Ill-Prepared Piano, by Duncan Blachford

Ill-Prepared Piano

by Duncan Blachford

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Ill-Prepared Piano, Piano and Rain No 1, Beach Scenes, Glaciale Klavier & Schlagzeug, This World Fights Back with an Opera Amongst the Silent Streets, Surplus Behaviour, Mimosa Forms, Suite for Piano, and 4 more. , and , .

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Limited edition of home dubbed cassettes. Sold out at source. Available at www.naturestrip.com

Includes unlimited streaming of Ill-Prepared Piano via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	No Borders 03:55	buy track
2.	Negative Space 05:37	buy track
3.	Dinner Arrangements 04:12	buy track
4.	Dark Flowers 05:45	buy track
5.	After Hours 11:12	buy track

about

"ghosted incidental piano reveries from naarm artist duncan blachford, discordant hypnosis summoned by way of a decayed instrument dumped in the industrial badlands of thornbury. gorgeous putrefaction.

there's a definite feeling of the phantasmagoric on 'ill-prepared piano', music played by and for the air as much as it is by any human hand, the keys eking out notes in patterns that their gradual weathering dictates, the quiet clatter of fraying wood adding unintended oddball rhythmic thrusts. there are points where the surrounding environmental sound meshes with the patient flurries of tone, one dissipating into the other, machine whirrs & garbled chatter superimposed upon busted yet painstakingly beautiful discordance. this is very much a prepared piano work, sure, but the demarcation is in the naturalism of the preparation; firmly accidental sound in the best possible sense, blachford wrangling what little remnants of beauty are left in the piano's carcass even as it rots in hand." – naturestrip.com

Ill-Prepared Piano
Duncan Blachford
Endless Melt Records (EMR016)

This site-specific recording was performed on a decaying piano found on the street outside an industrial warehouse, recorded toward the tail-end of a blistering summer workday.

Although pulverised by the elements, a small handful of the piano's keys still worked – if only intermittently – setting the parameters of what notes could be struck, and at times, determining when. While played, damaged sections of artificial ivory detached themselves from wood – providing a clattering rhythmic accompaniment to the discordant and weather-worn keys.

The recording site, bordering a Darebin Creek walking-trail and an industrial backstreet in Thornbury, offers a unique acoustic environment: whirring circular-saws combine with birdsong; rustling debris with motorbikes and cars; and two-way radio-calls with improvisatory piano – the field recordings colliding with the piano's interventions in instant composition. Shortly after these recordings were made, the piano was gone. The album closes with a field-recording captured after-hours, outside the factory, following the piano's removal.

Duncan Blachford is a musician from lutruwita (Tasmania), based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Previously active in Exhaustion, Actual Holes, Drunk Hands, Rubbish Throwers, Goodgrief Commune, Psychic Baggage, Swawklor, Cross Brothers and Keith's Yard. 'Ill-Prepared Piano' operates as a companion piece to Blachford's other piano works, 'Suite for Piano' (2013), 'Glaciale Klavier & Schlagzeug' (2022) and 'Improvisation for Piano and Rain No 1' (2023).

credits

released March 1, 2024

Performed and recorded by Duncan Blachford, Friday 9 February 2024. After Hours recorded 26 February 2024. On track 3, workers speak in Mandarin and another dialect – discussing the evening's work and dinner arrangements – thanks for allowing the recording to take place.

Artwork by Duncan Blachford.

Written and recorded on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

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Endless Melt Records Melbourne, Australia

Antipodean underground imprint. Established 2010, Naarm/Melbourne.

'A label that can do no wrong, Australia’s sainted Endless Melt' – Volcanic Tongue

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