Silent Noise Revolution ~ Icarus Tapes #2

Based in Belgium, Icarus is a record label and radio show dedicated to experimental music. Last year Silent Noise Revolution, the name under which pianist Jan De Block releases music, performed a live session with Luc van Lieshout at a recording studio, the results of which have been mastered and released as Icarus Tapes #2, the second in the label’s library series.

The session opens with a lilting melody traced out on a piano. On “Demons,” as on many tracks on the record, the piano is joined by van Lieshout’s horn (both the bugle and trumpet were used during the session) for a pleasant, slightly melancholic duet. The tone of the piece is a little pensive, the piano slightly unsure of itself, but not scared, as the name “Demons” might imply.

“Demons” is followed by “Don’t Say Anything,” a song whose opening bugle motif tips more into the tragic, evoking the fatalism of film noir.  Despite the title this track has more to say, the melody acting more assertive as the piano fills in the space between the bugle’s brief themes. The background noise of the recording is also more audible here— as the album progresses the gentle crackle of vinyl and small glitches such as the faint whirs and clicks on “Teared Apart,” increasingly augment the mediated, yesteryear quality of the album’s spare, beautiful music.

The debt the improvisations on this album owe to the romantic era is made most clear in the lovely recording of Chopin’s “Prelude No 4,” an inclusion that makes perfect sense amidst the slow development and the insistent building on a theme that occurs across the album’s other entries.

Cinematic is an over-used term with regards to certain forms of modern composition— the capacity a solo piano has to build drama and pathos has been especially taken up in recent years in film and television— but it’s a word that this album begs for. The compositions here are full of vivid yearning, the trills of “Our Silent Fight” and the sorrow of “Synapse Sync” play on the listener’s feelings in the way that perhaps only the timbre of a piano can.

The world is full of solo piano music but Silent Noise Revolution’s album for Icarus feels vital despite the faint familiarity of its melodies. The technological filters help— the distance of the vinyl and the hazy warmth of the recording. So does van Lieshout’s horn and its spare but perfect deployment: When it loudly enters to trace a brief line of melody at several points on “Synapse Sync” or “Don’t say anything,” for example, it transforms the time and place of De Block’s piano playing, pushing it more directly into the specific, the darkness of an LA night, perhaps, as opposed to the more universal imagery of the piano. (Jennifer Smart)