Madak is better known as Bee Mask, and runs Deception Island, which is apparently also a real place, just off the Antartic. This is his first release (as far as I’m aware) using his real name, and is a real departure from the electronic drones of his Bee Mask project. The material here is, for a start, all acoustic and was recorded “al fresco” on a found piano left by the roadside in the neighbourhood, an approach that reminds me of Organum’s Vacant Lights. Sadly though the fragile musicality of that LP is not to be had here. Scrabbles predominate, objects rattle about on (mostly) dampened strings and wooden frame while traffic buzzes, trains rattle and lorries reverse nearby. The background noise never really becomes anything more than incidental, not seeming to impact upon Madak’s rustles and taps of the instrument at all, car horns would seem to be gift’s to the solo roadside improviser, a chance to respond or to allow them to punctuate the piece, but they go unobserved. The playing itself doesn’t take off either, coming across more as a couple of casual explorative sessions of piano preparation than a piece of music, and possibly that's the aesthetic he's after, but it doesn't work for me. The gestures are busy and frustratingly repetitive, similar clacks and clatters come and go without much awareness of what came before or how to progress. Nice moments of objects forced between strings become lost in the general melee of activity rather than juxtaposed with a different approach. Madak has chosen a tough path here, taking on the most fetishised and over-prepared instrument in history on a street-corner in a happenstance manner, which with art-historical terms of found-object, site-specificity and locational improvisation I respect a great deal. Unfortunately the music here just doesn’t match the motives.Deception Island
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