max eilbacher: music for piano no. 7

Rhythmic, yes, but the rhythms change a lot. Loud, yes, but there are moments of such sparseness and cleanliness that it’s hard to tell if that quick blip was, well, quite loud. Especially when the last blip was, well, quite soft. Max Eilbacher’s Music For Piano No.7 sounds confusing, so let the relaxed female voice at the beginning of each program calm things. “Time For Take Off” is replaced by “Coat Hangers in a Hotel Room” before a scattered vignette whirs across the compositional landscape. The A-side uses programmatic strategies in which Toshi Ichiyanagi’s eponymous score Music For Piano No.7 is used as a tool to generate musical events, employing a pre-determined sound palette crafted by Eilbacher. The B-side traces out an impressionistic travel log when,again, “a modular synthesis composition that was never used” or “a train ride” is announced from the relaxed female voice. The idea of movement is given from choppy loops of people talking on a train, the accompanying ambient sounds of the train itself, short smacks of the aforementioned coat hangers, and gasps of flappy, slithering electronics. Max Eilbacher plays in Horse Lords, Matmos, and the defunct psych-0-skuzz-performance unit Needle Gun.