“Softly spoken, with his broad Tottenham accent sounding as fruitily at odds with the rarefied nature of his music as it ever has, he describes sitting at a piano hitting a single key for days on end, listening intently to the special cadences of the sound draining from a dying string. He will also enthuse about dissonance and Miles Davis and Ravel and Can and John Cage and Ornette Coleman and fail to mention a single other “pop” artist at any stage of our discussion.“ Mark Roland talking to Mark Hollis for Melody Maker, January 1998
‘Piano’ was (deliberately) the last piece of music I ever heard in stereo, that is, with two working ears. Seven years ago now.
What does the world sound like in mono? Non-spatial, directionless; all sounds come from everywhere and nowhere and who-knows-where. This does make a stereo recording mostly redundant. But not in the case of Piano by John Cope for Allinson Brown. A room, Mark Hollis, a piano, and Phill Brown in charge of mic placement. The space is there, all of it, even in mono, even the air in that room, made audible by the slow fading notes.
Why are those notes so slow? Has Hollis taken his whole ‘silence’ trip too far? Not at all. This was originally recorded for a series of art installations, with Piano being played on a loop in the exhibition space. See, it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? One day soon I will find a gallery to sit in and listen to Piano, just for the vibe.
For now the parks and pathways of my neighbourhood are the visual accompaniment to Piano. Birdsong, summer cicadas and the kids at the school at the end of the street bleed through, filling those long silences with the sounds of life. It’s no accident Hollis mentioned John Cage to Melody Maker.
“There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
John Cage, speaking about the premiere of 4’33”
Piano – Youtube
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=niUH0MfeGZY&si=Wbi22nbDh5pvtCni
Piano – Bandcamp