/Avant-garde, Experimentalism, Piano
music, Field recording, Improvised music/
Comment:
Vietnam-based artist Nguyễn Hồng Nhung aka Sound Awakener takes on an upright
acoustic piano to create something inspired and beautiful. The issue starts off
with Vibrate which differentiates due
to a more buried timbre and sonic vamp. Later on, the artist creates tracks by amplifying
them to the edge of distortion and dissonance, or using the sounds of field
recording, or adding reverb-heavy spaces, some hissy wisps and stereo tricks to
the blend. Nguyễn Hồng Nhung is an endued musician because of being classically
educated he has not lost his explorative nature to educational formalism. In
fact, these two characteristic vectors do have the same direction thereby
resulting in the hitting stomp emotively. More concretely, hilarious moments are variegated with more shadowy glimpses into the soul of piano improvisation. Some tracks might sound in a lo-fi
way at times yet it is not something of a lo-fi album because all the layers
added to the mix are produced in an adept way. You could call it the knavish
lo-fi outing if you wish. On this example the Vietnamese musician`s outing
resembles the Swede Oskar Hallbert`s slightly introvertive and hazy compositions.
Solid issue indeed.