A Forest

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As the music starts to gain ground I find my mind swooping fast along the damp floor of some vast nameless central European forest sliced across with streams, that wonderful Autumnal smell of change, gentle rot and clean decay in my nostrils. I stop suddenly, staring closely into a patch of lichen on a toppled branch, itself a whole forest if you stare hard enough into it. Then yanked upwards again now high above the canopy, conscious of the scale of it all, marvelling at the few stubborn leaves still smouldering their sullen copper resistance, refusing to fall, refusing to join the others.

Then the music stops abruptly and you feel the absolute churning absence of where it was and the space it occupied seconds ago, where and when you need to feel it again.

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Lubomyr Melnyk is easily my favourite 72 year-old Ukranian composer and pianist and one of the very best musical discoveries of mine in many years. His 2018 album Fallen Trees is just incredible.

I came across his name whilst paddling around in the shallow end of minimalist modern classical music, I noticed he was on Erased Tapes Records which piqued my interest* and read up on him.

Melnyk has pioneered what he terms ‘continuous music’ for piano, a rolling technique that sees him playing rapid sequences of notes with both hands to an absurd degree, up to 19 notes a second with both hands. The affect is to conjure a rolling vista of sound, a blanket of notes that, for me, beat and blur like the wings of a hummingbird.

Minimalism this ain’t.

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Fallen Trees saves the best for, umm, first in my opinion with ‘Requiem For A Fallen Tree’, which adds the voice of Hatis Noit into the mix, the only vocal on the LP. Very much in the style of Dead Can Dance the vocal is a texture, alternating between a deep tone and a yearning to break free. In conjunction with the continual motion of the piano I find it very affecting, a true requiem for the fallen.

The slightly Zappaesque title ‘Son Of Parasol’, doesn’t quite do justice this steamroller of a track, there is a command and an assertion in Melnyk’s playing here that in any other context I’d describe as ‘heavy’; except when you are dealing with a roiling, fluttering, torrent of notes like this, heavy doesn’t cut it. I love the way that certain phrases and melodies occasionally bubble to the top are emphasised and then recede, to be replaced by another. It really is like nothing else I’ve heard.

‘Barcarolle’, written for a ballet about a painter is the most conventionally classical piece here. There is an air of a climactic film soundtrack about it, a reconciliation on a storm-tossed shoreline maybe.

On the flipside Melnyk gives us a five part title track. Fallen trees carry their magnificence, grandeur and glory with them even in their felled state, according to the sleeve notes and our hero essentially paints that for us in notes. Each part does have its own ambience and phrasing, the introduction of a cello and vocal touches during ‘Part III: Apparition’ really grants it a dignity and resonance.

The final part of the piece, ‘Part V: Not Forgotten’ sees the piano almost sprinting away from the listener, those coruscating notes streaking away behind it until it ends abruptly.

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Fallen Trees is always a very emotional listen for me, which is interesting because in an instrumental sense the music that usually penetrates my highly armoured defences piercing the sensitive mush inside, is usually very sparing, minimal. What Melnyk does I think is to conjure such a rush of sound that you end up listening to and being entranced by the blending, or clashing overtones rather than the notes themselves. It can be an utterly hypnotic experience.

Try something different, something continuous.

1103 Down.

*Nils Frahm and A Winged Victory For The Sullen being my other finds there, they have a reputation for experimental electronic music.