more from
Séance Centre
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

So Lo Piano Works Vol. 1

by Allan Gilbert Balon

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $5 USD  or more

     

  • Cassette & Publication
    Cassette + Digital Album

    Double-sided cassette featuring the works Rafflesia Suite/Philae & Only Ma in the Ni ews.

    Letter pressed in clamshell case, twenty page tabloid newspaper, oversized insert with drawing/performance notes housed in a plastic string-tie envelope. Limited to 100 copies.

    Includes unlimited streaming of So Lo Piano Works Vol. 1 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
2.

about

Wry Press & Séance Centre present the first release by pianist/composer/artist, Allan Gilbert Balon (b.1986). Born & raised in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe (Caraïbes), he is presently living in Ardèche, Southern France, where he creates cryptic & highly evocative compositions that explore sound as a phenomenon born of consciousness. His pieces seem to be rooted in both the more spiritually minded end of mid-20th Century composition (Scelsi, Radulescu, Sorabji, Rudhyar, etc.), as well as the woolly, lateral logic of jazz composers like Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, or Lowell Davidson — where abrupt dissonances give way to elegantly philosophical reflections.

We first stumbled on Balon’s work after his site-specific installation, "mantra of things as they are sometimes” was performed at MOMA PS1 in February of 2022, then further investigated via his personal website (www.coleopter-xy.com) — an intriguing compendium/collage of home recorded pieces, scores, drawings, writings, & performance works. To accompany the three solo piano pieces we are presenting here, Balon has designed a twenty page tabloid style newspaper publication which mirrors the concerns of his virtual world; featuring a treatise on sound, fragments of poetry, xeroxed scans of influences, artwork, and a score.

There’s something of a very private headspace we’re given privy to here; lo-fi & elliptical, notes fragment into lyrical bits which accumulate sound as both power & melodic balm. When I listen, I think of the notes the late composer Talib Rasul Hakim (another forebear to Balon’s particular brand of “mysticism of sound” I would think) wrote to accompany his piece, “Sound Gone”, which reads in part; “atmospheres-of-sound floating above and around segments of moving silence… a veil-like aura-of-sound, mystifying in its layers of introspective freedom…”

credits

released April 10, 2023

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Allan Gilbert Balon Les Abymes, Guadeloupe

contact / help

Contact Allan Gilbert Balon

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Allan Gilbert Balon, you may also like: