, which was already released by the label as a single, is called “Falling In Keys”, and it perfectly embodies the lush atmospheres produced by the piano, drenched in sweeping delays, lightly sprinkled flutters and deep rumbling bass. The piece that I’m premiering for you today echoes the textured theme with just a touch of synth pads, delicate treatments and forefront pulsating rhythm. Here, we find Gjertsen “expertly oscillating between catchy, beat-driven hooks and slow-motion soundscapes that cause us to lose track of time.” I hope you will enjoy this and then come back for her 2019 debut, titled Fragile.

Read more about it here: http://hcdi.gs/Gjertsen

Formations

TRACK PREMIERE : Julia Gjertsen - Cause And Effect

Boris Rogowski conceived the idea for The Waste Land in the autumn of 2020, when the world became quiet again after a deceptively easygoing summer. During a walk among the “last fingers of leaf” he revisited in his mind the landscape of T.S. Eliot’s enigmatic poem The Waste Land, a somber meditation on disillusionment, nostalgia and isolation in the “modern” world of the early 1920s. It had accompanied Rogowski for many years, and knowing entire passages by heart he found that the strange, tuneful lines had left him with a sort of musical map of the Waste Land. What he heard was a string quartet playing amid a stream of dissolving, permanently mutating sounds, seeking hold, losing it, coming up for air again. The music he envisioned melded contradictions into a cohesive whole, was strange yet universally accessible and – just like Eliot’s poem – an expression both of sorrow for a lost world and hope for a new beginning, deep admiration for classical tradition and disgust at the snobbery and ignorance of an elitist class trying to keep it under lock and key.

The even quieter winter months found Rogowski working long days and nights on the score, putting the music in his head to paper. Also, he quested for the sounds that would be able to represent the stream of synthetic memories that in his vision rolled through the music like the river Thames through the central portion of the poem—and found that they were already there, right in front of him: In the early days of the pandemic he and his friend and studio co-owner Bazzazian had harnessed the halt of everyday life to create a library of sounds that embodied their very own idea of style. For this purpose, they had sent their recordings of acoustic and electronic instruments through a specially devised processing chain, giving them an evocative, strangely timeless quality. It was only logical that those sounds would form the foundation of The Waste Land.

Later, in the spring of 2021, other musicians brought in their unique voices: Moishe Lichtfuss [flute, tenor sax] added his woodwind textures to many of the compositions, most notably on “The Sound of Horns and Motors”. Claus Schulte [drums] made a brief, yet crucial appearance on the centerpiece “The Violet Hour”. At last, the Waste Land String Quartet (Alexander Sachs and Irina Borissova [violins], Anna Krimm [viola] and Michael Preuß [cello]) recorded their parts under the baton of fellow composer David Menke who also played the solo piano on the brooding “In Rats’ Alley”.

The Waste Land is a unique musical cosmos that nonetheless touches upon many reference points, among them the minimalist music of composers like Michael Nyman and Philip Glass, Post Rock of bands like Tortoise or Swans and contemporary Experimental and Ambient works like those of KMRU, Christina Vantzou or Tim Hecker. Like Eliot’s poem, it contains a multitude of voices and fuses them to a music very much its own. The album begins with a wash of piano that carries splendor and melancholia in equal measures and ends with the pointillistic rhythm of Morse code spelling out the final words of The Waste Land, “Shantih shantih shantih”—peace.

In 2022, T.S. Eliot’s poem will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Its central themes—solitude, estrangement and a wounded world with an alarmingly uncertain future—are even more pressing today than they were 100 years ago. Boris Rogowski’s soundscapes embody the mood perfectly: The fear and darkness as much as the faint, yet stubborn hope for the light of a new day.

Boris Rogowski - Marie Marie

Wishes

i do not own this piano cover
all rights belong to Tara O'Brien on Youtube; watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF9dDXNNYsM

Clarity By Zedd (piano By Tara O'Brien)

I Saw Waves Coming

Roots

Eight For A Wish

Japanese pianist @daigohanada lends his subtle felted playing and beautiful textured arrangements to this rework of 'Last to Let Go' by @richard_luke. Close your eyes and immerse yourself in this intimate and soulful piece for piano.

stream on your favourite platform : https://orcd.co/last-to-let-go
download : https://modernarecords.bandcamp.com/album/last-to-let-go-daigo-hanada-rework

Glass Island (Reworked)

Last to Let Go (Daigo Hanada Rework)

Spotify ⊜

Richard Luke - Last to Let Go (Daigo Hanada Rework)

Night Walk

New Restrictions

Pianist and producer among other things.



Contact/enquiries: John@johnhayesmusic.com

Eight For A Wish

John Hayes

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