AdriAn Lim-KLumpes

Yield (Off-Label OCD036)

If knowing that a solo pianist is playing a Steinway even infinitesimally narrows your idea of how this album may sound, forget it: disorienting and enchanting post-production treatments make it like hearing a piano conversing with its own ghost. It is exhilarating in its conceptual freedom, despite Adrian Lim-Klumpes’ intent to create formal preludes and fugues, but via improvisation rather than composition. He 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. 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.