Adrian Lim-Klumpes album

YIELD

(Off-Label)

8.5/10

yield resIf the knowledge that a solo pianist is playing a Steinway even infinitesimally narrows your idea of how this album may sound, forget it, because post-production treatments have been used in ways that are both disorienting and enchanting. It is like hearing a piano conversing with its own ghost. Adrian Lim-Klumpes has never been constrained by convention, and this album is exhilarating in its conceptual freedom, despite his formal intent to create a set of preludes and fugues, but via improvisation rather than composition.

Armed with those 10 pieces – charming in their own right – Lim-Klumpes has then revelled in the electronic manipulation of them, so that the formal aspects may variously be distorted or pulled into sharper focus. Often the sounds are layered until they have almost infinite depth. In relation to the truly astonishing Caution he speaks (in his erudite liner-notes) of drowning the listener, and the metaphor is perfect. This is much more like under-water music than music made under water. Listen to the slow-motion unfolding of Wait, in which the notes seem suspended in a reality that lies outside of time and space.