Clocked Out Duo is percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson and pianist Erik Griswold – but that seems like a meager presentation, even on the verge of mendacity, since the music they make amounts to so much more than you would normally expect from a piano and some percussion. Griswold and Tomlinson create a unique and wildly varied sound world.
Tomlinson explains:

This is their third CD.
The first track is the title one, Water Pushes Sand. It has a very elegant, strutting beginning, piano and wooden sticks teaming up in a Chinese march of sorts, soon transforming into a Lou Harrison/John Cage smile, quirky, out of the corner of the mouth!
Heavier base drum thuds combine with rippling mountain stream piano, picturing slabs of rocks and gushing glacier water, tasty with minerals, many thousand-years-fresh.

The musicians:

The texture of the piano and the at each moment chosen percussive instruments is one of metallic, spiky properties, quite jolly and energetic, springing off like a host of Jack-in-the Boxes on an endless plain towards the horizon, whirlwinds dancing at the merger of sky and land.

The ingenuity of forefathers like Cage and… Harry Partch shine through – yes, Harry Partch is a natural association when listening to Griswold and Tomlinson, regarding these makeshift percussive sounds in rhythmic progressions and hopping Eastern jolts and jumps.

The fabric of sound is swung out like a bullfighter’s cloth, dust is rising, you see the open mouths of the hollering audience, and you’re lost inside the cog-wheel world of a clock-work of details that rattle along in a corrugated steel wave pattern.

The piano, way down in the register, starts sounding like an old wooden fence being taken down, silvery with age, as the tingling percussion brings on visions of elves and fairies in blessed states of mushroom poisoning…

Yet, I’m brought right back into construction site mathematics hammered out in the score, in schizoid Nash scribblings, into the wilderness of cityscapes, and then, praise be, back out into the natural open spaces of the civilization of nature, dew drops gleaming like soundless percussion under spider gazes, where the circuits of Urbana is just a threat deep down in the unconscious.

Tomlinson even manages to get watery sounds out of her percussion. I have no idea how, but it’s terrific. I suddenly have myself reoriented to a submerged state of African fresh water ponds where my tympanic membranes are massaged and tickled by the sharp clicks of submarine insects.

These musicians take the attentive and vulnerable listener on many a strange journey of discovery!

It keeps on. The piano, again way down, agitates its way along one of those old Roman roads of Italy, bouncing and shaking heavily over the stones as the battalions head for Britain to build the Wall of Hadrian. It’s a rattling and rolling piano motion, the body of the instrument creaking and moaning like and old, forgotten bar piano in the dusty Australian outback, as portrayed by Ross Bolleter in pieces like Nallan Void, created on a ruined piano in the Murchison Goldfields 700 kilometers northeast of Perth.

The ingenuity of these musicians is immense. Erik Griswold talks about his methods and aims in an interview with Russell Smith:

Track 2 is called Bicycle Groove. In this piece the duo gets right into soundscapes, to begin with presenting a bustling street scene from China. This beginning is drawn from a larger work made in collaboration with composer Zou Xiangping, entitled Chengdu Streetsongs. One of the distinct qualities of Bicycle Groove is how, after a while, the street noise dissipates very slowly, and how some of the individual sounds from the street are retained and purified, for example the blowing of bicycle horns and ringing of bicycle bells. These sounds, together with Tomlinson percussion and Griswold piano, then formulates the most beautiful stretch of music, peculiarly transparent, having grown out of the haze of the street.

Tomlinson and Griswold:

Dear Judy is a rather strange issue, but it works; balloons and piano; a piano that trickles and ripples, sending off water-over-pebbles audio reflections, and a balloon that wheezes and complains, chatters and has sex!

Griswold says, about the balloon emergence:

Yep, maybe so – but to come up with a balloon-piano transcription takes some extra insanity – and the result is great, just amazing! This is conversational music, really, with the two voices of balloon and piano in quick and sometimes bothersome domestic exchanges.
Sometimes they don’t even listen to each other, but sometimes they hug too, and sex…? Well…

We move by intuition commences in a recurring piano figure which picks up density, cutting out the pauses, while Tomlinson gathers percussive sounds that she sifts out, rocking the more solid sounds back and forth.
We hear vibrating stringy sounds, that could possibly originate in stroking the piano strings inside the piano, but maybe these whining sounds are glass-originated?
Griswold rocks on in boogie-woogie type exclamations as tension builds up in this rather nervous audio outing.
All of a sudden a dreamy, bar-night romance spreads its tobacco haze of Marlboro and Kent, and the music gets slightly intoxicated, making a taxicab conclusion necessary later on.

The percussion gets ever more tinkly, sandy, papery – in crumpling little sounds of something giving way, as the piano gets up speed and hightails it out of there. It gets tapped on the back all the while!

Track 6 – Motorcycling through the city of churches – sports a wondrous motorbike envisioned by a hands-on balloon, frictioned in mimicry of a real live motorcycle! The effect id completely illusory! This is more circus event than music, but we like it! A bell for the church is played on the piano. Wow, I could never have thought this bit out! Marvelous! I love it when someone beats me to it. These guys did it with this tune! Hearing is believing!

Waltz at track 7 is another completely outrageous demonstration of the possibilities of balloon and piano interaction. This could work as the soundtrack for some crazy cartoon!

Felaminikuti is an African thumb piano mimicry with whistles and all kinds of small sounds that transports me to dark African village tribal gatherings round fires at night, fireflies flickering about, shadows moving on the outskirts of visibility.
The performers use a toy piano – madly! -, bird whistles (it seems) – and… balloon!

Delicious Ironies is a work on a little grander scale, hitting it off intensely with a spur of collected percussive explosions thrown out in all directions like fire works on a Bristol Bonfire Night in November! These are actually samplings of authentic Sichuan Opera percussion made by Lindsay Vickery, which the duo here uses as a base for their improvisations.
It gets wild and weary and choked, to say the least, and I get the feeling I’d like to play it at half speed – but right then it thins out and slows down, and the individual samples can be heard and taken into account orderly by the musicians, who can then use the samples as inspiration or as conversational partners, and the music gets awkwardly interesting. This is a highlight of the CD!

Let me finish with a quote from the Chengdu Commercial Daily, after a concert with the Clocked Out Duo: