Francesco Tristano – Auricle/Bio/On

Luxembourg-born Francesco Tristano is an accomplished pianist who attended the Juliyard musical school in New York and made a name for himself by performing classical piano in auditoriums across the western world, and winning a few awards as well. But he also has a foot in contemporary electronic music, he has a debut album of piano and electronics which Fernando Corona (Murcof) helped him make, and now his newest album Auricle/Bio/On is here, with Minimal Dub Techno legend Moritz Von Oswald (one half of Basic Channel) who ‘enchanted & mastered’ it, according to the back cover. For this album Tristano takes a piano and treats it as a machine from which to produce sounds, which are created with the idea of Techno in mind. The instrument/machine is approached from an abstract angle with John Cage’s idea that every single noise is music, these recording were then taken by Tristano and cut down, splintered and turned into Minimal Techno pieces. Von Oswald then subtly impregnated and shaped this material using his magic dust (presumably), and we are left with a two-track 50-minute album.So, a piano is made to sound like a shattered comet drifting in space, like thousands of dust motes seen across a sun beam, millions of plankton stretching through the sea. Notes made by keys are de-contextualized, precisely cropped and spliced until they turn into the textural/percussive building blocks of Minimal Techno. The album’s two pieces are in reality one long movement, progressing from the original piano recordings that are made up of stuttering stabs at keys and rapid scales, a distorted hiss of prepared, or impeded, piano strings. From there it’s onto texture/percussion, atmospheric scrapes, oscillations and flanging, a more expressive and less dour sense of melody, sounds that imitate bongos, woodblocks, even a washboard and all the while the piano makes cameos, seen through different filters and processing. That’s the first track.After the first couple of minutes the second completely lets go of the spectre of the piano, apart from deep Dubby piano chord drops, and the piece turns into a almost-funky, danceable, pulsating thing that could even be played in a club (albeit a very perculiar one). Grainy electronic textures, pings, blips, blops and all that, and an intermittent 4x4 beat are the only noticeable elements throughout, there’s less of a progression and more of a trance-inducing throb, and it’s perhaps less satisfying than the first half/piece which has more of a progression to grapple with.It’s an interesting concept, and sometimes it’s quite listenable and enjoyable if you really dig into it and un-earth the subtleties, but it does take a bit of effort, it can be cold and distant, difficult and even a little boring at times. The scale and the details, though, they tend to stick with you. 65% Francesco Tristano on MySpace