Pain Avoidance Machine

In late 2014, feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat, I turned to the prepared piano as a refuge. I was coming out of an intense two-year period of composing for every conceivable instrumental combination, and not sure where to go next. I felt the need to get back to basics, and create something essential, elemental. These pieces are meditations, each with it's own mood, but constructed in a similar way. The piano is the pain avoidance machine -Erik Griswold. America-born, Australia-based composer and pianist Erik Griswold is a master of the prepared piano. Since the late 1980s he has forged a deeply personal approach to transforming the piano from a tonal hammered instrument into a device that transgresses acoustic music traditions. Uniting robotic rhythms of almost electronic timbre, uncharacteristic evocative melody, and metallic murmurs, he transforms the piano with a restless and rigorous curiosity. Pain Avoidance Machine is an intimate set of miniatures. The listener is invited inside the piano, exposed to the instrument's raw materiality. Griswold offers an invitation to explore the prepared piano's sound-world in a detail that reveals an entirely new dimension. Mechanistic motifs and rhythms are layered one atop another to create fragile musical collages. Like a broken pianola, the subtle nuances of the prepared piano have an off-kilter quality, full of unexpected resonances, buzzes, and percussive strikes.

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