Disquiet

When musician Maciek Szymczuk titled his EP Romantic Piano for Lovers, he meant lovers of surface-noise-laden, static-laced, beats-all-a-flutter minimal techno, with saw blade string sections and chest-pounding thuds of subterranean dread. Or he was just being ironic. Either way, RPfL is a six-track set on which the piano is contorted until it skips like a broken self-playing model (“Supper at Piano Bar”), or it’s muted until it sounds like an alien harpsichord (“Romantic Walk”), or it provides occasional accent marks (“Flame of Love”), or it’s entirely abandoned after an opening chord in favor of speaker-shaking sludge and heavenly vocals (“Tender Kisses”). Szymczuk calls his music “click’n'everything” — and he clearly takes pleasure in contorting whatever sounds come his way, running them over mechanistic pulses and through echo chambers with sodden walls. The rich and varied set was the final release of 2004 on the tonAtom netlabel. Download it here, and visit tonAtom at tonatom.net and Szymczuk at mszymczuk.prv.pl.

By Marc Weidenbaum