Pain Avoidance Machine, by Erik Griswold

Pain Avoidance Machine

by Erik Griswold

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1.	Pale Yellow Frontier 02:52	buy track
2.	The Persistence Of Memory 03:40	buy track
3.	Pleasure Principle 04:21	buy track
4.	Over 04:24	buy track
5.	Pendulum Shift 03:20	buy track
6.	Hover 03:53	buy track
7.	Hammer and Tongs 03:15	buy track
8.	The Rumble Seat 03:44	buy track
9.	Short Circuits 02:21	buy track
10.	Russian Doll 01:45	buy track
11.	Effects of Enchantment 02:38	buy track
12.	Eyes Wide Open 03:27	buy track
13.	A Positive Turn 02:27	buy track
14.	Cascade 04:00	buy track
15.	Electric Aura 06:09	buy track

about

Pain Avoidance Machine is an intimate set of miniatures. You are invited inside the piano, exposed to the instruments raw materiality. Griswold offers an invitation to explore the prepared piano’s sound world in 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. 

“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 its own mood, but constructed in a similar way. The piano is the pain avoidance machine.” - Erik Griswold

credits

released August 9, 2015

Recorded by Erik Griswold on his 1887 Lipp & Sohn Piano
Mastered by Lawrence English
Released by Room40

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about

Erik Griswold Brisbane, Australia

Every object has two functions - to be put to use and to be possessed...The last note of one phrase sometimes serves as the first note of the next one...As a garden is full of flowers, so this species of counterpoint should be full of excellences of all kinds, a plastic melodic line, liveliness of movement, and beauty and variety of form.... ... more

erikgriswold.org

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