DAILY NECESSITIES

1. SLIDE: a friendly ghost toothache goes for a walk along twilight Seine

2. PENNY: snap-finding porchlight after her dewy topiary cramble

3. TRAIN: dingaree readymade windups cinderbank building halos

4. REFEREE: bottomless bowl alphabet

5. DOG: time for Japan open markings, riddle spacesuit

6. FACTORY: vibro pals sustained throughput lollygag

Sleeve notes

“The five o’clock whistle’s on the blink, the whistle won’t blow, and whaddaya think?”

Welcome, active listener, to the abandoned-keyboard artistry of Steve Beresford and Tania Caroline Chen. A hurricane tessellation of light coughs from above somewhere through elliptical crystal palace latticework. Every gesture is allowed (or forced?) to peacefully coexist alongside any other. Unruliness rules, but not marching along reactive streets. Last time this happened they dragged the nine-foot grands outside and interrogated them in front of the crowd. This is not a replay of that event (which, rumor tells, was staged). Forces of Order and Nostalgia, stand down. The players don’t post these Daily Necessities as a list of tenets, demands, a post-mortem, or a laundry basket of rolling heads. 

Followers of these two pioneering pianists might be forgiven a spell of head-scratching over the pair’s self-distancing, on this soundstage, from concentrated piano-plunking. But we’ve no time to linger on the edge of that void — Chen and Beresford have left the station on a whistling train of Sound Decisions. But can we get some interpretive help over here? “Too many decisions,” Chen wonders at the opening of PENNY. Some decisions are apparently unformed, yet assert themselves anyway. We clickety-clack past headstones of decisions into utter bloody-minded Joy of Hitting Things. Put in or extract all the structure, the volition that you require. Make of it what you will: you, the listener, are the composer. Forget the present. It’s your concert — put your ears into it! 

The daily grind might be Daily Rations of Irrational Numbers: enjoy them one day at a time. Chew, chew. Nourishment of the sonic politic gently infuses and massages: a mooing turtle found under a goalie, flogging snores. This sad pastoral scene surrounded by a cartoon music fence of ledger lines and rippling accordionics. Where did everybody go? Now we see it: it’s one of those wayward pianos, murmuring softly to itself “The Whistle of the Misshapen Midshipman.” Plunk! Clank. Vibro Champ. The train is slouching back into the station. We’ll parachute in, like heroes, like tadpoles. It’s after five o’clock, and whaddaya think? ...We’re over time.

Tom Djll, June 2020

Available on Bandcamp