A Sweet Quasimodo is a stunning work for two grand pianos played simultaneously by the composer in a tremolo style that Palestine calls “strumming,” a...

A Sweet Quasimodo is a stunning work for two grand pianos played simultaneously by the composer in a tremolo style that Palestine calls “strumming,” a technique that has defined his piano music since the late 1960s. Starting from a quiet repeated pitch, the work grows into a roaring flurry of notes as it spins out a sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones. It was recorded in concert at Maybeck Hall in Berkeley, California. Palestine precedes the piece’s performance with a short spoken reminiscence of his time spent in California 30 years earlier and a brief “ritual song” accompanied by the drone of a rubbed brandy snifter. “Palestine has a way of choosing notes so as to tremendously affect the thickness of the sound and create panoramic variety (and even microtonal anomalies) among the overtone masses he is creating, sort of a one-man acoustic Glenn Branca symphony.” [Village Voice] “Charlemagne Palestine…is among the most distinctive figures to have emerged as part of the late-Sixties counter-culture. Although he is often referred to as a Minimalist, his work has little systemic abstraction: indeed, its ritualistic and ceremonial qualities have more in common with John Cage and Lou Harrison.… A Sweet Quasimodo opens with a typically informal address to the audience, toasting them with a snifter of cognac and setting the mood with a raga-like vocalise sung falsetto. There follows a 36-minute piece played simultaneously on two Yamaha pianos…its rapid and parallel repetition of notes gradually fuse into a haze of harmonics which mutates into myriad timbres, accentuated not only by the detuning of the instrument but also by the ‘deep listening’ such a process of imperceptible change induces. When Palestine breaks off the performance, with the adage that he is really just getting going, there is indeed a sense of coming back to reality—albeit after an experience never less than pleasurable.” [Int’l Record Review] “Palestine's work offers sonic sculptures to be thoroughly inspected and savored at every moment.” [Wired magazine] “A sensuous and compelling sonic experience.” [All-Music Guide]