Ross Bolleter had such a great idea. He would locate pianos (and sometimes accordions) that had been left to the elements for years, decades even, and play them as is. The piano may have basked on the roof of a bar in the torrid Australian desert for 20 years or languished in a flooded basement for ten. He refers to them as "Ruined" (I prefer the term "cured"). When one is recovered he has little or no idea what will occur when a key is depressed. Will there be some sort of resonant click, a ghost of the original note, well out of tune, or perhaps a cluster of notes responding to a single key's depression? Bolleter collects these keyboards and improvises on them, as many as four or five grouped around a central seat so as to provide maximum ruined coloration.

A wonderful idea. The problem, such as it is on Bolleter's recordings, is the quality of the improvisation. The sounds themselves are spectacular and one can quite easily and pleasurably lose oneself in the jungle of bongs, thuds, groans, clinks, shudders and tinkles — it's a fantastically rich environment. But if one listens a bit more critically, those very effects tend to mask an ordinariness of improvisatory approach. Bolleter clearly takes great joy in eliciting and contrasting various tones but seems to spend little time thinking about how those sounds are arrayed in space so that the pieces have a tendency to sprawl and meander. Sometimes, as on the opening "The Red Way" here, it's beside the point as the sheer gorgeousness of sound carries the day. It's also fascinating when he sticks to something approaching a melody ("Gong Heaven") as an appealing eeriness is achieved. But too often, the lack of rigor, unfortunately, imparts something of a surface sheen to the notes. One can only imagine what, say, John Tilbury would do with these instruments.

Still, there is much to enjoy here, a welter of sounds you're unlikely to hear anywhere else until you stumble across that old piano left out in the woods.