The Out Door: Long Careers, Busy Years

In this edition of The Out Door, Marc Masters surveys the wide sound-world of one of his favorite artists of the year, French-born artist Félicia Atkinson, and explores work by women who struck a balance between internal control and external chaos. Grayson Haver Currin dives into the "continuous music" of one of his favorite artists of the year, Lubomyr Melnyk, and gets to the heart of two great 2013 LPs by duos. (Remember to follow us on Twitter and Tumblr for all types of experimental music news and information.)

 *I: Control and chaos*

Subjective reality: Letha Rodman Melchior

Lately, whenever I think about my favorite experimental music of 2013, I keep realizing how arbitrary list-making is. For any ten records I might choose, there are likely another 100 I haven’t even heard that are just as good, maybe even better.  There’s too much good experimental music being made to even pretend I’ve heard a large percentage. I have some say in what I listen to, of course, but whatever does cross my path gets there partially through a random confluence that could’ve easily gone another way.

Perhaps making best-of lists is a way to fight that randomness–to find order inside the chaos of endless music. But it’s a losing battle, since lists inevitably oversimplify, and so many get made they create their own chaos. There’s something liberating about that, though. If I think of it all as chaos, something I can only react to rather than control, trying to figure it all out seems less important. For example, I’ve noticed that my favorites this year have included lots of female artists. I don’t know if this is due to any trend outside of my own listening, and I’m not sure I even could know. After all, from my limited perspective, it could all just be random.

Thinking this way has led me to an interesting coincidence: many of these favorite records seem to actually be about dealing with chaos, trying to make sense of it without oversimplifying it. In other words, music that’s personal and controlled yet still lets the arbitrary randomness of the world in. The external awareness in these works is often literal – many of these artists use the natural sounds of the world around them to mimic their internal monologues, and help give the listener a sense of what it’s like in there.

Ashley Paul: Watch Them Pass on SoundCloud.

I hear that in the brain-wave improvisations of Ghil, in which cellist Okkyung Lee responds to the chaos of reality with something even more chaotic: her own stream of musical consciousness. The subdued half-songs of Ashley Paul’s Line the Clouds have a deceptive passivity, as if Paul is letting the world seep into her melodies, wrapping around them like overgrown grass. On Nouskaa Henget, Marja Johansson (aka Tsembla) crafts bubbling electronics that bounce around chaotically like electrons in the throes of quantum chance. 

Aloonaluna: The Eves on SoundCloud.

Rachel Evans’ Motion Sickness of Time Travel continues to treat sound as an eternal flow to tap into, and this year that part of that tapping led her to create a trilogy of one-track CDr’s (each a “ballade” for a different “moon”) that were particularly attuned to the rhythms and interruptions of natural chaos. Lynn Fister’s Watery Starve press openly embraced the world's mossy sprawl, wrapping her cassette releases in leaves and feathers, and making music as Aloonaluna that stretched and breathed with atmospheric beauty. Her double-cassette compilation Taxidermy of Unicorns, which included herself, Evans, Felicia Atkinson (see our profile of her in section III), and Alicia Merz, felt like a watershed, and one of 2013’s prime musical accomplishments.

Bérangère Maximin

Bérangère Maximin: Infinitesimal (trailer) on Bandcamp

Three records this year particularly struck me as deep explorations of personal control and universal chaos. Bérangère Maximin’s Infinitesimal is so alive with the sounds of the external world that I initially couldn't locate her musical voice inside all of the activity. But as the album proceeds, ghosts of order emerge, through glimpses of symmetrical shapes and flashes of matching colors. Slowly, Infinitesimal establishes internal logic, matching the way things make sense in your head even if you can’t explain them. Maximin credits herself only with “voice, laptop, and various objects,” but she uses those minimal tools to drill a bottomless sound-well. And where previous records were more collaborative, Infinitesimal feels like her most personal statement yet.

Olivia Block, photo by Michael Schmelling

Olivia Block: Foramen Magnum (excerpt) on SoundCloud.

Olivia Block’s Karren opens with a big bang–a crunch of blasting noise that seems to say “brace yourself.” The rest of side-long opener “Foramen Magnum” alternates between distant sounds and more sudden eruptions. Though Block’s timing is fine-tuned, the piece feels as chaotic as the environment; in fact, much of “Foramen Magnum” comprises field recordings “taken from orchestral rehearsals and various public locations, including museums and zoos.” Block makes it sound like it could be all happening in her head or outside her window—or, more likely, both. After all, “Foramen Magnum” means an opening at the base of the human skull, and the piece (as well as it’s side B counterpart, the more overtly orchestral “Opening Night”) helps Karren become a kind of portal between the inner mind and the external universe.

But for me the 2013 record that most effectively grapples with inner and outer universes is Letha Melchior Rodman’s Handbook for Mortals. Over the course of 11 brief, impressionistic vignettes, Melchior traces a sound-world that feels utterly private and subjective, as if you're seeing through her eyes. At times her pieces have a surreal, under-water quality, but she always lets reality creep or burst in. The way she adds field recordings, like a TV playing across the room or a conversation held on the other side of a wall, reminds me of how Daniel Johnston added snippets of unrehearsed dialogue to his early cassettes. But where those played like skits, Melchior’s found sounds are woven into the fabric of her music, such that a struck chord and a distant voice can have the same hypnotic effect.

Melchior has spoken eloquently about her attraction to field recordings, and the idea of sound as music. “From early on, I found that I liked listening to blended sounds of familiar things; TV, lawnmowers, children playing outside,” she says in notes for the album. “When I lived in Chinatown on Canal Street in New York, I loved to lay in bed and listen to the vendors shouting, blending with the heavy traffic and tiny wind chimes; I would pretend I was someplace else, somewhere I didn’t know. I love that feeling.” That sums up Handbook for Mortals’ unique accomplishment: rather than trying to control the chaos of the world, she makes it her music, and in the process takes the listener along to “someplace else.” —Marc Masters

***Next: Two great 2013 records by duos***

*II: **In praise of the duo: Steve Gunn & Mike Gangloff and ÄÄNIPÄÄ*

Steve Gunn, photo courtesy of Mike Gangloff

Listening to a duo can feel a lot like eavesdropping on the conversation at a neighboring table. It’s an intimate form, where ideas are shared directly instead of being mitigated by a third or fourth or fifth party. The proclivities of two musicians interact, alternately intertwining into something new and pushing apart until their individual approaches nestle like complementary puzzle pieces. If you’re familiar with the other output of the principals, the listening can even turn into a mathematical game, where you start to understand how the players respond to certain situations and how they view what they do. More than a quintet configuration, where separate ideas turn idea a thicket so dense it’s sometimes impossible to discern where one player begins and another ends, duos invite a uniquely interactive listening experience: You can peel apart the pieces while you listen, almost as if you were watching the sessions themselves. In fact, two of my favorite records of this year—both by duos—take very different approaches to foster that same feeling.

The sensation of listening in presides throughout Melodies for a Savage Fix, a five-track collaboration between guitarist Steve Gunn and fiddler Mike Gangloff. Those are, at least, the roles for which they’re best known: Gangloff contributes lithe lines to the Black Twig Pickers and his great yawning tones to Pelt. Gunn, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the best young flat-pickers in music, thanks to the serpentine variations of his previous solo and duo records, his recent supporting role in Kurt Vile’s Violators and the imaginative folk-rock of this year’s Dead-summoning Time Off.

But Gunn and Gangloff are both multi-instrumentalists, and that’s a central feature of Savage Fix’s improvisational slipstream: In early February, the pair isolated themselves in the rural Virginia studio of Joseph Dejarnette with a menagerie of instruments far wider than their usual tools. Gangloff brought his bows and banjo, and Gunn brought his guitars. They added an assembly of international musical toys—singing bowls and gongs, the long-necked tambura and a droning Indian shruti box. They began recording the night of February 8 and finally quit as dawn approached the next day. The five pieces—no overdudbs or rearrangements, only edits—that shape Savage Fix speak to the spirit of the nocturnal session and the parallel strengths of its players.

Steve Gunn & Mike Gangloff: Worry Past Worry on SoundCloud.

“Slide and Gong,” whose title is every bit as literal as it may seem, is an anxious blues anthem. Gunn picks and scrapes a riff until he no longer does, sometimes sliding off the theme into a thistle of resonator noise. Gangloff patiently bangs and bows the metal, his slow hits adding a groaning layer of desolation beneath Gunn’s. Earth has previously traced lines between doom metal and the blues, but Gangloff and Gunn reimagine the route here. “Worry Past Worry” mines the onset of late-night delirium, though, with Gunn sketching quick guitar lines to nowhere and Gangloff intoning wide arches with his tanbura. It’s the sound of two friends staring at one another across a room, slipping out of any real-world troubles and into a sort of ad hoc cocoon.  

That same sense of emotional sublimation is at work on the record’s beautiful back half, too. Though these sessions were actually finished around 3 a.m., “Topeka AM” embraces both darkness and dawn. Tufts of nervous notes stretch into graceful, ascendant latticework; by the end, the song is practically skipping, with Gunn’s guitar bouncing over Gangloff’s casual percussion. If it’s an aubade, then closing delight “Dive for the Pearl” is a full reflection of daylight. The spry duet for banjo and guitar dips toward the bottom of Gunn’s chords but lifts continually with the momentum of Gangloff’s swift melody. It’s a short and economical number, not unlike the instrumental sprints of The Black Twig Pickers. It’s slyly circular, too, suggesting the long-form desert blues that Gunn has created elsewhere with drummer John Truscinski. It’s a fitting synthesis not only of the moment but of these players, too—two busy musicians, staying up late to revel in the skills of the other.

Where Savage Fix seemed to occur spontaneously and even represent the timeline on which it was made, the debut of another duo, ÄÄNIPÄÄ, required a decidedly more deliberate tack. Stephen O’Malley and Mika Vainio have been hatching the plan for a collaborative release since their respective bands, Sunn O))) and Pan Sonic, worked together on a Suicide cover more than a half-decade ago. They’re both incredibly prolific, though, meaning it took time for them to rendezvous in the studio. And the four monstrous cuts of their first album, the harrowing Through a Pre-Memory, are dense and intricate pieces, not a series of limited, one-take improvisations. Eyvind Kang, a frequent O’Malley contributor, even provides string arrangements, played here by a trio that includes contrabass and cello.

ÄÄNIPÄÄ: Watch over Stillness - Matters Principle (excerpt) on SoundCloud.

Though several other musicians worked on Through a Pre-Memory, the stylistic touchstones of O’Malley and Vainio remain its pillars: “Watch Over Stillness/Matters Principle” moves with the sort of savage guitar tone that made Khanate so vitriolic; that feeling is fortified by the appearance of former Khanate vocalist Alan Dubin, who turns the poetry of Russian writer Anna Akhmatova into caustic harangues. He also shows up during opener “Muse,” where O’Malley’s guitar looms like the scythe of a reaper, drifting between the scattered rhythms and samples characteristic of Vainio’s past. O’Malley and Vainio are both often associated with the loudness of their work (“Maximum volume yields maximum results,” reads Sunn O)))’s credo), but they force one another into relative silence and stillness. Sounds swell by stretching, and the intensity of the electronics increases as Vainio shocks the space between the beats, not the beats themselves. Even when Dubin rips into his rant, the sound remains asymptotic, always pushing toward the breaking point but never past it. ÄÄNIPÄÄ suggests the same intense textural grayness as The Haxan Cloak’s Excavation, but they sustain rather than rupture the pieces. It’s not acute morbidity; it’s the long-term work of two people who’ve been in pursuit of such feelings for decades.

In fact, the essential track here, “Toward All Thresholds,” bests that LP at the same refined brutality that serves as its trademark. Vainio sets up a system of nightmarish thuds that disappear and reappear, a failing heartbeat captured. O’Malley wrestles with his amplifier and instrument, coaxing barely there feedback that builds steadily into an electric storm. Vainio eventually settles on a militant industrial pattern, a hard-hitting clip that he’s able to pock with noise and use as a sort of weapon against O’Malley’s hangman riff. It rises and writhes, loud and threatening. Suddenly, it all comes down in corrosion, the volume and tone crumbling into a scattered lot of sonic debris. This is the only end suitable for something so heavy and centered on the distinct signatures of its dual architects. Those exact qualities make Through a Pre-Memory one of the most intense records of 2013. —Grayson Haver Currin

*Next: Félicia Atkinson's phenomenological music*

*III: **Phenomenological Music***: **Félicia Atkinson:****

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“I can't even really say I was listening to music,” says Félicia Atkinson, recalling when she first started playing in bands. “It's more like music was always in my ears, as a protection, a kind of soothing acouphene (tinnitus) I was wrapped in.” That also happens to describe what it’s like to listen to the music Atkinson herself makes, both under her own name and as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier. The Paris-born artist uses a range of tools—drones, pulses, voices, repetitions, reverberations—to envelop and coat the ears of anyone listening.

The sounds and atmospheres that Atkinson creates feel so natural they’re more like weather than art, the sonic equivalent of wind blowing into your ears or clouds rolling through your mind. “I believe in phenomenological music,” she says, responding to my email query about her musical philosophy. “Music that happens…music that is a kind of monolithic happening, where listening and playing is completely knotted.”

Félicia Atkinson: Hooves Drummed on SoundCloud.

Atkinson has been tying that knot for over half a decade now, but 2013 represented a new peak in her musical arc. Of her five excellent releases this year, one is most career-defining: the double LP Visions/Voices, which collects tracks from smaller-run releases made between 2010 and 2012. Her goal was, as she puts it in the album notes, “to tell in an abstract way the story of my personal journey through the land of music.” Indeed, Visions/Voices is an enthralling trek, as Atkinson constantly finds new places to go and new ways to get there. The overall effect is somewhere between a soothing dream and a paralyzing nightmare–it’s telling that she begins a poem included in the LP package with the line “Lullabies are scary.”

When I ask her to explain how she managed to tell a story without using concrete words, Atkinson reacts with an enthusiasm typical of her correspondences. “I love novels and poetry. I love imagination and I love painting,” she says. “I feel that by giving titles, describing landscapes, telling names, choosing colors and shapes, new forms appear – new lands, freedom. I am myopic and contemplative. I just need to put off my glasses and the mountains shifts into a blue stain!”

Such impressionistic musings reflect the way art saturates Atkinson’s life. Alongside her prolific musical career, she’s also an accomplished visual artist; her drawings, sculptures, and installations have appeared in numerous galleries over the past decade. Often utilizing simple swaths of color, her paintings are at times analogous to her layered music. “I see music and painting the same way: sharing what I see and feel with other people, very simply,” she says. “But I like also to separate music and art.” To that end, she rarely performs music in her art shows. An exception came when she played on the last day of an exhibit, intending the sounds as part of the in-progress artwork. “Everything that I do is always improvised and time-based,” she says. “[That’s] the way I do art – a deep connection to the in situ, using materials that are available.”

The flame behind Atkinson’s artistic drive was lit early. She first learned to play music at age four via “Methode Martenot,” a teaching technique based on rhymes. “You need to say the rhythms while you are making them with your hand – it's so fun!” she explains. Later she studied Celtic harp (an instrument she still uses), and her parents encouraged her musical interests (her father took her to see both Pierre Boulez and Lou Reed). “I was raised in the ethic that culture and music is for everybody,” she says. “Not only for the rich ones.”

Félicia Atkinson: With her own hands on SoundCloud.

In her teens, Atkinson studied theater, where she first encountered improvisation. Reconnecting with music in her early 20’s, she formed a band called Antichambre which played “in the dark with instruments we never touched before.” She later joined with dancer Elise Ladoue in the duo Stretchandrelax, an improvised project that often used masks or found objects rather than instruments. When Ladoue left the duo to return to dancing, Atkinson decided to start making music on her own.

That solo journey has brought her to America on multiple occasions, where she’s worked with a plethora of like-minded musicians. Her willingness to use whatever’s available led to recordings like 2010’s o-re-gon, made solely with the in-house instruments at Type Foundry Studio in Portland. “When I'm traveling…I can be sometimes a bit more adventurous,” she says. “I like also to record in the United States because I feel people are less judgmental than in France. [They] won't tell me what I should do – they let me be messy!”

During one sojourn to upstate New York, Atkinson contracted Lyme disease, and found herself sapped of “energy and strength.” “I needed to find a doppelganger in me…a kind of temporary warrior,” she explains. So she adopted the name Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier for some of her music. “It means ‘I am the little knight,’” she says. “It's taken from a song by Nico sung by her son, and I felt born again with that name.” Indeed, her work under than moniker is often quite forceful; her latest effort, a tape called Those Vermillion Sands, stays bold and urgent despite often sounding quite dark. (She recorded it alone on her MacBook, “in bed, under my quilt–no light and not a lot of air!”)

But it’s perhaps over-simplistic to draw distinctions between Atkinson’s guises, since everything she does is richly diverse. To her, the idea of switching between her given name and Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier is more about freedom than definitions. “It just allows me to shift when I want from one shoe to another,” she admits. “I am huge fan of Bill Callahan and Will Oldham, and I love how they can be Smog or Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and then come back to their own names.”

Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier: A Sculpture, Georges? on SoundCloud.

Last September, Atkinson migrated to “a tiny hamlet 700 meters high” in the Alps, where she runs the label and publisher Shelter Press with Bartolomé Sanson. Their intent is “to abolish this frontier between people who listen to music and people who prefer art books,” she says. “I am truly interested in the connection between improvised music and its displacement into art, from Fluxus and Dada to now. How ready-mades and sculpture can appear into music, and how delay and loops can be present into art.”

Shelter Press also helps keep Atkinson and Sanson tied to an international community of artists. “It's really important for sure!” says Atkinson of her vast array of musical friendships. “I am an only child and I need spiritual brothers and sisters!” Asked to name those siblings, she reels off a long list, including Terrence Hannum and Matthew Clark in Chicago, C. Spencer Yeh and David Grubbs in New York, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Gregg Kowalsky in California, and Sylvain Chaveau and Rhys Chatham in France.

She also cites many women comrades, such as Christina Carter, Rachel Evans, and Lynn Fister (she recently appeared with the latter two on the excellent compilation Taxidermy of Unicorns). “These women are as great as they are diverse, [but] I can't say if I feel more close to a woman's music than a man's music,” she says. “I don't think music has a gender or a color. What I sometimes notice, especially in France, [is] the audience and even some journalists expecting women to do"women music", always using their voices and pictures of themselves on the album covers. They love to qualify the female music as “fragile,” “delicate,” or “dreamy.” They organize "female festivals" or chose a woman to open for another woman musician, instead of just including more women in their regular musical program.”

Atkinson clearly doesn't let such frustrations stop her. It seems nothing could be an obstacle to her continued work. Take her new locale: though her music has often thrived on new situations that came from travelling, she’s found isolation can be just as conducive to creativity. “Since I was born in a city, I am fascinated by nature's wilderness as a stranger,” she says. “I have space here to make music and art to cook and read. I can watch the mountains changing endlessly, like in a Chinese painting. Humans [here] are tiny compared to the peaks, the valleys and animals. I see more horses than advertisement billboards, and I like it.” —Marc Masters

*Next: The "continuous music" of Lubomyr Melnyk*

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*IV: A storm of beauty: Lubomyr Melnyk*

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*photo by Fabio Lugaro

If you know the name of Ukraine-born composer Lubomyr Melnyk, you likely know two other words with which he’s associated: continuous music. For nearly 40 years, Melnyk has slavishly devoted himself to piano pieces that roll in ceaseless waves, with colossal arpeggios stacked atop and into one another so as to suggest that his sound is without end or beginning.

Parallel with that idea, Melnyk has emerged as a record-setting technician, too, capable of playing nearly 20 notes per second in each hand and nearly 100,000 notes in an hour. Rather than produce the piano equivalent of Guitar Center self-indulgence, Melnyk’s music is instead a cataract of splendor. Even with no knowledge of how or why they are played, these piano pieces are transformational listens, truly sublime sound capable of ferrying the listener far away.

Despite his longevity and his reverence for the piano canon that precedes him, Melnyk has mostly existed outside of classical music, with his fare lauded by experimental fans and more indie rock audiences when noticed at all. To that end, 2013 has been a landmark year for Melnyk, who turns 65 next week: He’s released three excellent albums on three broadly minded labels. Each showcases a different side of his musical identity and how it might fit into subsequent generation of musicians.

Windmills, his third release of the year, is classic Melnyk, with 63 nearly uninterrupted minutes of solo piano that offering a variation on the visually important Walt Disney cartoon The Old Mill. Recorded in Winnipeg by E.T. Nada with a system known as “omni-sonic sound,” it is one of Melnyk’s definitive performances, showcasing in turns the delicacy and dominance of his playing. To call it a dream state would be to simplify matters too much; Windmills is too dark for that, haunted at the edges by phantoms and premonitions.

Assisted by Peter Broderick and producer Nils Frahm, however, Corollaries pushes Melnyk’s work into some of its brightest places ever. Traced by strings and joined occasionally by voice and guitar, his playing radiates on these five tracks, with unlikely rhythmic and textural accents pushing the light forward. Corollaries repositions him as an overlooked mentor to the swell of “new music” that’s recently found favor with younger audiences.

But the real treat of Melnyk’s prolific year came closer to its start with The Watchers, his debut with like-minded British guitarist James Blackshaw. Though Melnyk admits that the four-track album required compromises on both musicians’ ends, it offers a bold extension of “continuous music” by taking something Melnyk has done largely in isolation and applying the idea to a bigger context and sound. Stylistically, Blackshaw and Melnyk have long followed similar paths—find a pattern and follow it at length. Their union makes stylistic sense, but it reaches across a generational aisle to create, in effect, a graceful continuum.

Melnyk is a peripatetic sort who bounces mostly between Germany and Canada. We spoke with him in Winnipeg, where he was doing his best to overcome the obstacles of digital production and classical music neglect while working on a new project. 

*Pitchfork: You first met the guitarist James Blackshaw by seeing him play at the Hea Uus Heli festival in Estonia 2008. You recognized that he was doing something with guitar akin to what you had been doing with piano for decades. What was your reaction?*

Lubomyr Melnyk: We were two musicians on the same track. It was quite a joyous surprise. He said that he was a fan of my music even before we met. But I am 100 percent sure that James chose his path before he heard me play Our musics don’t have an influence on one another. He is purely himself when is doing that music. That’s really nice to see, because a lot of musicians imitate stuff—not him.

*Pitchfork: When you recorded The Watchers together, what was the plan? Were these pieces written for guitar and piano in advance, or did you simply create them together on the spot?*

LM: It was in between those two. We met in the recording room and had some discussions and talks about how to balance the instruments—what I’m going to do, what he’s going to do. The problem with joining our two musics together is that James’ music is extremely delicate and rich and full of sound and harmonies that are extraordinarily complex. The piano is much louder. He was amplified, but we kept the piano closed. I had to play gently.

You can’t record continuous music; continuous music is unrecordable. If you record one instrument, you get a decent, acceptable recording. But when you’re doing two, it’s impossible. I find that with two pianos or then with his continuous guitar, I have to sacrifice a lot of continuous elements. There was a lot of compromising so that we could generate something that worked. The guitar is such a different thing that if you don’t know what you’re doing in advance on piano, you’re really scrambling.   

James Blackshaw & Lubomyr Melnyk: Haftorang on SoundCloud.

*Pitchfork: You said that continuous music is not capable of being recorded, but you’ve built a career on attempting to do just that. What are the challenges?*

LM: When I was 25 or 30, I was really fussy. You see what you’re getting, and you know what you want. What you’re getting just isn’t good enough, so you strive. At this point, I accept that a regular, ordinary recording will have to do. I have worked with a studio technician who came up with the idea of multiple platforms of sound—not just digital, but 90 percent analogue forms. We would be pulling every analogue machine we could find on the street and channeling it into the sound. You multiply them, multitudinously. It’s very expensive to do unless you own your own studio, which I don’t. It also triples or quadruples your mix time, but that is the best way.

*Pitchfork: Does digital recording technology work for what you do?*

LM: Because of the digital sound system available through the Internet, people have this impression that music should be free and it costs nothing to make. Because of the digital system, recording costs are quadrupled for someone like me. Instead of making music cheaper, digital sound has made music extraordinarily expensive to make with a good result. I’m stuck with it, because I want to create recordings that are beautiful and good. I have to spend all the money on the studio time to make these stupid, lousy digital recordings that are listenable to me. It takes an incredible amount of time and effort to make what is basically a fake reproduction of what you would’ve gotten with an analogue tape.

I am not talking about super finesse. I am talking about a hamburger that you picked up off the street that a car ran over versus a beautiful meal at a restaurant. And then there’s this ridiculous, disgusting situation where people expect it to be free.

Before, with analogue, you would set up the mics, and you would experiment. After about half an hour, you had a fantastic sound—really good EQ, really good playing position. You went and recorded, and that was it. That recording was the best you could do, and that took 20 minutes. Now, to get something like that, it will take you 10–15 hours of studio remix time, experimenting with different EQs, experimenting with different echo systems, combining this and that, mixing different machines. 

Melnyk and Peter Broderick in Berlin, photo by Martyn Henye*Pitchfork: James Blackshaw is only one of a number of younger musicians interested in your work. Corollaries, your new album on Erased Tapes, adds strings, voice and guitar in spots thanks to people such as Peter Broderick. How have these young listeners and players helped you?*

LM: I’m very, very grateful to the young generation. And by young, I mean anything from 15 to 60. It’s a good generation of listeners. I am surprised, because I am a classical pianist. I am not just classically trained. I am a classical pianist in the tradition of Franz Liszt and Beethoven. I have nothing to do with the regular strains of music in contemporary times.

Having said that, I am really surprised that the classical world has ignored my music. When I play for them, they can’t hear it at all. Their minds are completely impervious. The beauty of the music just bounces off of them, like Star Trek shields. With the younger generation, the beauty just pours into them. They have experiences from my music.

I suspect that classical audiences can’t even hear the beauty of Mozart and Beethoven anymore. They’re like cows. Cows can hear Mozart and Beethoven and Bach and hear something pretty, but they don’t hear the music. It’s the same with these classical people; I’m wondering if they’re not turning into cows. They do not hear the intense powerful beauty of Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius, anything. It’s just pretty music. It’s not pretty music. It’s the most awesome, heaven-shattering thing that ever occurs on earth. When you hear it, you should just stand there and shake to the ground and wonder how this miracle is possible. I almost just want to die because I can’t stand how powerfully beautiful it is. The young people seem to hear beauty, and that makes me happy.

*Pitchfork: How early into your career did you realize that continuous music might meet some reluctance in the classical community?*

LM: I’ve struggled with that all my life. Continuous music is so difficult to play. It’s such a high level of technical virtuosity that I just thought the classical world would say, “Bravo, fantastic, well done!” instead of “Good grief, get off the stage. We want to hear Chopin.” I realized that, try as I might, this would never reach the classical world.

In their defense, I could say that, yes, I am not as good as Beethoven or Mozart or Bach or Sibelius or Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff. I’m not, but nobody is! Why would you stop listening to new music by people who are alive today just because they’re not as good as Beethoven? There are tons of musicians alive today who are doing amazing things with their instruments. There’s me with the piano, but there are a lot of pianists doing really odd, new things. There are cellists and violinists and bold guitarists, like James Blackshaw, that are creating amazing music today. The classical music world should damn well listen to it. I have never heard such lousy cello playing as these great big shots that the classical world listens to. They listen to it just because it’s a famous name.

It’s like saying I’m not going to eat anymore food, and I’m just going to eat this pill that tasted like a great chef in 1750 in France. It’ll give you all the nutrition to keep you alive, but it’s never going to give you the real thing. If you really want to have real chicken or real vegetables prepared in a sublime, magnificent flavor, it may not be as good, but it’s a real meal. They’re going for the pill. When I look at the classical world, I see a bunch of totally braindead people.

You could get mad and say, “What the hell are you talking about? We love Beethoven, and we’re really smart.” You’re not really smart, because you don’t realize how great and beautiful Beethoven is. You just go because it’s a thing to do—to go and listen to “pretty music.” Beethoven is not pretty. It should only be played only once a year, and the whole world should listen. Nobody goes to work that day. 

cover of Melnky's Corollaries LP

*Pitchfork: Your music can be rather trance-like, with 15-minute tracks that are huge, ceaseless flurries of sound. Do you ever get lost inside of it?*

LM: What you’re describing is something I don’t experience when I’m playing. I experience a no-man’s land, a complete emptiness within the body. I just become a motor generating the sounds from the piano. I rarely drift off, though that does occur from time to time. The piano has to generate the music, so I can’t experience the music the way the audience can. Part of me is listening to it, but I can’t sit back the way an audience is sitting back and listening. In creating the pieces, I sit at the piano and work with some idea that just happens. You work it and work it, maybe like a sculptor who sees something in a piece of marble or wood and is chipping away at it. I just write down what happens.

*Pitchfork: How tightly scripted are these pieces? Do you know exactly where each note is going all the time, and how worried are you about how long each one lasts?*

LM: The pieces have a ballpark time allotment, which I usually don’t pay too much attention to. If I’m striving for something 15 minutes, it may end up around 22 minutes. I’m not that strict. If I’m aiming for 15 minutes and I hit 17, that’s right on. That’s what usually happens because continuous music takes time. You feel the harmony, and it creates a powerful vortex that has to turn into another one, and that turns into a vortex of its own. That modulates into the next thing.

In a way, I am sculpting the sound in live time. The sound is alive, and I can’t just cut it off short because I want 15 minutes. Once I touch the piano and start the piece, it’s a living process. The duration of it will always take a second seat to the life of the music. But I don’t disregard it completely. You have to both let the music live and try to somehow keep it within the guideline of time.

Lubomyr Melnyk: The Six Day Moment on SoundCloud.

*Pitchfork: How has your relationship to continuous music changed during your career? Have the principles shifted? Has your technique evolved?*

LM: In some ways, it’s changed a great deal. In some aspects, it has not changed at all. I think the initial concepts of continuous music remain exactly constant. I am a little less focused on the immediate sound and letting that be the cloud on which I float away. I find the sound to be a very simple structure, with just a few notes. I find that very meditative and wonderful. I’ve used thicker and bigger and more powerful sounds.

My body continues to be altered by the music and the actual piano playing. Piano playing is a very amazing discipline. Continuous music is like the start of a road for the pianist turning into, for example, a kung fu master. The kung fu master’s body is constantly in a state of change and movement toward an unknown goal. You don’t know what the body and mind are capable of doing. You know that you are headed into this fantastic landscape. You don’t know what is going to be over that ridge, but you know that the landscape is totally magical.

*Pitchfork: You keep a number of students at any given time. How does learning the concept of continuous music alter them?*

LM: The few students who I do work with always say how much better they can play Beethoven and Bach now. Of course, because continuous music is changing your flesh into instantaneous time and light. The greatest classical pianist alive or in the whole history of mankind could never go beyond 13–14 notes per playing, and that’s terribly fast. Believe me. However, the continuous pianist goes way beyond that and into a different level of physical activity. The flesh that you have—the bones and the muscles and the tendons, everything that works in the classical pianist—will not work with continuous music. All of that has to be altered. This process of change does not stop. It’s not like, once I can do it, I’ve reached the end of it. The playing changes my perception of space and time. My experience of time is altered. Everything is changing. —Grayson Haver Currin Reported by Pitchfork 4 days ago.