专辑简介

by Sylvie Harrison

The 1998 release from M.J. Schumacher, not the famous motorsports figure of the same name, but the American composer of experimental and minimalist musics. This CD is a recording of solo piano performances, which were sampled and controlled by a computer. Very similar to the meditative piano music of Morton Feldman, these pieces have a repetitious symmetrical quality that lull the listener into a deep concentration, an environment not unlike the audio visual installations this music was designed for. The CD documents the piano music which accompanied a multimedia art exhibition of photographer Ursular Scherer. Her minimalist photographs and the music are mutually compliment each other; the cold images of architecture aptly grace the cover of this independently released CD. Schumacher's recordings include his contribution as a guitarist in the Donald Miller Trio, and solo on Fidicin Drones, where he approaches minimalism from a different angle. The similarities are that wherever he works, either with loud feed-backing drone guitars or with delicate computer and piano music, he achieves stunning effects with minimal means. Like the Brian Eno of Music for Airports, the electronic transformations of the piano are so subtle that they create a hall-of-mirrors effect, where the tones build up atop of each other until they slowly become a cloud of harmonics, the source indefinable.