The world of experimental music is full of prepared piano pieces and other usages of extended technique on the standard instrument. Much rarer is the use of extended technique on a prepared Rhodes electric piano, but trust a Mills grad to explore such a thing, as Berkeley dandy Eric Glick Rieman has over the past decade. Putting his MFA in Electronic Music to good use, the sounds heard on In My Mind, Her Image Was Reversed evoke far more grandiose images than just an electric piano. Yet this album was made entirely on a Rhodes, which comes as a shock considering all the weird percussive and atmospheric sounds Rieman live mixes through eight interdependent channels, modified from the Rhodes' original single output. At times, this sounds more like it was recorded at a woodworking shop on a farm than at a studio, given its insect-like sounds and all manner of scraping and knocking created through the use of seeds, springs, washers, quartz, paper, marbles, a wire brush and more. Yet out of the more pastoral and rustic evocations flow fragments of melody set against repetitive noises and vice-versa, hinting at Rieman's appreciation for the indeterminacy and slowly developing compositions of Morton Feldman. With In My Mind, Her Image Was Reversed, like an abstract expressionist painting, one never feels pushed to bring the whole picture into focus, rather allowing the shapes and colours of the piece to exist and evolve.
(Accretions)Eric Glick Rieman
In My Mind, Her Image Was Reversed
BY Alan RantaPublished Nov 1, 2011