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Progressive Rock CD Reviews

Satoko Fujii

Piano Music

Review by Gary Hill

This album is, as the title suggests, all played on one instrument - piano. Don't expect traditional piano music, though. This is artistic (in fact, I put it under prog because of the art music and experimental nature of it) and unique. Much of it is made up of sonic experimentation, without a lot of traditional piano played with the keys. There are only two pieces here, but the shortest of them is nearly twenty-minutes long. As odd as this is, it's equally interesting and entertaining.

This review is available in book (paperback and hardcover) form in Music Street Journal: 2021  Volume 5. More information and purchase links can be found at: garyhillauthor.com/Music-Street-Journal-2021.

Track by Track Review
Shiroku
A droning, ambient tone starts this and holds it. Other textures join tentatively after a time. Strange, spacey sonic explorations ensue with a lot of the sound involving directly plucking the piano strings. This really gets into trippy space music as it continues. It feels like something from a horror or science fiction film at times. This becomes very free-form in nature, rather sparse and quite cool further down the road. The piece, at just about 19-minutes of music, is the shorter of the two here. The ending is especially strange and tastefully creepy.
Fuwarito

This comes in with jangly music that is haunting and a bit jarring. It builds gradually outward from there, moving into some space music zones at times. At just over 27-minutes long, this is definitely an epic in terms of size. There are some particularly unsettling, horror movie soundtrack like parts of this cut. This works through a lot of different sections, presenting different modes and sounds on the piano. It is very much a piece of sonic art. There are some especially dramatic moments to this piece.

 
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