Bewitching Detail and Thunderous Power from Pianist Karine Poghosyan at Carnegie Hall

Last night the thunderstorm over Carnegie Hall was no match for what Karine Poghosyan was doing inside. New York’s most charismatic classical pianist played for more than two hours, completely from memory – including five pieces by Liszt. Flinging her hair back, swaying on the piano bench, she embodied the grace of a gymnast and also the strength and stamina of a boxer. Her response to the standing ovation at the end was to flex her biceps and give everybody the revolutionary salute, left fist triumphantly in the air. She’d earned it.

There’s a fleeting moment in Liszt’s Rhapsodie Espagnole where instead of a new thematic variation, the composer offers a split-second shadow of a doubt: are we really going in the right direction, toward real Romany-inspired bliss, he asks? Other pianists capable of playing the piece would likely burn through that moment. But Poghosyan caught it, as she did so many similar instances throughout the rest of the program.

Poghosyan has a righthand with a quicksliver precision but also crushing power, and a left hand so ferocious that she could ride the pedal, as she frequently did throughout the show, and still Liszt’s stabbing low-register chords would resonat cleanly. But ultimately, what differentiates her from the hundreds of other hotshot pianists around the world who can play on her level is that that she goes much deeper into the music, for narrative, and emotion, and especially amusement.

This bill was conceptual, springboarded by an epiphany she had after an apparently disheartening meeting with a top agent a couple of years ago. After that, Poghosyan swore off trying to please people and instead decided to concentrate on what she likes playing most. She offered this program simply as a collection of works that make her feel the most alive. Truth in advertising: she could have woken the dead.

Sporting a crimson jumpsuit, she leapt from the piano after nimbly negoatiating the cruelly challenging octaves and jackhammer flamenco passages of the night’s first number, DeFalla’s Fantasia Betica. After changing to a shiny copper dress for the second half of the program, she closed with two pieces by Khachaturian, a composer whose work she has fiercely advocated. An arrangement of the adagio from his opera Spartacus came to life as a coy flirtation, a cat-and-mouse game between possible lovers, jaunty precision against airy, balletesque joy laced with caution and bittersweetness..

Khachaturian’s 1961 Piano Sonata was a study in far more intense contrasts, from gorgeously glittering yet enigmatic Near Eastern tonalities, a Debussy-esque garden in a hailstorm, and finally the crushing volleys of a dance with far heavier artillery than mere sabres. And she approached the Liszt with almost shocking sensitivity and attention to detail. Poghosyan shifted with seamless verve between angst and exhilaration, dazzling upper righthand constellations and stygian terror from the low left, in the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 7, the Grande Etude de Paganini, No, 3 and the lilting Spozalizio, from his Annees de Pelerinage. And as hubristic as Liszt’s arrangemetn of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543 was, Poghosyan was undaunted as she worked the counterpoint with High Romantic flair. She encored with the romping finale from Stravinsky’s Firebird.

In academia, both piano faculty and students refer derisively to “sovietization:”a cookie-cutter approach to performance. Last night, Poghosyan reaffirned her status as the least Sovietized pianist in the world.

An Eclectic Master of the Macabre and the Cinematic Visits Crown Heights

JG Thirlwell sold out a two-night stand at National Sawdust this spring. Admittedly, the place’s capacity is smaller than you would think, considering its size, but that’s still an achievement. Are there enough old goths or cinephiles to pack the Happy Lucky No. 1 Gallery, where he’s playing on May 31 at 8 PM? Probably. The surprisingly eclectic film composer – with a punishing past in 80s industrial and gothic music – is opening a cunningly conceived twinbill. The similarly cinematic if considerably sunnier Tredici Bacci, who make hilarious videos poking fun at 60s and 70s Italian film and its scores, play afterward at around 9. Cover is $20; get there early if you’re going.

Out of Thirlwell’s substantial back catalog, his tv cartoon score Music of The Venture Bros., Vol. 2 might be the best way to gear up for the show.It’s funny, relentlessly energetic, very 80s, and it shows how colorful Thirlwell can be when the script calls for it. In addition to composing this score, he also conducts the orchestra.

A sardonic fanfare builds to a big, amtbitious theme in the opening number, Ham and Cheese Hero. With one eyebrow raised, the orchestral arrangement pulses almost frantically through the antagonist’s theme, Chickenhawk

Big Rooster is straight-up bombast for the dancefloor, spiced with blippy R2D2 electronics, while Pay the Piper is an incongruously successful maashup of Led Zep and Bartok for strings and percussion.

Optimistic Space Travel could be a techier predecessor for Tredici Bacci’s sarcastic blitheness. Tension rises with the strings in Ready for Takeoff,; then, in Scenester, Thirlwell builds an irresistibly sardonic space lounge scenario accented with wry faux-jazz.

The rest of the album, sequentially, includes warpy video game-style variations; a furtively hilarious mashup of John Barry and Isaac Hayes; ominously murky strings and Exorcist keys; a sick, OCD shout-out to both Richard Strauss and the Mission Impossible theme; phony P-Funk; space valkyries; a chase, a ridiculous march and a big stomping coda. Now where can you hear all this goodnatured noise? Not on Bandcamp or Soundcloud, unfortunately. Not on Spotify either, and a youtube search yields nothing on the first several search pages. If you have the energy, start with Thirlwell’s Vimeo channel.

 

Jazz Icons Salute a Fallen Hero at Roulette

Composer and saxophonist Joseph Jarman was one of the most important forces in serious improvised concert music over the past fifty years. A founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (better known as the AACM) and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Jarman would go on to a second and similarly acclaimed career teaching and running an aikido martial arts studo in Brooklyn during the latter part of his life. An allstar lineup from both of those careers saluted him with a frequently rapturous, haunting performance Saturday night at Roulette.

His longtime bandmate, drummer Thurman Barker, offered a revealing insight into how Jarman wrote: his long-toned, slowly unfolding compositions wouldn’t have such fluid beauty if they’d been faster, or caught in a steady rhythm. And Barker was right: Jarman wrote many of the AACM’s best-known tunes. Barker spiced a couple of largescale Jarman numbers with all sorts of rattling flourishes, echoed by many of the other members of the Lifetime Visions Orchestra, playing a small museum’s worth of rattles from Jarman’s personal collection just as he would have done when not playing sax. Or reading his poetry, or acting out some kind of surreal performance art: he was a renaissance guy.

In keeping with the compositions, the band kept their lines precise and bittersweet: some of the highlights were an allusively modal one from acoustic guitarist John Ehlis, a fond fanfare from saxophonist Douglas Ewart, a more emphatic one from saxophonist Jessica Jones and some meticulously misty atmospherics from drummer Rob Garcia.

A trio which included Ewart and pianist Bernadette Speach offered a smaller-scale take on similarly pensive, heartfelt themes. Saxophonist Oliver Lake and drummer Pheeroan akLaff picked up the pace with some welcome rolling thunder, while trumpet icon Wadada Leo Smith led a trio through more spare, otherworldly territory. Roscoe Mitchell was ailing and couldn’t make it to the show, so a quartet of saxophonist Henry Threadgill, drummer Reggie Nicholson, organist Amina Claudine Myers and guitarist Brandon Ross closed the night with an achingly gorgeous series of waves. Threadgill slashed and jabbed while Myers built calm, sometimes gospel-inflected swaths, Ross’ angst-fueled, David Gilmour-esque leads were arguably the nigth’s most beautiful moments out of many.

Roulette has all sorts of similarly good jazz coming up next month, beginning on June 4 at 8 PM with bassist Nick Dunston premiering his new suite La Operación for soprano voice, two alto saxes, two basses and two percussionists. cover is $18 in advance. It’s also worth giving a shout-out to the venue for not being cashless – remember, #cashless=apartheid – you can get an advance ticket at the box office for cash on show nights.

 

 

Greek Judas Headline One of the Year’s Best Twinbills in the East Village

When Greek Judas took the stage at Niagara at a little after eleven a couple of Thursdays ago, everybody in the crowd suddenly had their phones out. Maybe that was because three of the five guys in the band were wearing animal masks. But it’s more likely that nobody in the audience had ever seen a Greek metal band.

And in that space, they were louder than ever. Singer Quince Marcum projects as well as any other frontman in town, but this time he was low in the mix. When the band got their start, guitarist/lapsteel player Wade Ripka and guitarist Adam Good would typically take long, careening, Middle Eastern-tinged solos. And that worked; both guys love their creepy chromatics, and they can get totally symphonic without being boring. Times have changed: instead of jabbing at each other to pull a song back on track, there’s a lot more interplay and at least semi-controlled chaos now. Ironically, the tighter they get, the more psychedelic the music is.

Bassist Nick Cudahy downtunes his axe now, for some serious tarpit sonics. Meanwhile, drummer Chris Stromquist makes the songs’ tricky rhythms look easy: the way he plays, no matter how bizarre the underlying beat is, you can stand and sway from side to side and not feel any more stoned than you might already be.

Obviously, you don’t have to be high to appreciate the band. One of the reasons why they’ve tightened up the show is that they have a lot more songs and they don’t have to stretch them out so much. They’re all covers, from the 1920s to the 1960s, most of them from the criminal and revolutionary underworld who fought against dictatorial terror and then a British invasion after World War II. Many of those tunes were written by ethnic Greeks who’d escaped persecution in Cyprus and Turkey, only to find themselves second-class citizens in their ancestral land.

The best song of the night was I’m a Junkie, which might have just been a shout-out to good hash, or something stronger – Marcum sings everything in the original Greek. The most lyrically innocuous love song of the night was also one of the most macabre. Police brutality, heavy partying, black humor behind bars, trans-Mediterranean drug smuggling and crack addiction were some of the other topics Marcum addressed – he almost always gives the audience a little translation for just about everything. They’re back at Niagara (Ave. A and 7th St., the former King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut across from the southwest corner of Tompking Square Park) this Thursday at 10. As a bonus, the excellent Trouble with Kittens – who play similarly edgy if somewhat quieter and faster, new wave-influenced songs – open the night at 9. Noir cinematic trio Sexmob‘s brilliant drummer, Kenny Wollesen is sitting in with them this for this show. It’s a pass-the-tip-jar situation.

Darkly Eclectic Composer Jay Vilnai Releases His Most Haunting Album

Guitarist Jay Vilnai is one of Brooklyn’s most individualistic, consistently interesting composers. Over the years, he’s led a fiery Romany-rock band, Jay Vilnai’s Vampire Suit and made acerbic chamber music out of Shakespearean poetry. He’s also the lead guitarist in another wild, popular Slavic string band, Romashka. His latest album, Thorns All Over – a collection of new murder ballads with text by poet Rachel Abramowitz, streaming at Bandcamp – is one of his best projects so far. In fact, it could be the most lurid, Lynchian indie classical album ever made. Vilnai is playing the album release show at Arete Gallery in Greenpoint on June 6 at 7 PM, leading a trio with violinist Skye Steele and singer Augusta Caso. Cover is $15.

The allbum’s Pinter-esque plotline follows a series of jump cuts. Likewise, the rhythms shift almost incessantly, enhancing a mood of perpetual unease. Vilnai layers eerily looping piano, desolately glimering tremolo guitar and evil, twinkling vibraphone up to a savage crescendo in the album’s opening track, The Lake: it’s all the more haunting for how quietly and offhandedly the narrator relates what happens along the shore that night.

Vilnai builds a skronky maze of counterpoint in tandem with Reuben Radding’s bass in A Woman or a Gun, a surreal mashup of what could be Ted Hearne indie opera, John Zorn noir soundtrack tableau and Angelo Badalamenti taking a stab at beatnik jazz.

“I took her to the dark forest to see if she would light the way,”Vilnai intones over gloomy pools of piano, as the band make their way into The Forest. A chamber ensemble of Skye Steele on violin, Oscar Noriega on clarinet, Ben Holmes on trumpet, Katie Scheele on English horn and David Wechsler on alto flute build a gently fluttering tableau, a sarcastic contrast with the story’s ugly foreshadowing.

A ghostly choir – Quince Marcum, Laura Brenneman and Jean Rohe – join in an echoing vortex behind Vilnai’s stately angst in Heartbreak. He layers grim low-register guitar, coldly starlit piano and enveloping atmospherics in the title track, up to a squirrelly mathrock crescendo amd slowly back down: this love triangle turns out to be a lot stranger than expected.

The album’s macabre final diptych is The Night We Met: Noriega’s moody clarinet rises over creepy, lingering belltones, Vilnai’s minimalist guitar lurking in the background. It concludes as a glacially waltzing dirge. Count this as one of this year’s most haunting and strangest records: you’ll see it on the best albums of 2019 page here in December.

A Brilliant Classical Music Discovery From Ten Years Ago Brings Her Virtuoso Intensity to Carnegie Hall

It’s always validating to see an artist take their work to a major stage after they’ve blown you away at a small venue. it was just over ten years ago when the phenomenally talented pianist Karine Poghosyan played a program at Bargemusic, enthusiastically reviewed by New York Music Daily’s predecessor (and current annex for classical music and jazz), Lucid Culture. Poghosyan is at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall this May 30 at 7:30 PM playing works by DeFalla, Liszt and Khachaturian, and you better believe this blog will be there. Here’s what happened that spring night at the Brooklyn waterfront;

“The barge, tethered at the old Brooklyn Heights Fulton Ferry landing had pretty much stopped swaying by the time Karine Poghosyan settled in at the keys: for awhile, it looked like it was going to be a rocky ride. Instead, it was as if the waves parted and gave the Armenian-American virtuoso clear passage through a brutally challenging, frequently exhilarating performance. She warmed up with Haydn’s warmly consonant Piano Sonata No. 38 in F Major, Hob XVI: 23 and then tackled Chopin’s Four Mazurkas, Op. 67, beginning with a remarkably understated take on the famous first one in G. Other pianists schmaltz this up: she didn’t. The haunting G Minor Mazurka – as well as the more upbeat, gypsy-inflected C Minor and A Minor Mazurkas – were extraordinary, Poghosyan pushing to the absolute limits of rubato, bringing out every microtone of longing and drama.

Then she launched into Liszt’s knotty, spectacular Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C Sharp Minor, the first of two show-stoppers. She took its hammering staccato chords, spectacular lefthand leaps from the lowest to highest registers and scurrying sixteenth-note runs down the scale in the right and while she didn’t make them look effortless, she had such command that she was able to pull out all the stops and blast her way through them without ever losing her footing.

That she was able to shift gears after that, with a poignant, impeccably sensitive rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Elegie in E Flat Minor, Op. 3, No. 1 was perhaps just as impressive. Then she ratcheted the intensity up to redline again and stayed there for the entirety of Stravinsky’s 1921 piano arrangement of three movements from Petrouchka: the gypsyish Danse Russse, evoking the Chopin earlier in the program; an utterly macabre, resoundingly successful romp through Chez Petrouchka and ending with La Semaine Grasse, a revelation, vastly more powerful than the ballet’s original orchestral score. Anyone with the desire to get to the root of the composer’s paradigm-shifting, deathly tonalities would do well to discover this version.”

Meah Pace Brings Her Classic High-Voltage Soul Sounds to Lincoln Center

Meah Pace is one of the leading lights of the New York soul underground Although the charismatic singer has performed at Lincoln Center in the past, her show there at the atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd St. on May 30 at 7:30 PM  will be her debut there as a bandleader.

Onstage, Pace is a force of nature. She twirls, pounces, spins and stalks across the stage with the energy of a professional athlete – which she is, as the former leader of a NFL cheerleading squad. Vocally, she.s very eclectic: in quieter moments, she has the sweetness of a golden-age singer like Bettye Swann, as well as the grit of Tina Turner and the relentless power of Sharon Jones, an artist Pace once opened for at the Apollo

Her group for the show includes many bandmates from her debut album, titled 11:03 (streaming at Spotify) .She’ll have jazz keyboardist Randy Ingram along with brilliant baritone saxophonist “Moist” Paula Henderson and bassist Dan Fabricatore, plus trombonist John Speck, tenor saxophonist Jeremy Udden, former Sharon Jones drummer Eric Kalb and noir connoisseur Al Street on guitar.

The songs on the record reveal how much ground Pace can cover, from the simmering, latin-tinged strut of Promised Land, to the title track, a steamy Friday summer night scenario with a trick ending. That’s where the Tina Turner comparison echoes most clearly.

On My Brain has a steady, suspenseful beat flavored with Ingram’s simmering. nocturnal organ and reverb-toned Rhodes, “Would it be too hard to forget about the man I loved too hard?” Pace asks poetically. Yet, she admits that “I get up early and go to bed late so that I can sit for hours with him on my brain.”Meanwhile ingram teases uneasy, carnivalesque flourishes from the keys.

“I come, you call, I trip, you fall,” Pace explains as the funky Memphis groove of I Don’t Need Ya gets underway. It’s a serious reality check aimed at a manipulative dude with an overinflated ego.

Gracefully has a slow Aretha-style gospel sway: it’s a showcase for Pace’s gentle, sweetly nuanced side, a message of encouragement and hope for a brokenhearted friend. The title cut has a chugging, vintage Ike and Tina  pulse. Pace paints a vivid picture of a long overdue end-of-the-week scenario, the main character with her “Long red fingernails, legs like solid gold,” sitting at a six o’clock table, “Feeling enabled for a Friday night.”  The story’s ending hits you so fast that you may not see it coming.

Although Pace writes her own songs, she’s been known to break out a cover or two. One of the best is a harrowing reinvention of the old Alice Cooper ballad Only Women Bleed. Pace sang that with a brooding, knowing intensity at a Long Island City show (very enthusiastically reviewed here), an empahetic empowerment anthem for any woman who might have been abused. Those are just a few of the flavors Pace is likely to deliver this Thursday night.

Perennial Relevance, Irrepressible Wit and Catchy Tunes From Meredith Monk at the Jewish Museum

Thursday night at the Jewish Museum, Meredith Monk sang a playful, relentlessly catchy, perennially relevant mix of songs spanning over forty years. Now well into her seventies, the iconic composer still has the same clarity and purity in her upper register that she had back in the 1970s when she first came to prominence as a young lioness of the avant garde. Since then, just about every quirky songstress, from Laurie Anderson, to Bjork, to Carol Lipnik, owes her a shout for blazing the trail.

Monk always looks like the cat who ate the canary, an outward calm masking an inner delight that she can’t resist sharing. Her leaps and bounds and sudden rhythmic shifts seem more seamless – and easy to sing – than they actually are, considering what a brilliant tunesmith she is. Bright, kinetic melodies from throughout the show lingered long after it was over. She opened solo, a-cappella with Wa-li-oh, a 1975 number from her Songs from the Hill collection, where she’d literally gone to the mountaintop for the inspiration to write them. Its subtle echo effects may well have reflected that milieu.

She delivered similarly dappled, sunspotted pointillisms in a couple of other numbers: the Xosa-inflected Click Song, from 1988, and later in a series of brief pieces from last year’s suite of Cellular Songs, the final puckishly titled Lullaby for Leaves. By then, she’d been joined by two members of her Vocal Ensemble, Allison Sniffin and Katie Geissinger, tall blonde valkyries flanking the modestly dressed, slender bandleader. The two womens’ harmonies, frequent upward flights and command of Monk’s frequently challenging counterpoint were the icing on the cake.

The night’s most memorable number was Scared Song, for organ and vocals, its macabre undercurrent reflecting its response to Reagan-era fearmongering. “Fear becomes violence when we don’t know it’s fear,” she advised.

Another starkly relevant moment was when the trio sang Memory Song, from Monk’s dystopic 1984 suite The Games, a calmly surreal evocation from the point of view of a quasi-griot enumerating lost cultural references, from the essential to the ridiculous. That’s why Monk’s work has always had such resonance beyond the cutting edge: there’s always something funny to lighten even the darkest points.

Monk related how she’d recorded the bittersweetly circling Gotham Lullaby in 1975, solo on piano on her debut album, and felt like she’d botched the take. Producer Manfred Eicher told he it was fine – she could do another take if she felt like it, but he’d be going out for coffee while she did. And he was right, she demurred: there was magic in its imperfections, although her take this time out certainly didn’t seem to have any.

The most operatic moment of the night was a song from her 2006 Impermanence suite. The most trickily rhythnic was Waltz in 5’s, from 1996’s The Politics of Quiet. The most enigmatic was her own solo rendition of Happy Woman, from last year. Monk’s everywoman narrator seems on the surface to be perfectly content, but it turns out she’s also troubled in almost innumerable other ways. At face value, she maintained a resolute calm, but the turbulent undercurent cuoldn’t be masked. In an era when state legislatures are falling like dominoes to a lunatic misogynist fringe, that song couldn’t have had more of an impact.

This was it for this spring’s series of concerts at the Jewish Museum sponsored by the Bang on a Can organization, but they typically do an outdoor summer series at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City as well. Meanwhile, the Museum’s must-see Leonard Cohen exhibit will be up through Sept 8, and trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s noir cinematic trio Sexmob are there for free on June 11 at around 6 as part of this year’s Museum Mile Festival.

The Chelsea Symphony Celebrate Audacity in the Face of Terror

The New York Philharmonic’s newfound dedication to socially aware programming is a welcome development, but among New York orchestras, the Chelsea Symphony got there first. This year their entire season has been devoted to music celebrating freedom fighters and the struggle against fascism. The coda of Saturday night’s program, Shostakovich’s audaciously transgressive Symphony No. 5, was arguably the most deliciously redemptive piece they’ve played in the last several months, at least from this perspective.

It was a loud yet remarkably distinct performance. It often makes perfect sense for an orchestra to play the lulls close to the vest, in order to max out the dynamics, but conductor Reuben Blundell did the opposite, right from the somber opening riffs, a paraphrase nicked from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The effect was the same: gloom and doom, in your face, and the rest of the symphony was as impossible to turn away from.

One by one, the ensemble absolutely nailed many of the composer’s future signature tropes: a creepy, satirical danse macabre, buffoonish phony pageantry, cynically strutting militarism and the terror and soul-depletion all those things create. In moments of guarded hope, the brass section, in particular, distinguished thesmelves with their lustrous clarity. Solos throughout the performance – notably from Michael Dwinell’s oboe, Sarah Abrams’ flute, Hannah Murphy’s harp and Tyler Hefferon’s timpani – had guided-missile precision.

The piece was an enormous gamble for the composer. In 1937, Stalin’s secret police were rounding up and murdering his friends; meanwhile, he was under fire from the censors for drifting too close to the Second Viennese School, i.e. ‘western” sounds, notwithstanding that so many of the leading figures in that movement were also Slavic. Shostakovich’s response was this wickedly catchy, emotionally panoramic, occasionally harrowing masterpiece.

Notwithstanding all its drama and hope against hope, the one section that might have been the group’s greatest triumph could have been the surreal, atmospheric interlude in the third movement, one which often gets away from other orchestras. Blundell seemed to offer contrasting hope with the robustness of the conclusion, which others often leave much more unsettled.

One thing that did get away from the orchestra was beyond anyone’s control. The DiMenna Center’s air conditioning kicked in hard and sent the string sections’ tuning awry as Nell Flanders led the ensemble matter-of-factly through Dvorak’s Violin Concerto in A Minor. Soloist Bryn Digney played it from memory. She knew what she was doing, but stringed instruments tend not to adjust well to unexpectedly cold air on a warm night.

Fortunately, that wasn’t a factor in the beginning and end of the concert, which the group kicked off with minute attention to sudden stylistic shifts throughout Courtney Bryan‘s Sanctum. A portrait of the attempt to stake out solid ground amid relentless police brutality and attacks on black Americans, it requires split-second timing to sync up with a backing track including field recordings  from the Fereguson, Missouri protests. But the Symphony were up to the task of elevating stark bluesiness out of the murk – and vice versa.

The Chelsea Symphony conclude their season on June 29 at 8 PM, repeating on the 30th at 2 at the DiMenna Center with a performance of Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 plus the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in D Minor with soloist Adam von Housen.  For Sunday’s performance, they switch out Mendelssohn for Beethoven’s violin cnncerto in that same key.. Suggested donation of $20 is about half what the Philharmonic is charging for the Corigliano ealier next month. It will be interesting to compare the two.

Deep Listening From Perennially Adventurous Pianist Satoko Fujii

Late in life, pianist Satoko Fujii‘s grandmother lost her hearing. Yet she maintained that after becoming deaf, she heard sounds of incredible beauty in her head. Fujii’s new solo album Stone – which hasn’t hit the web yet – is an attempt to evoke such a world. Her raison d’etre, throughout a wildly prolific career, has been “to play music that nobody has ever heard before.” This is definitely that: it’s one of her most strangely entertaining albums.

The opening track, Obsius comes across as rapt, still, minimalist phrases in a thunderstorm. That’s because Fujii, one of the most adventurous extended-technique pianists on the planet, is brushing and probably smacking the low strings to get that cumulo-nimbus ambience. The effect is striking, to say the least.

All but two of the numbers here are improvised; in keeping with the album title, most of the tracks reference a specific layer beneath the earth’s surface. The album’s longest and most atmospheric segment, Trachyte, has long, keening tones punctuated by the occasional pluck inside the piano: Fujii is probably getting all that resonance by bowing the high strings, essentially, using a piece of wire wrapped around them.

Fujii can be very funny: Biotite has a spot-on facsimile of a ringtone, a warpily serviceable analogue for a zither-like instrument such as the Korean gayageum, and a rodent gnawing away at something, or so it would seem. She puts aside the strange sonics for the attractively allusive miniature River Flow, then goes back under the hood for Shale, an eerily chiming, microtonal prepared piano piece.

Phonolite is a Pauline Oliveros-esque exploration of piano-body resonance. To Fujii, Lava seems to issue in waves from a deep, dark place – and then spills over into ornate neoromanticism. Icy Wood is just the opposite, spare and disquietingly bell-like.

With Fujii’s picks and scrapes resonating inside the piano, Piemontite Schist also reflects a hard surface. A buzzing motor and insectile swarming inside the piano give way to some deliciously dark chromatics in Chlorite, while Basalt is a rather coy good cop-bad cop tableau.

You think Sandstone would be portrayed by high harmonics falling away? Check! Marble echoes upward from the lows; Fujii returns to spare drops amid stormy turbulence in Ice Waterfall. She concludes with her composition Eternity, essentially a synopsis of much of this utterly psychedelic album.