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About This Episode
This week's episode is another FROM THE VAULT as we travel back to one of our (sadly) many episodes that were recorded during the pandemic. This one is actually a condensing of two episodes on the weird/genius/odd/interesting music, and personality, of pianist Lubomyr Melnyk. Enjoy! Chris has been chomping at the bit to do this Lubomyr Melnyk album for a while. In fact, some may even remember that he brought it up during our Pandemic Mixtape. Well, the time has come to finally tackle this post-classical/minimalist work and in doing so we absolutely had to cover his…interesting thoughts on musical philosophy. Which cascades into his questionable thoughts on the actual science of how sound works. Which takes us down a big old rabbit hole, as I’m sure you can imagine. All of this to say that it takes us a while to get to the album as a result. Also, the dude’s done like 20+ albums (although we don’t cover all of them) so that’s another whole thing we had to deal with. We also talk about continuous music (the genre he reckons he’s in…of which he is the only practitioner), his incredible piano playing speed and a bunch more things. Our voyage into continuous music comes to a close as we dig into Lubomyr Melnyk’s eighteenth (!) album Corollaries. For the unfamiliar, Melnyk categorises his style as being something almost beyond classical music, yet this release sees him team up with neoclassical composers Nils Frahm and Peter Broderick. This album seemed to give Melnyk a new lease of life; upon getting together with Frahm and Broderick he stated “Where were you in my thirties?”, a statement that stands in stark contrast to his general aversion to playing with other musicians in the years before. There’s a lot to be said about Melnyk’s playing, and I think we cover most of that in the episode. Once again, potato quality audio from Mark but hey, it isn’t terrible.