“Put two Steinways head to toe so that they form a square. Draw a circle with a piece of chalk.
The whole turns into a geometric figure, a ying yang only longing to sound. These two surrounded pianos, that’s Pop Art.
Two iron harps, and, sitting at the keyboards like symmetric figures on one playing card, Rami and Francesco, two runaway accomplices.
One is from the Levant, and the deep oriental singing. The other from some kind of North where the heaves curl up at the feet of steel bridges. They face each other. Almost.
One glance and … go! Double play of Pop Art. The union of the olive tree and the sprout, far away from solfege in an age of digital after-piano.
Here, it is all done in a flash on dual mechanic. It’s a system captured in a mirror. A shared reflection for an improvised Sonatine at the crossroads of the preludes. The piano overcame baroque music when architecture was inventing sounding modules and scattered perspectives. There’s something happening today under the song of these ruins. It has become a solitary machine at the center of the world. A self-repeating chromatic belt.
Diptych – multiples – ornamentation – response – 4-had match – loop…
Pop Art sounds and grooves, flows and brews.
The sequence profuses a flow of woody notes. The strings cringe under the fingernail like a scratch board or a boat adrift, pushed around by a lukewarm breeze. The two of them lead to the dance. One from the moon, the other from the sun. One in the clouds, the other on basalt.
One is a winged cat, the other a hidden fox. Heads or Tails, Pop Art or a kind of inventive atmospheric music, arpeggiating on the hills of the Eixample like a musical hide and seek.
A reverse shot filled with eighth-notes and catchy hitches. It is a dream machine of sound transporting us until its extinction under the vaults of profound grottos. The vault itself traces the volutes like an arabesque. A phylactery scrolls on the inner wall of the gypsum like a massive convulsive body.”
I like the crafted connection between the CD description and tracks’ names…
Beautiful melodies evoking mental, emotional and maybe even physical release … maybe I’ll explain more later, but for now get your copy here! and decide which yourself…
and be sure to explore more of Rami Khalife’s and Francesco Tristano’s work
Expressions of Nakba is an international competition and exhibition to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba: the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948.
