Danish composer-improviser-sound artist Christian Rønn’s Travel through Stones explores the seminal influences of innovative composers and performers of contemporary music, free jazz pianists like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Keith Jarrett, or minimalism composers such as Monte Young and Terry Riley. The album was recorded live at Kulturhuset Islands Brygge and Prags Boulevard in Copenhagen, and at Esbønderup Church in Græsted and augmented with studio recordings. The album is released on Rønn’s label, Niche.

Rønn focuses on Travel through Stones on the piano, leaving aside the electro-acoustic experiments of his previous projects. The titles of the three extended solo piano pieces and one short one inform the enigmatic-spiritual atmosphere of this album – «Travel through Stones», «Diary of a Feather», «Butterfly Spirit» and «Is på roret» (ice on the helm). Rønn performs these minimalist, austere pieces with patience and great focus on each sound and articulation, letting all resonate fully before exploring another one.

Like the influential composers and performers, Rønn has established his own personal, powerful language, and his playing reflects his long-time interest in the «grey zone areas where sound breaks up and transforms into something else. The moment before the vibrating string distorts and the seconds following the release of the huge cluster chord, where energy still hangs in the air». Rønn expands here this sonic interest in acoustic forms and attempts to take the listener on a transcending journey beyond words and conventional concepts of time and space, examining in-between-moments and unrecognizable states of being.

Eyal Hareuveni

Christian Rønn (p)