OP-1 Is the Instrument, Not the Opus

This processed piano track, by Nuun, can be heard as a complement to one from earlier in the week, Carl Mikael’s “Live Looping Improv.” Mikael’s posting was a full, multi-camera video that captured his performance in intimate detail. Nuun’s, “OP – 1 092116 Piano En Loops,” doesn’t include video of the execution. Nonetheless, the combination of elements in Nuun’s piece, of gently played piano and of lightly glitching effects applied to that piano, is so diagrammatic, you can almost see the procedures as they are enacted. (The “OP -1” in the title refers not to the opus number, but to the device, from the boutique Stockholm-based firm Teenage Engineering, that’s providing the processing.) The piano is the root of it. The piano line lands in the Venn Diagram overlap between neo-classicism and minimalism, between appealingly emotive and motorically repetitive. The piano riffs themselves are repeated enough to be, at times, indistinguishable from the echo and more fractured reflections that Nuun then imposes on them. That parallel is part of why the overall combination works, how the piano presupposes the digital effects imposed upon it.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/nuunnuun.