Jennings / Cage / Tilbury / Lexer

Lost Daylight

Label: Another Timbre Country: UK

" [...] Lost Daylight - John Tilbury performing Terry Jennings and John Cage - is a record we're going to be talking about for years. The delicately transforming textures of "Winter Sun", the most often cited work by Jennings, an undeservedly overlooked American proto-minimalist, holds gestural clutter in disdain, allowing the piano to intone along its natural grain. Cage's "Electronic Music for Piano" is not a composition as such, rather a set of open ended instructions about a possible treatment, governed by random procedures developed from an astronomical atlas, of Cage's earlier "Music for Piano", using feedback, amplifiers and loudspeakers.

Tilbury, with Sebastian Lexer on electronics, then doubles up on those procedures by subjecting the raw recording itself to a further randomised edit. Don't make my mistake and yank up the volume to appreciate softs that are softer than soft; the recording levels are awesomely (uniquely?) wide and what came next dealt me an ear-splitting shock. The recording melts Tilbury's playing towards silence in an authentic expression of the Cageian spirit, but then something truly remarkable - near the end, the silence captured during the performance is intercut with the absolute silence of blank disc space. The recording takes you completely outside the performance space, and into different colours of silence. Feldman once said Cage was the first composer to explore the possibility that music could be an 'art form' rather than a 'music form'. No Cage disc rises to that challenge more boldly, and with such revolutionary results."-Philip Clark, The Wire