Australian composer and musician Roman Benedict releases Half-remembered Dances, a followup to his 2020 album Music to Ignore.
This album expands the ideas explored in Music to Ignore and Foghorn Lullabies, with an extra infusion of energy and chaos. Developing the solo piano and adding double bass and a frankly unnecessary amount of harmoniums and other mechanical instruments, I use this as a starting point to explore memory and reflection, as well as dance, joyfulness and silliness.
Folk but not folk. Sometimes it sounds like jazz, but it’s definitely not jazz. Technically classical but doesn’t work like a classical release. Dances throughout but mostly undanceable.
Many of the tracks on this album are drawn from my experiences as a child going to see the Morris Dancers on May Day, and to Barn Dances on the local farm. In my youth I was mostly baffled by the costumes or focussed on climbing the haybales, as an adult it is the music, dancing and energy that has stayed with me. The tracks on this album draw on my memory of these times: not recreations but remembrances.
Some tracks are improvised and captured on the fly, others are meticulously assembled, in the tradition of the music written for player pianos by Percy Grainger and Conlon Nancarrow. In making this album I’ve enjoyed playing around with mechanical instruments, and many of the digital recreations here are playing with that centuries old tradition of player pianos, calliope, orchestrion and music box in how the music is written and performed.
Track Listing
- Folkcoder – 4m 13s
- Last Rains – 3m 38s
- Jumping the Groove – 7m49s
- Side Hustle – 4m41s
- Amid the roar – 3m49s
- Wildish Dreams – 3m9s
- One-legged Waltz – 1m47s
- Untethered – 2m41s
Formats available on release
Streaming – wherever you get your streaming, download via bandcamp
Interactive listener mixable version of Folkcoder – find your own way to listen to this track
Music box punchtape to play back on your personal music box – Last Rains
Performance file for your Diskclavier/Spirio/PianoDisc player piano system – Jumping the Groove
Sheet music – album in sheet music format, arranged for small ensemble.
Sadly not yet available due to cost (but contact me if you disagree) – Vinyl record, pianola paper roll for your pneumatic player piano, cassette, CD.
Track notes
Folkcoder
Secret messages flying through the air: Numbers Stations are covert radio broadcasts in plain view. For the last century spy services have run radio stations, often using electronic snippets of folk songs followed by a robotic voice reading strings of numbers that only the intended receiver can decode. This track weaves together a tapestry using several of these numbers stations, as well as a Russian secret broadcast and some morse code, scoring it cinematically as if these random and indecipherable sounds were the soloist in a concerto. This track also includes ‘random jazz’ – a nonsense algorithmically-generated jazz trio that accompanies the mechanical warblings of a transmission system.
Everything on this track (other than the accompanying instruments) was broadcast on the open airwaves for anyone to hear, but only two people – the original sender and receiver – ever understood their true meaning.
Last Rains
A simple track of just piano and harmonium, this was improvised out of the beautiful folk tune Last Rose of Summer and my setting of the Shakespeare song ‘The Rain it Raineth Every Day’. A couple of takes, woven together, this is reflective, nostalgic and loose.
Jumping the Groove
A jazz tune, playing on a scratched and broken record – a 30 second tune is transformed and stretched into an 8 minute jumping and looping piece that obscures its trad roots with a mechanical and maniacal energy.
Side Hustle
Unrelenting (although maybe not in a good way): this work is playing with the mechanical side of these antique instruments – hocketing parts, playful interjections, and a wonky groove that underpins the whole work like a sewing machine or factory engine.
Amid the roar
A solo piano piece, inspired by ‘A Dream within a Dream’ by Edgar Allen Poe. A reprieve from the chaos of the works around it.
Wildish dreams
Building on the core ensemble (Piano, Bass, Harmonium) by layering sounds of nature and cities, as well as a music box and some snatches of radio. This track started life as a simple song but developed into a wistful soundscape with threads of tune weaving through a rolling tapestry.
One-legged waltz
A memory is attached to this piece – as a student I visited a touristy cellar-based restaurant in Budapest, where a small ensemble was playing traditional gypsy music with an energy and virtuosity that blew me away and expanded my ideas of what a performance might be. I wanted to capture that feeling into a piece of my own, as well as play around with an ambiguity between major and minor for my own amusement (this track is in both and neither).
Untethered
Two friends who are writers asked me to write a track for a show they were pitching about loss, parenthood, grieving, and aliens. The project never developed, but I liked the music so much that I combined it with a couple of other unused ideas from a musical about romance in a German-Korean fusion restaurant to make this track that closes out this album.
Album Credits
- Produced, performed and composed by Roman Benedict
- Mixed and mastered by Kiah Gossner
- Artwork by Anna Levy
- Audio recordings of radio transmissions used by CC0 Public Domain License from The Conet Project (archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project) Wikimedia (wikimedia.org) and Signal Identification Guide (sigidwiki.org). Morse code Model’s Own.