I’ve been all over the piano recently like some cheap floosy in a cabaret club.  This year you have seen me gyrating enthusiastically but unerotically to Triosk and The Necks.  Last year I was pretty much giving lapdances on the piano stools of Julien Neto and In The Country (count yourself lucky you didn’t see that).  The latest record to wait until after the show, buy me one drink too many, and try to put its hand up my blouse is Be Still by Adrian Klumpes.

Klumpes is 33.333% of the aforementioned Australian jazz/electronics trio Triosk.  While the other two members were out the back tending the barbie (feel free to replace this with a cheap, crude Australian stereotype of your own choosing), he had a few hours in the studio on his own to lay down the piano tracks for Be Still, which he then processed and enhanced electronically.  Although the short recording period could be expected to give the tracks a sense of contiguity - and in terms of acoustics and resonance, and a certain feeling of edgy restlessness, that is the case - the album is broad-ranging in its emotional reach, and the level of intrusiveness of the digital elements varies from nil to about, oooh, sixteen.

At the sparse end we have the title track, which is constructed around a beautiful and emotive melodic motif, played repeatedly as if it provides therapeutic respite from some trauma.  The ten minutes of unadorned piano which make up “Unrest” form the album’s glorious centrepiece; propelling you gleefully downstream over urgent and insistent piano which tumbles like river rapids, shifting course and gaining intensity as it goes. 

On “Why” and “Give In”, the sounds are kidnapped and taken far from source (as per Fennesz’s treatment of the guitar) with the tracks eventually left at the roadside scarred by feedback.  “Exhale”, marginally less successfully, sounds like a piano being wheeled in a supermarket trolley through Iceland’s car park (note for foreign readers: Iceland is a UK supermarket chain at the less expensive end of the market.  Their car parks are probably full of detritus.  Not that I’ve ever been, obviously.  Anyway, to clarify: this has nothing to do with Iceland the country, whose car parks are probably entirely free of detritus.  Not that I’ve ever been, sadly).  Last track “Passing Pain” seems mistitled; there is a shrieking undercurrent of grief which the piano seems to be doing its best to ignore, as opposed to overcome.

Be Still is a mesmeric and powerful record which, via distillation of their core ethos into specific sonic and emotional fractions, may even surpass Triosk’s excellent latest.  Cop a feel.

Listen to tracks on Adrian Klumpes’ Myspace page here
Download mp3 of “Exhale” from the Leaf site here