Skrifum

Album review

Skrifum marks Norwegian pianist and composer Jon Balke's third solo piano investigation in a decade. The companion titles, 2016's Warp and 2020's Discourses, both showcased compositions and improvisations threaded through with electronic sound processing and field recordings. Skrifum ("write" in Icelandic) changes that up. This time, Balke's "accompaniment" is drawn from a much more intimate source: the inside of the instrument itself. The pianist employs the aid of an electronic audio tool, the spektrafon. It is live processing software developed with technology professor Anders Tveit at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Using this interface, Balke is able to directly manipulate ambient audio sound from the piano (inside it, and immediately around it and its pedals) in real time: He is able to draw out sonic frequencies and sustain them in real time as harmonic chords, with sparkling overtones and even eerie drones. This active reverberation is then generated as new material for improvisation and musical dialogue.
These 14 selections are relatively brief; most are between two and five minutes with just one, closer "Tegaki," going over the latter mark. Balke's use of the spektrafon is revelatory on the opener "Sparks." As the pianist moves across, through, and inverts various scalar harmonics, sounds, manipulated with the echoes of drones, find themselves in inquisitive dialogue with the improvisor sending out edited inner echoes, washed-out pedal pulses, and reverberations; edgeless strings add dimension to the already probing melody. "Traces" commences as a near-classical inquiry before finding an off-ramp into speculative improvisation that moves directly into the detailed reverb control to offer conversational ballast. The spektrafon is more subtle in "Lanes," an elliptical improvisation that explores the intersections of modal scales -- it sounds like a work in the process of being composed. "Ductus" is sequenced between the nearly ambient "Stripes" and the droning, tension-filled "Rifts" that amplifies the harmonics from the piano's insides and challenges them with melodic drones and dissonant and modal phrasing. As such, it reflects an etude, but its subtly controlled dissonance, feedback, and delay create a nearly classical musicality in the jazz vocabulary. The title track is almost a miniature, but there is so much happening in its structure that the space required to trigger the harmonics is transformed into a whisper. Despite being the longest cut here, closer "Tegaki" is also the sparsest, and most melodic exercise here. Balke joins a folk melody and drone, then draws upon their shared tonality. It offers fragmentary melodic statements inside a floating harmonic architecture that relies heavily on the ringing overtones in the keyboard's middle register. Throughout, Balke's play is offered almost monophonically, allowing him to focus, weigh, and balance each note as the spektrafon carves out space in response, illuminating, underscoring, and sometimes briefly concealing the contrasting harmonics. Skrifum is the crowning achievement in his trilogy thus far as it extends the piano's language inward.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo