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Piano, piano (1980-1983)

july 20, 2024

Ronald's recent passing had me reminisce about the years we worked together, on a host of musical projects. Notably and intensively in the years 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, we shared a busy creative routine. But mid-1983 brought a significant disruption when Ronald suddenly faced debilitating physical problems. Still, be it gradually in less denser formats, as life sort of caught up with us, we continued to think together about music 'n' things, and met every now and then to record the odd tape with song sketches well into the early noughties, when we began to work out a plan for an adverture game cum picture book, that would feature the two as its main protagonists. ‘Hollandse Meesters’ we called this ultimate among our fictions. Dutch Masters we had become. Dutch Masters we would remain.

While rummaging through my sparse, chaotic, and widely dispersed archives—entropy!—I encountered numerous familiar items that rekindled memories of various episodes and anecdotes. Many of these recollections, including numerous faded details, I have documented in an extensive and comprehensive history of our Amphibious Records micro-label. This narrative should be featured in the upcoming issue of Kormplastics' “Annual.” (If it is not, I will probably make sure that it becomes available through other channels.)

Bref. It was during this process that I came across a tape marked R/H (for ‘Ronald/Harold‘) and ‘piano, piano‘, dated 2/2/1983.

Early 1983 was right after the year that we indulged in the making of Commuters, which took up much of our time and energy in 1982, and which had us almost 'live inside' the acoustic piano. We had decided to make this planned album piano-and-voice only, and Dagmar Krause's commitment to do the singing provided the adrenaline needed to go to extremes. The sketches we made for Commuters that year hardly left anything to chance. We did the necessary recordings and the final mix for the album with Dagmar in less than a week's time in September 1982.

The choice of the acoustic piano as only instrument on the Commuters album was, in our early post-ULTRA days, an act of—what we saw as—juste rebellion against the—what we saw as obviously—faux rebellion with electric and emerging electronics-for-the masses instruments against traditional instruments, that marked fashion and trends in the popmusic of the day. Combined with our ongoing study and digging up of ever new ways to musick and our 'pop-eyed’ (think a bit if you do not directly feel the double sens here :) fascination with post-war academic composers, it made the piano a fact that was ever more difficult to avoid.

This is then where somehow fits the forgotten taped recording of the two of us playing piano, dated February 2nd, 2024. It was a Wednesday, we met in the morning.

If we include this ‘Piano, piano‘, there are exactly three things on which Ronald and I use the acoustic piano.

The Commuters are in the middle, but they appear inside two brackets.

The first bracket, the opening one, is the very first piece that we did together, the three-part ‘You & Me’, conceived and recorded in the spring of 1980. (The first of the three could already be heard as part of Stduio's No. 461.) The basic material consisted of three sounds, idiomatic in the context of day-to-day, conjugal, fights. Sounds that accompany face-to-face arguments couples and other pairs would get involved in. At home. Chez eux. We recorded those sounds onto tape: the sound of breaking glass (empty beer bottles that we smashed on a few paving stones), the sound of a door slamming shut (that of the kitchen in Ronald’s house), and running up and down a flight of stairs (at my place, because that was where the stairs sounded best). Through strict little schemes, the duration and pan of those sounds were varied over the three sections of the piece, each of which lasted exactly ten times twenty, i.e. 200, seconds, making for a total duration of ten minutes. We commented on the glass-door-staircase sounds with solitary piano tones, for which we had again set up a couple of rules. Sometimes we could choose, but nothing was left to chance, all sounding events had been fixed beforehand.

It is like the ‘neoplastic’ voicing of a rigidly vulgar quarrel, of hate & love, of you & me, abstracted into a simple but rigid combinatorics of sampled sounds. We made the final version late April 1980 on the four-track TEAC reel-to-reel in the demo studio of youth centre Oktopus on the Amsterdam Keizersgracht, where we also played and recorded the acoustic piano notes that we needed to round up the piece. Each of us played one pan-side of pointillist and very lonely piano tones, commenting and extending the combinatorics of conjugal fighting sounds.

The closing bracket is ‘Piano, Piano’. It is a duo improvisation on two acoustic piano's performed and recorded in Amsterdam on the morning of Wednesday February 2nd, 1983. It is a strange and remarkable recording, unrelated as it is to other work we were pursuing at the time. Around the same time we had just started our Conspiracies, and began working on moulding and recording material for our Polish and French fictions. Note that in the Conspiracies, project we deliberately choose to not be ourselves.

Not so however in ‘Piano, Piano’, captured straight with two microphones, one for ‘you‘, one for ‘me‘.

Unprepared, it turned a dynamic and adventurous, spontaneous, uninhibited, and very personal musical conversation, in which we each transcend our individual piano-technical limitations. It is fun, shameless, full of energy, to the point but still totally free, smart, brimming with ideas, rich in variety of colour and emotion.
In hindsight, and re-hearing the magic in this forgotten recording for the first time in over forty years, it is a total mystery to me why it so happened that we did this only once that morning in 1983, and never again used an acoustic piano in any of the music that we did together after that 2nd of February, 1983.

Our ‘joint piano music’ stopped as suddenly as does the recording of ‘Piano, Piano'.

End of tape.

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[ here enter are a lot of thoughts that I may ponder upon and add at a later time ]

tags: Ronald Heiloo, piano, Amphibious

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