#andrewpekler

A few years ago I wrote an essay about how experimental music can be really funny, even when – sometimes especially when – it’s serious. Andrew Pekler’s work is proof. He investigates some heavy sonic concepts, but there’s always a sense of play and absurdity running though his music. Follow his winding lines closely and they become a series of set-ups and punch lines, or a collage of wordless puns.

The title of his latest project, The Prepaid Piano, is a literal pun, playing off the serious concept of Prepared Piano (i.e. piano altered by placing objects inside it). But it’s not just a funny line. It reflects Pekler’s process of placing prepaid cell phones inside a piano, which vibrate the strings when the audience calls them. The result is bubbling, cartoon-ish music that’s also eerie, dramatic, and evocative. There are echoes of electronic music’s original prankster, Raymond Scott. But Pekler has a unique brand of sonic alchemy, which plays even better on side B, Replayed, where he ultra-MIDI’s the sounds from side A. He sees humor where others might see seriousness and vice versa, and that uncanny vision makes The Prepaid Piano & Replayed one of the best albums of the year.

 – Marc Masters

Andrew Pekler on The Prepaid Piano & Replayed

Like the album before it, the Prepaid Piano has its origin in a play on words. The prepared/prepaid pun had been floating around in my mind with all the other debris of unrealized/unrealizable ideas for few years before attaching itself to another strain of thought I'm always entertaining: how to get music to make itself, with minimal participation on my part.

Taking the form of an installation piece, the Prepaid Piano goes like this: In a room is a grand piano. Inside the piano, five mobile telephones rest directly on the piano strings. Calling any one of the telephones activates its vibration alarm, thereby ‘playing’ the strings on which the phone happens to be lying. Visitors choose which parts of the piano are played by calling any of the five telephones. Contact microphones attached to the piano’s sound-board send the sounds of the vibrating piano strings to a modular synth that's set up to continually loop and modulate the incoming signals. The audio is played back over loudspeakers and subsequent calls to the phones produce new loops that gradually displace the previously recorded audio. When the prepaid credit on all of the phones in the piano runs out, the piece is over.