A quick, press-release only nod to a couple of upcoming higher-profile concerts – one for post-classical piano, the other for experimental gamelan…
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Erased Tapes presents:
Lubomyr Melnyk + James Heather
The Jazz Café, 5 Parkway, Camden Town, London, NW1 7PG, England
Wednesday 17th January 2018, 7.00pm – information here, here and here
“Lubomyr Melnyk is a Ukrainian composer and pianist who has pioneered “continuous piano music”. Classically trained and influenced by the minimalist movement in the early 1970s, he has developed his own unique language for the piano, named after the principle of maintaining a continuous, unbroken stream of sound. A true innovator, his mission is to explore new directions for contemporary music. Not only is he regarded as one of the world’s fastest concert pianists, his compositions also truly carry the listener to new realms. To witness one of his rare live performances is nothing short of a mind-opening experience.
Joining him on the bill will be Ninja Tune’s post-classical pianist James Heather, one of the new school set of ‘post classical’ artists flourishing in the wake of the long, steady but recently accelerated success of figureheads like Max Richter, Ben Lukas Boyson and Jóhann Johannsson, and the wider public’s overdue but now burgeoning relationship with this varied genre. His debut album – ‘Stories From Far Away On Piano’ – was released in August 2017 via Coldcut’s Ahead Of Our Time label.
“The album concept and artwork (layers of Indian ink repeatedly bled into newspaper print representing the recirculation of information) centres on Heather’s musical interpretations of real world stories; Isis jihadists hijacking the Facebook account of an executed female activist in Syria (Ruqia), the British Empire’s imprisonment of Boers in South Africa (Empire Sounds), a missing Malaysia Airlines jet in the Indian Ocean (MHope), the Paris terror suspect who reportedly had a Last Minute Change Of Heart and the Los Angeles man freed after 16 years in prison after being wrongly identified by a Teardrop Tattoo.”
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The Barbican, Kazum! and Europalia present:
Aloysius Suwardi: “Planet Harmonik”
Milton Court Concert Hall @ Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Silk Street, Barbican, London, EC2Y 9BH, England
Thursday 18th January 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
“Composer, instrument-maker and gamelan expert Aloysius Suwardi presents his ‘Planet Harmonik’ project for the first time outside of his native Indonesia. Bringing together a host of self-made instruments – from giant gambang xylophones, to hydraulic bamboo flutes – Suwardi’s ‘Planet Harmonik’ takes its inspiration from the Pythagorean theory of “music of the spheres”. It’s the idea that the proportional relationship between planets is equivalent to the relationship between musical notes – that the sun, the moon and Earth all emit their own tone.
The instruments of Aloysius Suwardi (photo © Witjak Widhi Cahya)
“When I’m making musical instruments I have two starting points: firstly, I aim to make an instrument based on my mental picture of its shape, without considering the resulting sound. Secondly, I aim to make an instrument to obtain a specific sound that is derived from a sound imagined in my head. I decided to make a new ensemble to explore the possibilities of obtaining a series of harmonics produced by the instruments. The clearest and loudest harmonics are used for the pitch to be arranged as either slendro or pelog gamelan tuning scales.”
“Like the planets, ‘Planet Harmonik’ is a piece that moves with grace despite its complexity, rooted in the rich history of gamelan while also looking to the future.”
Misfit City 
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