Damned Piano
Bob Bellerue
9ft Weber grand piano, speakers, pickups, mics, pedals, laptop
Recorded July 2014 by Patrick Higgins at Future Past Studios, Hudson NY. Performance photo by Alexander Perelli.
“I can’t tell how much hearing the title Damned Piano before I heard the music colored my experience of Bob Bellerue’s masterful double LP, but either way it strikes me as one of the most apt names ever. In these four brain-encroaching slabs of drone, ambience, noise, and sonic terror, Bellerue sounds like he’s doing everything he can to exorcise demons out of a piano. The process he used sounds a little ritualistic too, but it’s the results that bear ghosts, erecting a black-toned universe of creepily-calm, subconsciously-urgent music.” – Marc Masters, The Out Door (Pitchfork)
“This epic and at times over the top work fully delivers on its forthright title, which suggests the instrument in question at best deserves expletives and at worst warrants an exorcism. There’s no melodic ivory tinkling to be found here – Bellerue positions various objects on the body of the piano and its soundboard to draw out their resonant properties, then amplifies the results to cacophonous volumes. Over its four-part 64 minute duration, Damned Piano segues from looming, opaque, abraded drone workouts, to noise climaxes rippling with finely striated tonal detail, to extended passages of impenetrably dense frequencies, reverberating with seismic shudders. Proceedings do verge on the schlocky – the artwork is festooned with foreboding gothic lettering, some of which exhorts the listener to “turn it up to frightening levels”. And more variety in approach – or even something other than continual all-out attack – would have provided helpful contrast. Still, it’s certainly entertaining throughout.“ Nick Cain (The Wire, Nov 2015)
This project is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes
