Keith Jarrett: Roma (ECM 2880)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Roma

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded live July 12, 2016
at Sala Santa Cecilia,
Auditorium Parco della Musica, Roma
Producer: Keith Jarrett
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Design: Sascha Kleis
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 6, 2026

Keith Jarrett’s Roma fills the last space in ECM’s portrait of his final European solo tour. Recorded at Rome’s Santa Cecilia Hall on July 12, 2016, it joins the Budapest, Bordeaux, Vienna, and Munich concerts in documenting five evenings across thirteen days. Within that brief span, the pianist found enough room to remake his relationship with the keyboard at every stop. Here, dense chromatic lines give melody something to push against, each emerging theme revealing an opening that could scarcely have been imagined a moment before. Listening, we feel our way along with him.

“Part I” brings its fragmentary existence into frame with the force of a seemingly impossible proof. Working through various equations in real time, Jarrett seeks a single number the notes can agree on, challenging himself in the process of becoming. The feeling is gnarled, even uncomfortable, yet the free atonality remains heartfelt. Its tensions carry the awkward sincerity of a body attempting to describe itself from inside its own bloodstream. As complexities mount and detours clamor for equal value, ten fingers become exponential explorers, now a hundred, now ten thousand, until the arithmetic threatens to consume the hands that set it moving. Consensus eventually reveals itself, though by then its beauty has become suspect. We have grown accustomed to the chaos, discovered a pulse within its abrasions. Resolution arrives bearing an almost indecent neatness, a signature affixed to something whose identity was richest while it remained illegible.

The growling bass line grounding “Part II” gives the left hand a shadow to inhabit while the right answers with brighter dance moves. Their balance is astonishing, maintained even as complex polyrhythms slowly entangle them. Independence becomes a means of intimacy, distinct intentions occupying the same nervous system. A more estranged conversation awaits in the deconstructed elegy of “Part III,” where the left hand plods forward and the right seems to play its theme backward. Time folds at their meeting point, permitting the briefest harmonious union. Within the sparser architecture of “Part IV,” this divided consciousness contracts. Its stop-and-start modality speaks with the hesitancy of someone remembering a room that has been removed from the house. The gaps preserve its dimensions, giving absence a floor beneath its feet.

That absence allows the sunlight of nostalgia to enter the gospel of “Part V,” carrying its song as a wound after war. Uplift remains ephemeral, a light in the window lit for one necessary moment and extinguished before it can become an object of worship. Such tenderness knows what prolonged exposure might demand of a fragile thing. From this small illumination, the heavenly cast of “Part VI” rises with epic, cinematic sensibilities. Expansive arpeggios supply their own means of ascent; the music seems to be flight itself, inventing altitude from the pressure of a fingertip. Gravity becomes a proposition the body can entertain without accepting, its argument suspended somewhere beneath our hearing.

A balladic return to earth gives “Part VII” its emotional reach. Jarrett speaks tenderly, without a shred of self-interest, gathering flowers for the yearning listener from a field whose acreage changes with every breath. The bouquet is delicate enough to preserve the distance between its stems. When “Part VIII” gathers that earthbound feeling into a skyward trajectory, its acuity of observation becomes almost unbearable. Jarrett is an observer of places that must be articulated in the moment of witnessing them, before their veracity is ruined by the artifice of recall. These central improvisations may form one of the most magnificent stretches in his archive. Their comforts retain the gravity of the thicker psychospiritual territory he has worked through to reach them. Even the most open melody carries that buried resistance, an underground correspondence whose pages have become translucent.

The blues of “Part IX” grants Jarrett license to let his voice out freely. His exuberance has a rough grain, and the tight entanglements of the left hand keep the romp tethered to the concert’s deeper concerns. Joy acquires traction through the very knots that might have impeded it. Where this earthy momentum presses against the keyboard, “Part X” loosens the instrument into a cascading wonder. Its sparkling highs and subterranean lows exchange density until the piano seems capable of evaporating through its own roots. Those roots rumble with a need to be heard.

The restraint of “Over the Rainbow” gathers these vibrations into a melody heard anew. Jarrett’s clever harmonies deepen its vulnerability, and what he holds back becomes an active presence, protecting the song so that its purpose might not be bruised. “It’s a Lonesome Old Town” extends that care, keeping its tongue behind a glass cage to protect the implied lyrics. The cage is strangely permeable, reaching us without claiming to know what we have lost. Both encores appeared in Munich 2016, yet here their poignancy feels concentrated beyond the scale of ordinary memory. The world has been distilled into a thimble and administered drop by drop to the tongue of time. What receives this medicine seems older than the mouth, an ache that preceded its own capacity for expression.

Something darker courses through this recording, its courting of shadow lending the passages of glory the urgency of a reprieve. The piano is palpably present, its own resonance meeting that of the hall until the room seems to acquire a second ribcage. The exchange suggests a strange form of labor by building a dwelling for something we could never possess. Every note has the capacity to annex silence, yet these hands repeatedly leave a portion unclaimed. The music’s deepest generosity may reside there, in making room for an existence that owes us nothing.

The Caretaker: Everywhere At The End Of Time

| Tyran Grillo

Somewhere beyond the last remembered melody, a room is waiting for us to remember that no human being belongs entirely to memory. Its confines continue to breathe long after the drywall of experience has surrendered to oblivion, while the invisible inhabitants of its past move through one another with the exquisite indifference of ghosts who have misplaced the circumstances of their deaths. Perhaps memory has always been an elaborate misunderstanding between presence and disappearance, a clandestine negotiation through which consciousness persuades itself that what has passed remains available for retrieval. We inhabit the ruins of our own becoming, adorning their corridors with images whose origins grow increasingly illegible, trusting in the fragile hospitality of recognition to shelter us from the terrifying possibility that our lives have already begun to forget us. Music offers a particularly seductive refuge from this predicament. Its repetitions confer upon transience the illusion of permanence, allowing what has vanished to return under the auspices of a familiar cadence. Yet beneath every recurrence lies an infinitesimal displacement, a subtle estrangement through which the present discovers its inability to coincide with its former incarnations. The melody remembers something its listener cannot, even as the listener attributes to its unfolding an intimacy that may never have existed. Such is the beautiful treachery of nostalgia, whose most enduring achievement consists in transforming absence into an almost tactile substance. And somewhere beyond that substance, where the distinction between recollection and invention becomes impossible to sustain, an entire universe awaits its own unmaking.

Into this labyrinth of vanishing correspondences, James Leyland Kirby, under his spectral alter ego The Caretaker, deposits the extraordinary six-and-a-half-hour Everywhere At The End Of Time, a monumental undertaking whose six stages unfold across an increasingly unstable geography of remembrance. Conceived as an artistic meditation on the progression of dementia, the work excavates the exhausted glamour of antique ballroom recordings, letting their melodies circulate through successive degrees of distortion until the possibility of musical recognition begins to disintegrate. What initially glimmers with the tarnished elegance of an abandoned social ritual gradually submits to an acoustics of ontological bewilderment, where every recognizable fragment carries within itself the premonition of its eventual illegibility. Here, the phonograph becomes an instrument of metaphysical excavation, unearthing the remnants of experiences that have survived their own intelligibility. The grain of a recording acquires the density of an ancestral wound; a half-obscured orchestral phrase opens upon an abyss of unremembered tenderness. We hear these sounds through an elaborate inheritance of absences, for their original listeners have long since relinquished their places within the world. Even their anonymity acquires an almost unbearable intimacy. Somewhere a trumpet continues playing for a woman whose face has disappeared from every photograph, its metallic throat preserving an affection no living witness can authenticate. A piano bends toward an unfinished dance, waiting for the hands that once taught its notes the meaning of proximity. The music circulates through an impossibly elaborate genealogy of vanished encounters, offering itself as evidence for experiences whose existence we can neither establish nor deny. We recognize something. Perhaps we have always recognized it. Perhaps recognition itself is the first symptom of an error whose consequences have yet to disclose themselves.

When we push ourselves through these lenses, it is astonishing what details are revealed in the in-betweenness of light. There are windows of time, each a flushed cheek embarrassed by the hint of love, yet perpetually on the edge of awareness. Pianos reveal their inner organs, each atrophying at its own pace, so that marking the passage of life becomes an exercise in futility, its cessation indistinguishable from its inception. “It’s just a burning memory” opens upon an almost indecent tenderness, a melody whose apparent familiarity arrives already contaminated by the possibility of its disappearance. Its repetitions provide the illusion of reassurance, although each return seems to have misplaced an infinitesimal portion of its own history. The horns emerge from the depths of our hearts and lungs, transformed by their passage into the outside world, where the first touch of air begins to corrode their cause. Sometimes there is scarcely a melody to shelter, only the tragedy of old vinyl caught in its own unresolved crackling, a tiny mechanical caesura endlessly rehearsing the circumstances of its infliction. Yet how strangely beautiful this damage becomes when heard through the fragile hospitality of reminiscence. We begin to desire the deterioration itself, listening for scratches as evidence that something has endured the violence of time. There is an almost erotic confusion in this attachment, for the aggrieved recording offers us the impossible pleasure of approaching what we cannot restore. One might even imagine that every remembered life consists of a similar arrangement, its coherence sustained through repeated encounters with the places where coherence has already failed. Still, the melody continues, while in the back of the room, a person is standing beside a window. The window faces a garden, or perhaps the garden is a photograph. It is difficult to tell from this distance. The person turns. We know the face. We have seen it before, although the circumstances escape us. There is a name for this feeling. There must be.

The intervening stages make increasingly uncertain demands upon the grammar of recognition. “Misplaced in time” suggests an estrangement that has penetrated beyond the boundaries of any particular recollection, while “Denial unravelling” seems to describe a consciousness losing the very instruments through which refusal could be articulated. These compositions are extracted from their own cellular makeup, rendered into a serum to be circulated back through the self, where their supposed restorative properties disclose an intimate toxicity. An orchestral phrase begins with the conviction of arriving somewhere, only to discover that its destination has withdrawn from existence. The same interval returns, carrying a slightly different account of what preceded it. The ear attempts to gather these irregularities into a recognizable sequence, but the sequence has forgotten the principle by which its elements were once related. We might call this confusion, although the word assumes an earlier condition of clarity whose existence becomes increasingly suspect. Perhaps identity has always amounted to a provisional arrangement of memories whose coherence we mistake for an enduring self. Perhaps the assurance of consciousness depends upon the willingness of yesterday to answer when today calls its name. Yet something remains troubling about these formulations. Their elegance seems to presume a spectator capable of contemplating the erosion from an intact position of knowledge. How easily philosophy transforms another person’s vulnerability into a mirror for its own anxieties. How readily the aesthetic representation of dementia risks confusing the collapse of recognizable form with the disappearance of the person who once inhabited it. I want to preserve this distinction. I remember wanting to preserve it. There was something important here about the distance between listening and knowing, about the danger of imagining that another consciousness becomes available to us through the very act of depicting its inaccessibility. I had been following a thought through the music. It concerned the person beside the window. No, there was no person in the music. There was a window. I think the distinction matters.

By Stage 4, distortion has assumed an authority that the surviving melodies can no longer challenge. Familiar tunes take on the inevitability of decay, wearing it as a new skin against the current of a relentless decline. String remnants collide within enormous chambers of sound, their former relationships compressed into a density that resists interpretation. Snippets of memory, fragmentary conversations and unfinished sentences become the new normal, flashing in slow motion as though signaling to some faraway vessel that never answers back. The compositions seem to stretch themselves across impossible distances while contracting around a center that cannot be located. There are moments when a recognizable contour almost escapes the tumult, only to be drawn back into the machinery of its own disintegration. The ear searches for continuity and discovers that continuity has become a demand imposed upon something no longer capable of satisfying it. Somewhere a phrase is beginning again. It has already begun. Perhaps it never reached its conclusion. There was a piano here, its secrets exposed, each note struggling to maintain its place within an increasingly unfamiliar body. But the body has become difficult to distinguish from the room that contains it. The window is farther away now. The garden has moved behind the glass, although there is no longer any certainty that glass separates these spaces. Someone is speaking from another part of the house. The words arrive without their beginnings. I understand the endings, or remember understanding them. It seems essential that I answer, since silence might suggest I have not heard. But the question has gone. There is a terrible intimacy in being addressed by a voice whose claim upon us survives the disappearance of its identity. It makes the room larger. It makes the room smaller. There should be a word for the distance between those two sensations. I had it a moment ago.

In the fifth stage, the music inhabits an almost geological disorder. Its remnants move through enormous folds of sound, crushed beneath the accumulating weight of their own discontinuities. A brass inflection surfaces from somewhere. A small brightness. Something metallic turning beneath the floorboards. The sound seems familiar because it was here before, although before has become an uncertain direction. There is no reliable way of knowing whether the phrase belongs to the present recording or to an earlier one, whether it has returned or never departed. I remember the orchestra. I know there was an orchestra. A room crowded with people whose faces have become the spaces between their faces. There were hands, I think, and someone had been waiting beside the window. The hand was familiar. It moved toward something. A door, perhaps. The door was there when the music began. The music began in a room. I am trying to remember whose room. It seems important to know because someone will ask, and there should be an answer. The answer has a particular shape. I can almost hear its syllables turning somewhere behind the sound. They are very close, close enough to hurt. Yet the closer they come, the less certain I become that they belong to a word. There is another voice now. It could be the same voice. It speaks with the familiarity of someone who knows me, although I cannot understand how that knowledge has survived when mine has not. I should respond. I want to. The music is very far away. The music is inside the wall. Perhaps I am inside the wall. There was a distinction between these things once. I had been writing about it. About the difference between a person and the memory of a person. It seemed possible to explain. I was going to explain.

By the sixth stage, even the disturbances have begun to withdraw. The great collisions of sound recede into a dark and opaque mirror that has nothing left to give. There is a vastness here without distance. The instruments move beneath the surface of something that cannot be named. Somewhere, almost impossibly, a choral radiance appears, carrying the suggestion of a human multitude into a place where the individual voice has become difficult to imagine. I want to hear consolation in it. But consolation requires someone who can receive it, and I am no longer certain who is being addressed. The voices seem to know. They are singing from another room. The room was here. There was a door. I remember the door because someone had been standing beside it. Or waiting beyond it. They had something to tell me.

The words were important.

There was a name.

I knew the name. It belonged to someone I loved, or someone who loved me. I can remember the feeling of being known. It has no face now. It is moving through the room without finding a place to rest. Perhaps the name belonged to me. Perhaps someone had been calling it for a long time and I had forgotten that I was meant to answer.

There is a hand.

I know this hand.

No. I know that I should know it.

The fingers close around mine. There is a warmth that has nothing to do with remembering. Someone is speaking. The voice has been speaking for a long time. I have been waiting for it to become familiar before allowing myself to answer.

But someone is here.

Someone has been here.

Why do I keep asking for the name?

The hand is still holding mine.

I think I was trying to understand what happens to a person when the world can no longer recognize them. There was an argument. Something about identity, about the strange authority we give to memory. I wanted to say that a life might persist beyond the stories used to establish its existence. That a person could remain worthy of being addressed even when the language of response had begun to disappear.

I cannot remember the argument now.

There is only this hand.

The room is very quiet.

Someone says my name.

I have no name to give them.

They say it again.

And again.

I can hear that they are calling for someone. I want to tell them that someone is here, although I do not know how to tell them who.

They are waiting.

I am waiting.

The name is somewhere between us.

They keep calling.

I am answering.

They keep calling.

I am answering.

Why can they not hear me?

ALLVEI Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for All About Jazz explores the self-titled debut of ALLVEI, the trio of Norwegian guitarist Eivind J. Vullum, Polish saxophonist Jerzy Mączyński, and Swiss drummer Nicolas Stocker. ECM listeners will recognize Stocker from the intricate rhythmic weave of Nik Bärtsch’s Mobile on Continuum (2016) and his sensitive percussion alongside Areni Agbabian’s voice and piano on Bloom (2019). Here, his melodic approach to rhythm helps turn spectral electronics, searching saxophone lines, and sustained guitar textures into a journey through places both geographical and imagined. From the subliminal groove of “Driva” to the gathering intensity of “Kristiania,” the musicians allow each contribution to reshape their shared space. The album’s patient unfolding, attention to texture, and balance of compositional clarity with improvisational freedom give ECM fans ample reason to spin this one sooner rather than later.

Tarkovsky’s Inner Ear

| Tyran Grillo

Released by Cold Spring on September 4, 2026, this vital boxed set gathers remastered soundtracks from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre across five CDs. Their passage from Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s orchestral writing to Eduard Artemyev’s electronic interiors opens a fissure that continues to emit productive fumes from deep within the core of the earth to this very day. The individually printed sleeves and accompanying artcards, reproducing Soviet and Japanese posters, return these intimate experiences to their public faces. Inside the matte box, however, cinema contracts to the dimensions of a listening body. The change of composers also shifts the terms of attention. Ovchinnikov gives the human voice an analog horizon, while Artemyev lets that horizon infiltrate the voice until its source shades into humanless oblivion. Across this passage, the sacred grows increasingly difficult to distinguish from the material conditions of hearing. An entire landscape can settle behind the sternum, its trees drawing nourishment from an ache whose origin we cannot locate.

Ovchinnikov’s score for Ivan’s Childhood (1962) enters a bucolic world already trembling at its foundations. Harp illuminates the strings from within, while the winds carry a sweetness too alert to relax into innocence. Ivan, a 12-year-old scout whose family has been killed by the Nazis, resists the adults who would remove him from the front. His competence has become the terrible credential of a childhood forcibly surrendered. Against this, his dreams preserve his mother’s presence, although preservation offers little protection. Ovchinnikov allows lyricism its full emotional amplitude, making Ivan’s vulnerability almost unbearable. Every tender phrase acquires a second circulation beneath its surface, carrying the blood of an event still waiting to occur.

Percussion unsettles this fragile enclosure, dislodging any confidence that the ground will remain beneath Ivan’s feet. Between the double basses and the violins’ breathier extremities stretches an abyss through which his small body must somehow pass. Even the adult courtship surrounding Masha cannot establish a refuge. Kholin’s kiss, suspending her above a ditch in the birch forest, binds desire to the geometry of danger; intimacy briefly occupies the space a grave might claim. The score’s dances register such pleasure with an urgency that exposes its provisional tenancy. Timpani give mortality a pulse, and the brass answers with cries that seem torn from the soul’s anatomy. Once Ivan’s fate becomes known, the final dream’s return to childhood cannot repair the historical wound. The hymnal slowing of the music leaves the water holding an image for which the world has withdrawn its permission.

With Andrei Roublev (1966), the sanctuary becomes a place of entropy. Bells bring their immense, inhabited hollowness into Ovchinnikov’s writing, and the flute’s more solitary inflections suggest a melody listening for its own burial. Tarkovsky’s icon painter moves through a medieval Russia where religious vocation offers no exemption from human brutality. After killing a man during the sack of Vladimir, Rublev renounces painting and takes a vow of silence. Heard against this refusal, the score’s choral abundance becomes agonizingly complex. A voice may ascend while its owner remains implicated in what happens below. A lone soprano, surrounded by the brittle intimacy of struck strings, opens a small aperture in that contradiction. Through it comes the possibility that devotion begins in the inability to reconcile the beauty one can imagine with the suffering one has helped to make.

Pagan ritual and Christian authority trouble one another across the film, denying its sacred spaces any simple moral enclosure. Ovchinnikov’s murmuring voices deepen this instability, their apparent serenity revealing chambers of holy delirium. Orchestral surges can dazzle so completely that vision becomes another impediment to seeing. Yet the bell-casting episode, in which the young Boriska risks everything on a skill he claims to have inherited, draws sound back toward the labor of fallible hands. His eventual confession that his father never entrusted him with the secret of casting recasts the bell’s successful ringing as an act undertaken without certainty. Rublev’s response, offering companionship and a return to creative work, gives the music’s spiritual reach a human address. Hearing the score apart from the film makes that dynamic newly palpable. The choir seems to gather clay around its vowels, each sustained breath touching the substance from which an image of the divine will have to be fashioned. Even transcendence has dirt beneath its fingernails.

This brings us to Solaris (1972), where Artemyev makes electronic sound inseparable from the disturbance of recognizing oneself. Bach’s chorale prelude, BWV 639, played on organ by Leonid Roizman, establishes an earthly center whose apparent stability the surrounding textures steadily estrange. Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at a space station orbiting a sentient ocean and encounters Hari, his wife who died by suicide, returned through an intelligence working upon his memories. Her presence gives bereavement a body, then exposes the insufficiency of the recollection from which that body has been made. Artemyev’s ANS synthesizer inhabits this interval with extraordinary sensitivity. Familiarity becomes almost extraterrestrial when it approaches us without the consoling distance of representation. A remembered face can turn toward its rememberer and begin asking questions he has spent years avoiding.

The metallic drones and rattling chains seem to exchange occupants. Abrasive resonances presage the vibrating sculptures of Harry Bertoia, although here the bronze appears to have grown directly through the nervous system. Beneath them, a rushing darkness carries the bodily cost of Kelvin’s encounter. Hari’s growing awareness of her condition exceeds the boundaries of his remorse, and the soundtrack permits that excess to remain frightening. Resurrection acquires an ethical burden: Having summoned someone through desire, what right have we to dictate the terms of her existence? Of these five discs, this one sustains the most persuasive independent life. I hear affinities with early Lull and Thomas Köner in its submerged expanses, if intensified by a harsher grain. Sound retains enough resistance to prevent contemplation from becoming comfortable, even at its most ravishing.

I remain particularly haunted by the final withdrawal of the camera, revealing the apparent return to Kelvin’s father’s house as an island within the Solaris ocean. The strings make the scale of that disclosure bodily. Home has become something another intelligence can construct, while the longing invested in it remains painfully ours. Hearing this passage without its image intensifies my memory of that first viewing, opening a trapdoor beneath the relief I we all want the scene to initially grant. Bach’s devotional gravity now gathers around a question of responsibility. If an alien consciousness can offer the shape of forgiveness, the person kneeling inside that shape must still answer for the life that brought him there. The ocean may contain the house; it cannot perform the work of inhabiting it.

Mirror (1975) carries this unstable habitation into the folds of an individual life. Of all these soundtracks, it seems most thoroughly absorbed into its film, sound and image exchanging their functions until each becomes the other’s means of recollection. The largely unseen Alexei moves through childhood memories and the clefts of his adult relationships. Margarita Terekhova’s presence as both his mother, Maria, and his former wife, Natalia, makes recognition falter inside its own apparent success. The face returns, but the person demands another encounter. Even as Artemyev’s electronic textures inhabit this complicated recurrence, pastoral beauty offers little chronological reassurance. A field can belong to childhood while opening directly onto the fear of losing one’s son, and the music enters through both distances at once.

Chant and synthesizer inhabit the same tenuous dwelling; Baroque passages introduce an elegance that memory cannot keep intact. The European inflections, with their flamenco bite, cut across any temptation to hear this world as a sealed Russian interior, finding resonance in the film’s Spanish exiles and Civil War footage. Proof that private remembrance has neighbors, even when it believes itself alone. Maria’s panic over a possible printing error, followed elsewhere by the impossible suspension of her body above a bed, sets institutional terror against an image of profound weightlessness. Artemyev allows these incompatible states to share an acoustic bloodstream. Arseny Tarkovsky’s recited poems further complicate the inheritance, the director’s father entering a son’s cinema through his own living voice. Listening becomes a form of kinship whose obligations extend beyond the people we can identify. Anonymous bodies in archival footage acquire a terrible proximity to the family photograph. This is where the soundtrack’s apparent diffuseness becomes essential. Its passages refuse the neat ownership of a single emotional subject, allowing a feeling to migrate beyond the person who first appeared to authorize it.

Stalker (1979) approaches us through a landscape whose every invitation may conceal a prohibition. A guide leads the Writer and the Professor into the restricted Zone toward a Room reputed to grant the deepest desires of whoever enters it. Artemyev’s Indian-inflected flute and circling electronics invest this movement with exquisite uncertainty. Melody flowers through the mechanical rattle of the rail journey, opening inward even as the travelers advance. Water drips into an acoustic space that seems to be aware of its own depth. The score’s choral beauty gathers around the guide’s battered faith, yet its tenderness leaves room for the skepticism of his companions. Their arguments cannot domesticate what surrounds them. Each attempt to turn the Zone into an explanation seems to lengthen the path through it.

The story of Porcupine, who sought his dead brother and received wealth, places a terrible doubt inside the promise of fulfillment. Desire may know us in ways our preferred account of ourselves cannot bear. This possibility deepens the music’s spiraling movement, its delicacy admitting a self-undoing more intimate than catastrophe. A flute phrase can seem to reach the threshold and hesitate there, having discovered that admission would require surrendering the identity that asked to enter. Artemyev makes the spiritual ordeal inseparable from physical duration. The track rattles beneath the body, while an electronic halo gathers around the effort to believe. Such passages return me to the care with which these soundtracks conduct emotional transference. We carry ourselves into their spaces and encounter the limits of what we are prepared to receive. Their beauty can leave our knowledge painfully incomplete.

Then there is Monkey, the Stalker’s daughter, sitting at a table as a drinking glass apparently moves beneath her gaze. The domestic surface holds an event the arduous expedition could neither secure nor explain. I find myself thinking less about the girl’s possible powers than about the glass. Throughout this set, objects have borne so much human longing that we might reasonably ask whether our hunger for revelation has allowed them an existence of their own. The bell must announce faith; a house must accommodate remorse. Here, an ordinary vessel slides toward the edge of what we can account for, carrying no assurance that its mystery concerns us. Perhaps reverence requires us to release even the desire to be spiritually enlarged by everything we encounter. Somewhere inside the glass, beyond the reach of thirst, there may be a life that has never asked to become our revelation.

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica: Pages of a Biography (ECM New Series 2803)

| Tyran Grillo

Gidon Kremer
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography

Gidon Kremer violin
Geneva Lewis violin
Andrew Pushkarev vibraphone, tubular bell
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography, Passacaglia, Darf ich…
recorded January 2024
Studio Residence Paliesius, Ignalina
Engineers: Vilius Keras, Aleksandra Kerienė
Kaleidoscope of Lost Time
recorded September 2020
at the Reformation Church, Riga
Recording engineer: Varis Kurmiņš
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 30, 2026

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica continue their long association with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, a recording in which the violinist’s history passes through the hands of those who have helped to shape it. Georgs Pelēcis and Andrius Žlabys contribute works conceived for Kremer, while Arvo Pärt’s presence reaches back to Tabula Rasa, the 1984 release that inaugurated the imprint. With Kremer approaching his 80th birthday in 2027 and the ensemble its 30th anniversary, the program opens a space in which the commemorative impulse can become strangely permeable. A life told through music acquires entrances its subject could never have built alone. Founded in 1997 to bring young musicians from the Baltic states into a shared artistic undertaking, Kremerata Baltica gives this understanding a collective body.

Pärt’s Passacaglia, heard in the orchestral version prepared in 2007 for Kremer’s 60th birthday, establishes this relationship through the simplest of circular motions. Kremer and Geneva Lewis draw their violin harmonies over the strings with a delicacy whose slightly abraded edges give the music a spirited skin. Andrei Pushkarev’s vibraphone places metallic footprints across a frozen lake, each tone opening a small chamber of depth beneath the surface. There is something almost Vivaldian in the suppleness of the textures, though the lower strings carry a dramatic undertow that gathers its force slowly. Pizzicato figures bring that development inward, registering as minute disturbances in the body’s private machinery. Above them, the violin lines entwine and separate with an ease that leaves room for friction. The recurring harmonic pattern gives each change a place to return to, even as its emotional coordinates shift. Within the circle, belief is allowed to wander; repetition discovers the difference between coming back to a place and becoming available to it.

Pelēcis’s title concerto, written for Kremer in 2007, gives that wandering a more personal geography. Their friendship began during their school years in Riga and continued in the shared quarters of the Moscow Conservatory, where Pelēcis witnessed the preparation through which public achievements slowly acquired their private framework. His score draws on the violin concertos that became decisive points in Kremer’s early career. Brahms and Elgar enter alongside recollections of competition performances; Sibelius and Beethoven provide further points of contact with the interpreter’s developing identity. Yet the quotations remain answerable to the person who once lived inside them. Set among more dramatic episodes, they emerge from the uncertain border between musical inheritance and remembered experience. Pelēcis’s description of the solo monologues as “intimate pages from a personal diary” becomes especially telling here. The diary has been written by someone else, and its subject must read himself into being through a voice that already knows him.

The opening solo feels its way into this territory with the vulnerability of childhood. Kremer gives the line an existence prior to explanation, finding in its exposed grain the authority of something alive. Buoyant orchestral gestures begin to court it, and their exchanges admit dissonance at the margins. Pelēcis lets passages of flowing beauty encounter the abrupt editing cuts of recall, as the pastoral turns its pockets inside out, spilling dark coins into the grass. Throughout the piece’s nearly thirty uninterrupted minutes, the violin speaks from within that complexity, drawing the insistent rhythms of the strings into its own work of discovery. Kremerata Baltica responds with an alertness that gives the broader episodes their cinematic scope while preserving the intimacy of the solo voice. The relationship between them becomes a sustained act of thinking in sound, capable of admitting doubt without surrendering its momentum. Near the close, the vibraphone distils the preceding expansiveness into a peculiarly bare utterance. The violin threads itself through that resonance, a silver filament drawn from a sentence whose meaning has become too familiar for speech.

With Žlabys’s Kaleidoscope of Lost Time, composed between 2014 and 2020 for Kremer and his ensemble, that inward scrutiny enters a more fractured consciousness. The composer envisioned Kremer’s sound in his earliest sketches, and the violin writing carries the imprint of a particular touch even at its most abstract. Žlabys speaks of giving the sensation of time’s disappearance a more durable form through music, so that beauty and sadness can be visited again. Across the work’s five movements, such revisitation becomes a problem of perception: every return alters the eye through which the past is apprehended. The opening Prelude sets this process in motion through dramatic undulations, its folk inflections carrying something dreamt into the firmness of the pulse. The dance occasionally appears to have misplaced its dancers, leaving their gestures suspended in the strings. Kremer inhabits those absences with a searching intensity, giving the music’s surreal spaces enough physical resistance to be felt. Time acquires joints here, and we hear the strain of their bending.

Scherzacaglia carries its mixed ancestry in its name, inviting musical forms to loosen their claims to separate identities. Along the way, neoclassical poise meets a rhythmic insistence suggestive of Shostakovich. Dissonant hymnody opens fissures in the devotional surface. The performers give each shift a distinct pressure, sustaining the sense of movement through different states as Dissonance gives way to Quarter=87. In Perpetuum, the violin’s flowing beauty opens an expanse so luminous that earlier agitations seem briefly to have been cast by its light. The double basses stir beneath that radiance, pulling its apparent weightlessness toward the body, until the opening dance reenters with the altered gravity of something that has survived its own telling. Žlabys makes this return both irresistible and disturbing.

Pärt’s Darf ich … (1999) gathers these questions into a more intimate register, with Lewis taking the solo violin part beside Pushkarev’s tubular bell in C sharp. The violin has a declamatory force that feels inseparable from its prayerfulness: its address is bold because the act of addressing remains vulnerable. Against the strings, the bell gives that vulnerability a vertical dimension, opening a heavenward passage through the music’s spare physical means. A requiem appears to have been dismantled and its fragments reassembled as a psalm, the weight of mourning redistributed through the possibility of praise. Kremer calls the work “almost a prayer,” understanding it as a reminder that musicians serve a cause beyond themselves. Lewis gives that conviction a voice of her own, making the album’s generational relationship audible in the place where it becomes most exposed. Her final high note is exquisitely breathy, a slender fold in the air holding open the title’s unfinished question. Permission itself acquires a barely material form.

That question quietly rearranges the premises of a recording devoted to one musician’s life. On an album named for Kremer’s biography, the closing solo belongs to another person, and his history finds one of its deepest expressions in her freedom to speak. The friendship encoded in Pelēcis’s concerto and the evanescence Žlabys seeks to preserve have brought us to an ethic of hospitality. Whatever these relationships transmit may become unrecognizable to the giver. Biography begins to touch the obscure responsibilities of parenthood, where a future is nurtured without its face being prescribed. Somewhere an eyelid is forming in darkness, protecting a gaze the past cannot rehearse. To have lived well may be to have made room for that gaze, including everything in it that will never turn toward us.

Tania Giannouli/Nik Bärtsch Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My review of Metakosmos, the new duo album by Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch, is now available at All About Jazz. Across eight pieces, the Greek and Swiss pianists bring melodic luminosity and rhythmic precision into an intimate exchange, exploring how attentive listening allows two distinct musical imaginations to create a shared world. Repetition becomes a means of discovering difference, while dampened strings, submerged strummings, and percussive accents reveal unexpected voices within the pianos. The review follows these encounters through dreamlike interiors, spiraling patterns, and moments of poised exuberance, considering how the music makes room for meanings neither player could arrive at alone

A Full Stop Short of Eternity: The Color of Absence in Jon Fosse’s Septology

| Tyran Grillo

For out of black minutes of madness ever more radiant,
The patient one wakes on the petrified threshold,
And is ardently clasped by cool blue and the gleaming decline of
the autumn,
The silent house and the legends of the forest,
Measure and law and the moonlit paths of the departed.
–Georg Trakl

A blank canvas seems to contain every possible image until the first stroke starts taking them away, so begins our story with a picture that cannot quite be settled, two painted lines, one brown and one purple, crossing upon a canvas, making a modest, wounded geometry whose light appears to originate somewhere beyond the pigment, while outside, on the western coast of Norway, the daylight contracts toward Christmas, and an aging painter named Asle stands looking at what he has made, though the more he looks the less securely the picture belongs to him, and this is the threshold of Jon Fosse’s Septology, a seven-part novel published in three volumes, The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name, translated by Damion Searls, in which Fosse, the Norwegian writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, gives us a single week in the life of a widowed, sober, solitary Catholic painter, yet a life entire within that week, beginning on a Monday in Advent and unfolding without a conventional full stop, a formal audacity that might demand admiration before granting pleasure but whose effect is almost disarmingly intimate, for I rarely felt imprisoned by the absence of periods, instead drawn into the velocity of someone thinking, a consciousness whose turns and retracings have not submitted to the editorial tyranny of retrospect, and one keeps reading because each thought opens another room, while the rooms have a troubling habit of opening onto the same darkness, each part beginning with the same astonishment, “And I see myself standing,” before ending in prayer, while between those gestures the conceit of chronology gives way to chambers of time without dependable walls, Asle living in his house in Dylgja, driving to Bjørgvin, visiting the gallery that sells his work, cooking for his neighbor Åsleik, considering an invitation to Christmas dinner, all the while his present being entered by lives that have already ended, for his wife, Ales, is dead and not dead, her absence factual, her presence no less persuasive, familiar objects opening suddenly into conversations with her, Asle speaking to her daily without pretending that speech will bring her back, their names exchanging almost the same letters, Asle and Ales suggesting a minute orthographical disturbance, a rearrangement through which a living man discovers he can never quite separate his name from that of the person he mourns, until even the novel’s tense seems to migrate with them, for yesterday has not receded into evidence but reaches forward and alters the pressure of every ordinary noun in the room, while in one recollection Ales becomes “the sky over everything in the world,” a wonderfully excessive image whose tenderness contains a threat, for if the beloved is everywhere, grief can scarcely find a place to put its feet, which returns us to the intersecting strokes of the opening picture, a cross being a place where two directions remain distinct yet touch, where the surface bears the mark of an event it cannot reverse, and Asle knows that a painting’s potential cannot be summoned through beauty alone, since Asle thinks that “a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it,” a proposition refusing the sentimental consolation that suffering automatically improves art, darkness being neither decoration nor an ethical entitlement to beauty but the resistance against which light becomes perceptible, though the picture remains answerable to whatever pain has entered it, the painter himself tormented by images lodged inside him, including his “innermost picture,” his work an attempt to release them into material form without reducing their mystery, paint fusing with canvas as he has fused with painting, and here his account of the image approaches a theology of embodiment, the painted surface inhabited by a spirit made of matter and soul together, so that the picture says something while refusing to say it, its speech impossible to paraphrase, just as there is no sentence in which grief can finally be deposited and left behind, which may be why memory returns Asle to a childhood of startling chromatic precision, to his sister Alida seeing a brown rowboat where he sees an abundance of different browns, objecting to the single word that erases them, her way of seeing providing the boundary against which his own perceptions emerge, his painterly vocation becoming an apprenticeship to colors the available vocabulary cannot hold, while the playground preserves a freedom of expression before the prohibitions of adult life harden into posture, and yet Alida, too, has disappeared into death, Asle’s mind storing the person and her absence in the same image, so the greater the fidelity of recollection the less certain it becomes whether remembering protects someone from oblivion or renews the fact that she cannot return, the novel’s repetitions performing the same experiment on its reader, each recurrence shifting the angle of incidence, until what seemed familiar acquires another hue, as though a remembered color had been mixed in darkness and returned to us altered, and then there is the other Asle, the Namesake, a doppelgänger of almost identical appearance who also paints and whose drinking has carried him into physical collapse, the men having first met through Sigve, an acquaintance from the narrator’s youth, their resemblance unbearable because it threatens to make identity an error of recognition, so that the narrator insists “if he and The Namesake look exactly the same then their souls, their spirits, can’t be as similar as their appearance,” a claim with a trembling logic, since outward sameness must conceal inward difference or the very idea of a singular life begins to fail, yet Fosse continually exposes that confidence to doubt, both men inhabiting ordered rooms whose neatness scarcely contains the disorder within, both carrying images that will not release them, both having known the devastation of alcohol, though one has stopped imbibing while the other cannot, his shaking body desperate for a drink that might briefly arrest its own rebellion, an apparatus of separation estranged from its agency, until the narrator finds the Namesake collapsed in the snow and takes him to the hospital, and this becomes the novel’s most urgent act of rescue, although what it rescues remains uncertain, the doubling tempting us toward a ready moral allegory, one man saved by love and faith, the other destroyed by addiction, yet Fosse’s art is better than that accounting, the other Asle neither a discarded draft of the narrator nor evidence of his triumph, especially when the narrator imagines dragging the other’s pain along with him only to correct himself, “share his pain, share his suffering,” the correction ethically enormous, for pain is neither luggage to be transferred nor property one may confiscate in the name of compassion, and to share it is to stand close without becoming the person whose body endures it, while the Namesake longs to disappear, that desire making the resemblance more frightening, since disappearance is also what the sober Asle’s dead have enacted, the question of who a person might have been had one decision, one drink, one intervention gone differently, a question Fosse makes physical without granting the false mercy of an answer, difference persisting even at the point of almost perfect likeness, and against this hall of doubles stands Åsleik, the neighboring fisherman whose habitual visits and obstinate speech supply the book with wonderfully undignified comedy, since Asle can think he has never much liked him only to conclude, almost in the same breath, that this is why he does, calling him a fool and then recognizing a wisdom beyond the sophistication of his own thoughts, that uncorrected movement allowing friendship its irritations and thought its refusal to reach a stable verdict, so when Åsleik wonders whether there is anything he has not already told Asle, the question becomes at once a joke about repetition and a miniature theory of the novel, what we say again need not be the same thing because the hearer has meanwhile changed, each man seeming to know what the other conceals while choosing not to expose it, and such tact is its own grace, an evening of eggs, bacon, and onions becoming unexpectedly delicious, and the kitchen does not suspend metaphysics, it discloses how existence can arrive with the intensity of revelation while announcing nothing grander than a good meal shared, even as the week’s paintings and conversations draw Asle deeper into the religious problem occupying him since adolescence, when he rejected the authority of Norway’s established church, later entering Catholicism through his life with Ales yet resisting doctrinal certainties, including the exclusion of the unbaptized from salvation, his faith less a collection of positions than a sustained pressure upon the limits of language, for with his phrase for God, “He doesn’t exist, He is,” Asle moves the divine from the category of beings available for inspection toward the condition under which being becomes possible, an echo of apophatic theology, with its conviction that God recedes from every predicate designed to contain Him, even if this risks rendering the divine invulnerable to argument, particularly when Asle supposes the very word God proves God’s reality, a proposition hardly satisfying logical scrutiny yet revealing a mind for which language has become both bridge and obstruction, the hunger for an answer and the wound opened by asking, while the tension between grace and truth grows especially acute around Christ, for Ales tells Asle that God’s power is found in powerlessness, in the crucified body unable to free itself from the nails, while Asle considers a God whose self-imposed limits belong to omnipotence, whose great silence is interrupted when the Word enters history, and this theology leads back to the canvas, incarnation becoming a form entering a world unable entirely to contain it, color interrupting blankness, stillness made visible through disturbance, truth insisting upon separateness, upon the finality of a breath that stops, upon the impossibility of another person’s suffering becoming our own, whereas grace arrives without overturning those conditions, asking what relation might remain when possession is no longer possible, though perhaps grace is merely the beautiful name given to our refusal to surrender the dead, a question Fosse leaves active as his painter speaks with Ales without cancelling her death, the novel’s Christian imagination most convincing where faith remains vulnerable to the contrary evidence of the body, and somewhere in the middle of this week, in Part V, a remembered trivial exchange in an art supply shop begins to radiate strange consequence, the Namesake complaining that the store never seems to have white paint, even wondering whether it refuses to stock any, white, the substance easiest to take for granted, becoming scarce, which opens a useful physical paradox, since white light contains the visible spectrum together while white pigment appears white by scattering light rather than by mixing every paint color into one, Fosse’s painter moving between incompatible forms of fullness, the untouched canvas seemingly complete in its whiteness until the first mark reveals a purity merely waiting for interruption, a blank canvas can be rolled away and stored, but a painted canvas carries the history of its wounds, the missing white, amid innumerable colors without names, suggesting the impossibility of gathering everything into a single unbroken presence, the imagined color of reconciliation that no shop can reliably sell, and as the book’s epigraph from Revelation promises, “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth,” thus altering the problem of doubling, since the two Asles share a name but perhaps any name given publicly is only an approximate address, a provisional utterance unable to exhaust the soul it designates, the other Asle’s struggle resisting the division of lives into successful and failed, just as Asle and Ales might be less two separate names than an alphabet still rearranging itself under the pressure of love, yet Revelation’s private name carries its own disquiet, since a name nobody else can know threatens to efface the social and historical person recognized through the names of loved ones, mystical union becoming a temptation to erase difference, from which Fosse repeatedly returns us to the stubbornly particular body, shaking, eating, waiting, aging, crossing a stretch of water to reach another person, while the approach of Christmas offers no simple resolution, obliging the narrator to confront the possible extinction of someone whose existence seemed to repeat his own, other figures receding into death, the painter meanwhile experiencing a change stranger than any vision as the need to paint begins leaving him, “I feel sure in my whole body that I have no desire to paint anymore,” he thinks, having spent a lifetime expelling images whose accumulation felt unbearable, now sensing they might gather into one stillness without requiring external form, though to read this as a neat ascension from art to God would reduce paintings to preliminary exercises for a more perfect silence, overlooking how the book itself depends upon the work of making, how art has permitted pain to become visible and shareable, and only then can Asle imagine relinquishing its necessity, an exhaustion we should not prematurely baptize as serenity, since it might be liberation or the symptom of a life preparing to close, until at last Asle accepts Åsleik’s invitation and travels by boat toward the Christmas gathering at his sister Guro’s home, crossing the water to return to what he has most fiercely withheld from himself, Ales’s final breath, the doctor’s announcement that she has gone to rest with God, a recollection that cannot give her back but allows the irreversibility of loss to enter the same consciousness that has insisted upon her continued presence, and at the house he offers a painting, enters a room to rest, encounters Guro’s invitation to intimacy, declining because he remains inwardly married to Ales, a scene resisting easy piety, since whether such fidelity is a magnificent continuity of love or the last enclosure grief has built around him remains uncertain, as does whether the beloved can remain present without making the survivor unavailable to everyone living, Fosse neither mocking the attachment nor guaranteeing its innocence, and the Christmas meal waits elsewhere while Asle withdraws into the most crowded solitude imaginable, attended by memory, desire, remorse, prayer, the final prayer repeating the novel’s movement toward a threshold it refuses to cross in the expected grammatical way, Asle reciting the Hail Mary and seeing a blue radiance burst into his forehead, perhaps dying, perhaps granted a mystical perception resembling death only from outside, the distinction suspended exactly where the reader wants confirmation in a full stop, the missing words making the ending more articulate than any completed explanation, Asle reaching the appointed hour while language cannot pronounce what it has approached for hundreds of pages, the all-engulfing white unavailable in the art shop returning as a possible image of wholeness but arriving in blue, the shade of a final, untranslatable experience, Trakl’s “cool blue” and his threshold of the departed trembling open here, seven days having passed while every now contains an eternity no calendar can measure, so the supposed extravagance of a novel made from one sentence eventually feels exact, even if this review does not, since Fosse does not abolish endings so much as make us inhabit their postponement, the form asking what truth can accomplish when its customary instruments of completion are withdrawn, what grace might mean if it cannot restore the dead or guarantee the salvation of those still suffering, Ales remaining dead, the Namesake’s anguish not undone by resemblance, the canvas still marked, even the promised new name arriving as a secret beyond verification by ordinary speech, yet something persisting in the space opened by these failures of possession, an attentiveness refusing to make a person identical with his worst moment or most visible form, Advent naming the coming of a presence into history while Septology imagines the reciprocal event, history becoming susceptible to what it cannot name, its last words stopping before death can be spoken, life in that interruption seeming neither concluded nor redeemed so much as held, for an impossible instant, in the white interval between a breath and the withheld mortis nostrae, in the silence allowing the prayer to remain forever nunc et in hora

Kali Malone: Living Torch

| Tyran Grillo

To sustain a flame is to enter into a secret negotiation with extinction, to nourish an illumination whose very existence depends upon its gradual disappearance. In Living Torch, Kali Malone transforms this paradox into an almost unbearable metaphysics of resonance, wherein sound becomes both the vessel and the slow dissolution of its own materiality. Duration wavers between breath and electricity, harmonic inevitability and spectral disobedience. Each sustained tone carries the sediment of another, opening subterranean chambers where the ear must renegotiate its relationship to time. The austere architectures that have distinguished Malone’s compositional language, particularly her excavations of the pipe organ’s interior life, undergo a profound transfiguration. Something once seemingly immovable begins to tremble at the edges of its formal certainty, exposing a vulnerability concealed beneath the mathematics of repetition. Perhaps a structure reveals its deepest truth precisely when it can no longer guarantee its foundations.

Composed between 2020 and 2021 at the Parisian studios of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, that storied laboratory of electroacoustic experimentation, Living Torch extends Malone’s investigation of just intonation and canonic structures into a labyrinth of timbral interdependencies. The trombone of Mats Äleklint and bass clarinet of Isak Hedtjärn merge with Malone’s electronic apparatus, including the boîte à bourdons and an ARP 2500 synthesizer bearing the historical imprint of Éliane Radigue. Commissioned for GRM’s Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra and premiered in its complete multichannel incarnation at Radio France, the piece treats space as an active participant in the reallocation of acoustic identity. The devotional patience of early music encounters the temporal dislocations of American minimalism, their intertwined genealogies refracted through the material consciousness of musique concrète. Within the sounding body, counterpoint undergoes a molecular reimagining. What survives of the canon is the eerie persistence of one vibration inside another, an inheritance speaking long after its source becomes unrecognizable.

In the first of the work’s two parts, the drone establishes itself as a compass of the heart, spinning in slow motion without ever securing a magnetic north. Its apparent stability is beset by minute discrepancies of pitch, the delicate interference of neighboring frequencies producing pulses that seem to originate beneath the audible surface. Just intonation, far from presenting a frictionless ideal of consonance, exposes the intimate volatility of consonance itself. One tone approaches another and the air thickens with consequences, while an apparently singular presence separates into competing interiors. Äleklint’s trombone contributes a corporeal grain that the electronics can prolong but never entirely domesticate. Hedtjärn’s bass clarinet emerges with a darker, more secretive pressure, its breath inhabiting the lowest registers with a kind of reluctant articulation. Their sonorities fuse with the circuitry, until the roughness of an attack or the instability of an exhalation discloses the laboring organism within. The human respiratory impulse is absorbed into an electrical continuum that nevertheless remains haunted by the possibility of suffocation.

The feeling of this music is intensely circular, caught in a bewildering simultaneity of waking and falling asleep. The internal drone wanders in search of a new body, only to discover the contours of the one it was desperate to leave, returning to the sadnesses that prompted its excursion. Malone’s long tones refuse the consolations of a conventional crescendo. Their concentration arises through microscopic redistributions of anxiety, through harmonic overtones that slip into audibility and retreat. Because the ear cannot settle upon a definitive foreground, listening assumes the uneasy condition of remembering something that has yet to become real. It is the opposite of déjà vu and is where the piece’s canonic intelligence becomes emotionally devastating. The music becomes an apparatus of selfhood, reforming its contours to prevent the body from disappearing while exhausting the impulse that keeps it alive.

By the second part, this inward circuitry has acquired a more troubled permeability. A sensation of distance enters the sound, suggesting wings gathering an impossible momentum. The instrumental voices seem to strain toward the edges of their registers, rubbing against the drones until the distinction between a breath drawn and a current sustained becomes increasingly tenuous. Low frequencies retain their gravitational authority, but their mass is traversed by finer disturbances, spectral fissures through which an unfamiliar dimension of the composition appears to glance. There is an undercurrent of despair in these migrations, although the music never permits despair the luxury of a settled identity. Each departure produces another return, subtly altering the place to which it leads. The two parts consequently establish a peculiar dramaturgy of circular motion, in which repetition does not close a circuit so much as deepen the wound around which the circuit has been drawn.

At moments, the atmosphere and trembling recall Darrin Verhagen’s Witch trilogy, whose sonic immersions can feel indistinguishable from visitations to the psyche’s hidden territories. Malone, however, moves according to the flickering logic of her own distinct flame. Where terror might be summoned by the arrival of an alien presence, Living Torch locates its deepest unease in the possibility that the foreign has always resided within the familiar. Its resonances move across the threshold where language ceases its habitual tug and asks the body to relearn the grammar of flight. Breath becomes an increasingly abstract measure of being, until the stillness of death seems momentarily audible inside the effort required to remain alive. The music’s spiritual force resides in this refusal to separate transcendence from its physiological cost.

What remains most unsettling is the ethical question concealed inside this choreography of persistence. A flame survives by consuming its own substance; a tone endures only through the continual expenditure of energy. Perhaps the self, too, is sustained through an unacknowledged succession of disappearances, each present tense quietly burning the person who made it possible. Between frequencies, identity ceases to be a possession and becomes a debt toward all the selves we have already extinguished. The torch illuminates no destination. It passes, instead, from one vanishing custodian to another, and the most difficult act of listening may be to recognize, among its vibrations, the unburied voices of those we had to become in order to survive ourselves.

A Name That Remembers: PIANIKA’s Intimate Circuits

| Tyran Grillo

There’s a secret, a beautiful secret, hidden behind the lips of most of us who write about music: our ears are magnets for fingerprints. We rarely notice them until a sound has already gone, leaving something of itself behind. In the music of PIANIKA, a New Zealand electronic producer, such elusive contact becomes a compositional principle. Acoustic sounds retain traces of their origins within electronic arrangements, where the organic and synthetic enter into an unusually sympathetic relationship. Her rhythms invite movement without demanding it, balancing the restorative qualities of ambient music with the physical pleasures of a gentle house beat. There is something quietly radical about this hospitality of sound, this willingness to let a melody disclose its vulnerabilities without requiring their resolution. Even the spaces between notes seem charged with possibilities for reflection, allowing the smallest gestures to acquire unexpected significance. PIANIKA makes music for those moments when consciousness loosens its grip on the immediate world.

The question of naming is particularly meaningful for PIANIKA, whose moniker is her middle name, inherited from her great-grandmother, the daughter of the chief of Maniapoto, a Māori iwi she describes as known for its music. Its history involves an intriguing act of translation: Bianca, a character in an English book, was given the Māori name Pianika. The association with purity or whiteness is therefore indirect, an etymological suggestion rather than a literal definition. As a child, she went by Pianika, although her official first name gradually assumed precedence. The inheritance continued to resonate more deeply with her, eventually becoming her artistic identity. Her music seems animated by this transformation, taking sounds from their original contexts and allowing them to communicate in unfamiliar ways.

Another inheritance proved equally consequential. “My grandmother passed away before I was born, leaving behind her piano,” PIANIKA recalls. The instrument remained in her childhood home, where she developed an immediate fascination with it, sometimes playing for hours. Music offered an early means of meditation and emotional expression, although her academic interests eventually led her toward biochemistry. That scientific background offers an interesting perspective on compositions whose seemingly simple structures reveal considerable intricacy upon closer listening. Her path changed at 22, when her partner asked why she had never considered pursuing music more seriously. Shortly afterward, she downloaded Ableton and began exploring electronic production, drawing upon more than a decade of informal classical piano experience. Her equipment remains modest: a laptop, headphones, a carefully maintained collection of virtual instruments and her beloved piano. This economy is reflected in the music, whose emotional range arises from a restrained sonic vocabulary.

Her practice draws further nourishment from the natural world, whose sounds she has gathered during years of travelling with a microphone. Field recordings become integral to her arrangements, preserving traces of the environments in which they originated. Daily walks through forests and beside the ocean remain essential to her creative routine, while sailing and surfing offer other forms of immersion. “I feel inspired most of all,” she confirms, “by the interactions of water and light.” Her album artwork features photographs taken during the same adventures that inspired the compositions. Although she received an offer of a photography scholarship in her final year of school, she pursued other interests, allowing her visual practice to develop alongside her music. Her photographs preserve encounters with a landscape; her compositions translate their sensory qualities into another medium.

PIANIKA has described her fusion of ambient music and subdued techno beats as “lullaby house,” an expression that captures her ability to reconcile the circularity of rhythm with the surrender of sleep. Her introduction to electronic production was strongly influenced by Majestic Casual and The Sound You Need, platforms that expanded her sense of what electronica could accomplish and “felt like coming home after a long journey.” Among her inspirations are KAASI, Petit Biscuit, ODESZA and Darius, although the sensuous vocal atmosphere of Galimatias and Alina Baraz’s Urban Flora seems especially relevant to her aesthetic. Despite these affinities, her compositions possess a distinct character, their rhythmic precision softened by affection for acoustic sounds and understated melodic development.

Across Pisces (2024) and Dream Work (2024), followed by the newly released Touch (2026), PIANIKA develops a vocabulary whose meanings remain beautifully unsettled. The first draws upon an astrological imagination, the second explores the unconscious processes through which memory and desire evolve, and the third turns toward physical contact and vulnerability. Together, they suggest a progression from cosmic belonging toward increasingly personal forms of connection. This is particularly compelling in electronic music, an art capable of generating extraordinary sensations of proximity through technological mediation. PIANIKA encourages us to consider how much of what we call presence depends upon memory and imagination.

With Pisces, musical structure and emotional expression seem inseparable. The title track opens in a gentle drift before the beat enters, discovering peace in a broken world. Just as its direction becomes predictable, the arrangement expands into weightlessness. In “One,” the human voice becomes increasingly important. Words remain shy and just beyond reach, yet their intentions are intensely present within the delicate backbeat; the listener responds to their tone without being directed toward a particular interpretation.

In a chill mix of “With You,” the lights of love dim as a blissful equilibrium develops through the interaction of rhythm and melody, suggesting two people discovering a way to communicate without eliminating their differences. The internal pulse of “Sun Kiss” feels connected to the body’s instinct for movement, its melodic details offering emotional release without insistence.

Of the three EPs, Dream Work offers the deepest immersion in PIANIKA’s contemplative affinities. Its opening “From Love (ambient edit)” has an immediately restorative quality, developing through subtle changes in texture rather than pronounced rhythmic movement. An ambient rendition of “Pisces” follows, its oceanic sounds suggesting the faint rush of blood in the ears.

“Interlude” brings the piano forward amid softly echoing textures, with birdsong joining the intimate relationship between natural sound and electronic composition. By the time “Hvar” introduces snapping fingers and flowing vocals, the music has acquired an even greater sense of proximity. A restrained digital pulse supports the arrangement, while the animate character of the singing makes this one of PIANIKA’s most affecting creations. She understands that tenderness depends as much upon what remains understated as upon what is openly expressed.

The piano assumes greater prominence in “Unravelled,” accompanied by a voice that moves gracefully around its melodic phrases. A sense of self-discovery emerges without insisting upon any final understanding. “Accolades” introduces delicate click-core sensibilities and lilting arpeggiations, suggesting nostalgia without attaching it to a particular memory. This sequence arrives at “You,” a loving conclusion that offers reassurance while acknowledging the uncertainties of attachment. Addressing another person involves recognizing an existence that can never become entirely available to us. Here, affection becomes a willingness to accept that mystery, allowing closeness to remain meaningful without eliminating distance.

The music is especially attentive to the subjective experience of time, which expands or contracts according to the intensity of inward attention. Hearing familiar material in a different arrangement encourages reflection upon memory and reinterpretation: musical ideas once associated with movement acquire another emotional character when their rhythmic context changes. Dream Work thus considers how experience continues to develop beyond the moment in which it first occurs.

Touch brings these concerns into a more explicitly affectionate register. Its opening “LUH” recalls the tender vocal atmospheres of Late Night Alumni, its delicate beat accompanying the passage of time with reassurance. “As You Grow” follows with midrange vocals that retain a slight distance while remaining clear in their emotional transmission. Beneath the singing, a gently insistent rhythm supports the patient, almost familial affection implied by the title.

An uplifting expression of development appears in “So Proud of You,” PIANIKA’s collaboration with TÂCHES. Higher clusters of sequenced notes lend the arrangement an expansive sense of movement and discovery. The transition toward “Shy” brings a quieter perspective on emotional exposure. Its vocal fragments convey affection through their hesitancy, approaching the threshold of intelligibility without always crossing it. Shyness acquires a dignity rarely afforded to it, becoming an indication of attentiveness rather than a limitation upon connection.

This openness to transformation is particularly evident in her treatment of the human voice. Asked how she decides when to sing and how to process her vocals, PIANIKA spoke of creative flow: “As an artist, I find satisfaction in turning down the volume of the conscious brain, and letting the subconscious make the art.” She frequently slices recordings into fragments, playing them through a drum rack and processing them with Valhalla Supermassive reverb. Such experiments sometimes suggest a song’s direction, as with “Shy.” While developing a remix of TÂCHES’s “Dances for Wolves,” she explored an alternative vocal interpretation that did not appear in the final remix but later supplied material for 9’6”. There is a philosophical implication in this fragmentation. Singing, ordinarily associated with identity and direct communication, becomes more ambiguous when words are separated from their original contexts. Meaning persists through tone and rhythm, beyond intelligible language.

The closing original version of “From Love” gathers these qualities into lo-fi beats and intimate singing that convey acceptance. Heard alongside its ambient treatment on Dream Work, it demonstrates how the same musical material can acquire new significance through changes in arrangement, much as our recollections evolve with subsequent experience. This relationship between continuity and transformation also illuminates the EP’s title. Physical contact is among our most immediate experiences, yet its meaning remains dependent upon interpretation. A touch can communicate reassurance or uncertainty according to circumstances the gesture itself cannot explain. PIANIKA approaches this nuance with sensitivity, recognizing that intimacy involves an ongoing negotiation between the desire for closeness and another person’s irreducible independence.

When I asked whether her music possessed a metaphysical or spiritual dimension, PIANIKA responded: “I think any music that makes you feel something is working with the metaphysical.” Music enters the body through measurable vibrations, yet the feelings awakened by those vibrations cannot be explained entirely through their physical properties. Each listener brings a different history to the encounter. PIANIKA hopes her work will communicate uplift, calm and awe for the beauty of the Earth, while allowing listeners to discover meanings beyond those she consciously intended. Its emotional clarity coexists with an openness that respects the complexity of those receiving it, offering consolation without presuming to know what anyone needs.