SALMON UNIVERSE

After the passing of the late great Ryuchi Sakamoto during winter in early 2023 Richard Pike gravitated towards the piano as a daily ritual, involving improvisation, or what he thinks of as ‘real-time composition’.

 

Avoiding the standard tropes of piano-meets-electronic Pike treads a beautiful line between refined elegant decisions and soft noise. The mix is at once intimate and expansive.

 

Deconstructed dubtechno and piano co-exist here, pulling from cassette sound sources, minimalism, and the ghostly acoustic ephemera that emerges from looped material, making it intimate, granular and dust-covered.

 

Pike’s initial approach was an interest in a repeated daily practice, finding earthly textural tape loops and arranging them on computer in the morning, against a commune with the piano in the afternoon. Very quickly a suite of pieces formed.

 

The process involved collecting electronic beds in the studio, then moving downstairs to his Eavestaff Minipiano in the living room, to record melodic and harmonic expressions over a background of texture, with and against the flow. This process was pure and impulsive, leaving editing and scrutiny until later.

 

The textures echo the likes of Romeo Poirier, Jan Jelinek, Deepchord, early music concrete and a nostalgia for the ‘clicks and pops’ era that inspired Richard’s early experiments in his Warp Records-affiliated band PVT.

 

The idea of redemption came about in these recording sessions partly as an act of self-forgiveness, acceptance and renewal. But it was also a trance-inducing process, momentarily redeeming oneself from the predicament of being human, which is perhaps music’s greatest gift.

 

Whereas Pike's vocal record 'How To Breathe' (2021) was an expression of an individual finding a path through intense change, here on Redemption Suite I-IX Pike is more settled, perhaps bringing in the glitch sound-worlds of his ambient moniker Deep Learning and entwining it with his sonic identity as a composer for TV drama. It is also Pike’s first record focused on the piano.

 

In recent years Richard Pike has shared the live stage with James Holden and Gold Panda and established himself as a sought-after screen composer. He also plays with forward-thinking trio Forgiveness and has collaborated as a duo with JQ (‘Tessera’) and another project with guitarist Adam Coney (‘Driftingland’ on Trestle Records) 

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richardpike.bandcamp.com

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salmonuniverse.bandcamp.com