Radu Malfatti: piano

"The ninth release on the label, nonostante II (2000), dispenses with sustained notes, and is written instead for solo piano, played by Malfatti himself. The familiar extended silences remain, surrounding tiny, carefully defined groups of piano pitches. The very long silences that separate them test the memory of even the most attentive listener, and it's far from easy to relate one patch of piano sound to the next. Brown's unanswered questions come to mind once more, but it's a text from Michael Pisaro that adorns nonostante's sleeve, including the line "the music is really always there, but like an iceberg, (or the English underground) it only comes to the surface at discrete moments". There is definitely the sense of a longer work existing here, large portions of which have been erased, not dissimilar to Futatsu, Malfatti's celebrated duo with Taku Sugimoto (Improvised Music from Japan)." | Richard Pinnell, Paris Transatlantic