Withering Sounds (excerpt)

The piano is an anti-nomadic instrument. It is often sitting in the same room for decades surviving several generations of a family, silently (or not) witnessing their histories. In interaction with the room-climate the piano is slowly changing over the decades. It is a kind of time-travel-instrument shaped by time and space. Sound artists Eva Poepplein and Janko Hanushevsky (aka Merzouga) played and recorded three aged pianos inside their rooms. They are not pianists and used the pianos as sound-generators. In interviews they unearthed as much of the pianos’ histories and made field-recordings of the rooms and the immediate space around them (the garden, the street). The stories they collected inspired the composition’s three movements, one dedicated to each of the pianos.