Audiopile Review: Debut album from Japanese pianist Mashu Hayasaka, issued on UK imprint All Night Flight. Made up entirely of improvised piano pieces, Piano Etudes I is as a refreshing counterpoint to the staid, clinical compositional solo piano albums that tend to dominate the general critical consensus. The lo-fi recording utilized here exudes an intimacy sorely lacking in many of the prominent contemporary composers, evoking the expressive quietude of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru or the simplicity of Eluvium’s beloved debut of solo piano, An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death. Competent but never flashy, Piano Etudes opts for pure emotive playing, pulling a melancholic wistfulness out of the wandering play of keys, the notes warbling and quivering from deep within the hissy ferric oxide. This is gonna be sublime listening for those who take the time to sit with this one. Huge recommendation.

Absolutely beautiful LP of intimate drifting lo-fi piano nostalgia from Hokkaido’s Mashu Hayasaka on the store’s own imprint.

Looking out from our corner of the musical landscape a certain kind of solo piano composition feels elemental. Satie’s miniatures invented a whole dreamtime realm of deft and delicate abstraction. And 120 years later we are still revolving slowly in the space they mapped out. This makes writing about records like this difficult. Listening feels like breathing. The responses it provokes are so deeply programmed that attempts to consciously discuss them produce a kind of profound blank. However when you hear it you know it. What makes Karla Borecky totally transporting and Max Richter totally blah? The specifics are unknowable. But part of it is balance, it is dangerous to wake a sleepwalker but you need some unexpected detail and at least a little grit to keep the dream alive. This record has that quality.

The clunk of a tape recorder begins a series of wandering happy/sad piano studies that recall Robert Haigh in his Sema guise, John Cage’s ‘In a landscape’ and Duke Ellington’s blurred chromatic solo piano performances. Mashu Hayasaka leaves nowhere to hide, his playing is poised and cooly controlled, focusing on the beauty of simplicity and purity. The fidelity plays a part too, these recordings are clearly diaristic, caught close up, granular and beautifully blown out in places, adding a level of cohesion to a genuinely special suite of music that melts so effortlessly into the everyday. Seriously, this one is a keeper, an unsettled but refreshing nap in the afternoon of your life.