Vinyl LP pressing. Within the voluminous catalog that pianist Matthew Shipp has created over the last three and a half decades, his solo piano work has charted a unique and compelling pathway for the evolution of the instrument's vocabulary. On Codebreaker, that path turns yet another unexpected corner, continuing to venture further while taking a surprising turn inward. Codebreaker finds Shipp in an uncharacteristically meditative state of mind. Though the language is unmistakably his own, the usual violent attacks, dense clusters and insistent circularity are in short supply, replaced by harmonic nebulae that luxuriate in the mysterious resonances that Shipp conjures from the keyboard. As ever with the work of this consummate improviser, intention had very little to do with it.
Matthew Shipp takes an introspective turn on his latest solo piano album, continuing to discover new territory for his singular cosmic pianism. Codebreaker encrypts rich harmonies, cloud-like clusters, and the unlikely confluence of Bill Evans and Bud Powell
Matthew Shipp takes an introspective turn on his latest solo piano album, continuing to discover new territory for his singular cosmic pianism. Codebreaker encrypts rich harmonies, cloud-like clusters, and the unlikely confluence of Bill Evans and Bud Powell
Vinyl LP pressing. Within the voluminous catalog that pianist Matthew Shipp has created over the last three and a half decades, his solo piano work has charted a unique and compelling pathway for the evolution of the instrument's vocabulary. On Codebreaker, that path turns yet another unexpected corner, continuing to venture further while taking a surprising turn inward. Codebreaker finds Shipp in an uncharacteristically meditative state of mind. Though the language is unmistakably his own, the usual violent attacks, dense clusters and insistent circularity are in short supply, replaced by harmonic nebulae that luxuriate in the mysterious resonances that Shipp conjures from the keyboard. As ever with the work of this consummate improviser, intention had very little to do with it.
For over 30 years Matthew Shipp has built up an unparalleled body of work and a wholly original musical language that becomes more focused and distinctive with the passage of time. His abstract eloquence is on vivid display throughout The Piano Equation, new works for solo piano. Shipp builds his solo music in a cellular fashion, formed out of disparate elements that combine and evolve in novel and fascinating forms. Stride, swing and the avant-garde collide like elemental particles, the aftereffects radiating outward in increasingly complex and intricate formations. The scientific, the personal, the political and the fantastic co-exist throughout his work, melding in the pianists radical vocabulary which speaks with it's own alien yet familiar logic. Fragments of melody coalesce and transform, dissolve or shatter into kaleidoscopic reveries. The Piano Equation celebrates Matthew Shipp's 60th birtday, and while some may have used the arrival of such a landmark occasion as their 60th birthday to look backwards, Shipp continues to move resolutely forward, further evolving a voice that is as intimately personal as it is cosmically adventurous. This release is also the inaugural release from Tao Forms, a new label founded by drummer-improviser-composer - and longtime Shipp collaborator - Whit Dickey.
Wellspring presents the arrival of a powerful new voice in creative music, unrelenting in passion and invention, while always transmitting a deeply empathic grace. Masterful composer-improviser DoYeon Kim is an unparalleled practitioner of the Korean gayageum (a silk-string zither), and is also in possession of a purposeful vocal intensity. This is her debut album as a bandleader, featuring fellow master musicians Tyshawn Sorey (drums), Mat Maneri (viola), Henry Fraser (bass). Armed with an unlikely traditional instrument, flanked by three extraordinary improvisers, radiating a brash, acoustic strategy that simultaneously invokes folk universalism and a No Wave battle-stance, the Brooklyn-based virtuoso has dropped a volcanic sonic statement with grand humanist goals. Kim mingles Korean lullabies, fervent interactions between drums and strings, and pure instrumental expressions of musical self. At times, she sounds like she can halt armies. Wellspring is a call for society to come together. How the Seoul, South Korea-born 34-year-old came to be the centuries-old zither's leading (only?) practitioner of contemporary improvised music, reflects an expansive embrace of her own culture, her place in modern society, and her ascending recognition of music's liberatory power. Kim has released works alongside Morris and Brandon Lopez. Her 2017 duo album GaPi with Chase Morrin garnered a Korean Grammy nomination. And she's shared stages with Kris Davis, Cooper-Moore and John Hebert, among many others. Now, Wellspring, is the recorded culmination of her growth period. It is a rumbling record, with wall-to-wall big sounds, all Kim compositions or group improvisations, built on immediacy and gusto. Even the aforementioned lullaby, "Walking in a Dream," which Kim performs with unrestrained vocal intensity, surrounded by Fraser's resonant bowing, Maneri's accompanying melody and counter figures, and Sorey adding atmospheric percussive touches-ends like a hurricane. Kim chose her accompanists not simply because of familiarity, but due to their emotionally unmediated relationship to the moment. "I don't want people thinking about their 'role' in the music" she says. "I want people free from their instrument, who are more about how they are making a sound and the relationship between our sounds." That feeling and the album's humanist themes are well-displayed by Wellspring's two-part epic closer, the 20+-minute "Linear System"/"Calculus of the Soul." The instrumental "Linear Systems" is, according to Kim, constructed on the theme of the lifecycle, slowly building to a mass bowed drone, through a plucked and reactionary percussion section, before folding into the album's gentlest moment, and sliding into "Calculus of the Soul." "Please listen to this girl's story" the latter begins; then, with Maneri and Sorey flitting around her narration in noise-folk fashion, Kim speak-sings-then-screams of how between the sun's and the moon's daily arrival are countless formulas, and that the mystery of life is contained within those numbers. "That's how we live together!" LP is packaged with an insert featuring liner notes & addt'l images, and full album download card with CD Only track "Walking in the Dream". Limited edition of 500.
Wellspring presents the arrival of a powerful new voice in creative music, unrelenting in passion and invention, while always transmitting a deeply empathic grace. Masterful composer-improviser DoYeon Kim is an unparalleled practitioner of the Korean gayageum (a silk-string zither), and is also in possession of a purposeful vocal intensity. This is her debut album as a bandleader, featuring fellow master musicians Tyshawn Sorey (drums), Mat Maneri (viola), Henry Fraser (bass). Armed with an unlikely traditional instrument, flanked by three extraordinary improvisers, radiating a brash, acoustic strategy that simultaneously invokes folk universalism and a No Wave battle-stance, the Brooklyn-based virtuoso has dropped a volcanic sonic statement with grand humanist goals. Kim mingles Korean lullabies, fervent interactions between drums and strings, and pure instrumental expressions of musical self. At times, she sounds like she can halt armies. Wellspring is a call for society to come together. How the Seoul, South Korea-born 34-year-old came to be the centuries-old zither's leading (only?) practitioner of contemporary improvised music, reflects an expansive embrace of her own culture, her place in modern society, and her ascending recognition of music's liberatory power. Kim has released works alongside Morris and Brandon Lopez. Her 2017 duo album GaPi with Chase Morrin garnered a Korean Grammy nomination. And she's shared stages with Kris Davis, Cooper-Moore and John Hebert, among many others. Now, Wellspring, is the recorded culmination of her growth period. It is a rumbling record, with wall-to-wall big sounds, all Kim compositions or group improvisations, built on immediacy and gusto. Even the aforementioned lullaby, "Walking in a Dream," which Kim performs with unrestrained vocal intensity, surrounded by Fraser's resonant bowing, Maneri's accompanying melody and counter figures, and Sorey adding atmospheric percussive touches-ends like a hurricane. Kim chose her accompanists not simply because of familiarity, but due to their emotionally unmediated relationship to the moment. "I don't want people thinking about their 'role' in the music" she says. "I want people free from their instrument, who are more about how they are making a sound and the relationship between our sounds." That feeling and the album's humanist themes are well-displayed by Wellspring's two-part epic closer, the 20+-minute "Linear System"/"Calculus of the Soul." The instrumental "Linear Systems" is, according to Kim, constructed on the theme of the lifecycle, slowly building to a mass bowed drone, through a plucked and reactionary percussion section, before folding into the album's gentlest moment, and sliding into "Calculus of the Soul." "Please listen to this girl's story" the latter begins; then, with Maneri and Sorey flitting around her narration in noise-folk fashion, Kim speak-sings-then-screams of how between the sun's and the moon's daily arrival are countless formulas, and that the mystery of life is contained within those numbers. "That's how we live together!"
