Tilting at Windmills.
This album is music created mainly with experimental thumb pianos, broken guitars, and toy keyboards.
The sounds range from unprocessed to multi-processed through various effect chains and computer software. There is a spe [+]Tilting at Windmills.
This album is music created mainly with experimental thumb pianos, broken guitars, and toy keyboards.
The sounds range from unprocessed to multi-processed through various effect chains and computer software. There is a special emphasis on harmonics, distortion, and texture within the subtle discourse of background and foreground.
The songs are a compilation of improv captures and modular open-ended assemblages. They involve an examination of the interplay between feeling and conceptual strategies. The moods are diverse, moving on a spectrum of the gritty to the pretty.
I have been building instruments for over 25 years, and for the last 15 years have been investigating a variety of materials, mechanisms, and techniques for the thumb piano: plucked idiophone, lamellaphone, mbira, sansa, kalimba, likembe. The same sensibility that applies to the method of making experimental instruments, where the quirky, unconventional and unique character of certain configurations is cultivated, also flows into the music.
A big inspiration for me in regards to building musical instruments is the work of Harry Partch and the strongest musical influences are African Music, World Folk Music, and Jazz.
This is #8 in a series of solo studio projects.
!!!New Album by RP Collier at CD Baby!!!
title: Map of the Sky
http://www.cdbaby.com/rpcollier2
REVIEWS:
The Wire
Issue 244 June 2004
www.thewire.co.uk
American multi-instrumentalist RP Collier plays thumb piano, toy synthesizer, guitar and drum machine in various combinations. Titles such as "Losing at Solitaire" hint at a modest and self-deprecating nature but the overall title of this project suggests a quixotic spirit quietly churning beneath his humility. There are faint echoes of Harry Partch here, particularly in "Solitaire", whose thumb pianism, refracted and distended in a hall of home studio mirrors is positively gamelan in its scale and resonance. But this is preceded by the charming greeting of "Aperture", in which Collier's synthesizer gently cascades over an ethnologically forged loop of keyboard.
Many of Collier's titles are self-descriptive, such as "Sunrise: Mars Colony Biodome 5", grainy, ruddy and dawning, or "Plinkage", which evokes images of a ro
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