The first bars immediately lead your thoughts towards Conlon Nancarrow and his Studies for Player Piano, towards John Cage and his Music of Changes and Etudes Australes, towards Pierre Boulez and his Sonates pour Piano, and towards Ernesto Diaz-Infante and his Solus. And certainly the spirit of Scriabin haunts these chords too… That is not bad, and by way of this CD Staffan Björklund earns the right to take up residency without restrictions with the aforementioned crowd of wizards. This bundle of dialogues for a lonely piano should – as the pieces mentioned above – soon be counted among the classics of the more refined and sophisticated pianoforte school.

The CD is filled with intricate piano compositions, which I would suspect are post-notated and processed improvisations, but then again; maybe all music is…

With this CD Björklund places himself in a tradition which he pays homage to while he also develops it, with, as it seems, an almost indecent ease, but it is exactly this illusion of ease, of a feather-light ease, that great artistry evokes, effectively reducing and eliminating everything that stands in between the listener and the pure experience. Björklund has succeeded in this plight. The experience of the music is here is immediate and wonderfully direct!

Farther ahead on Björklund’s CD you might even be lead to believe that you’re actually listening to Marianne Schroeder interpreting some piece by Morton Feldman; so transparent and sparse are the rows of tones delivered by Björklund, at times contrasted with a more brutal counterpoint, in a music that suggests clear skies of fall through naked networks of branches - but I experience this music as absolute, like abstract painting affecting the spirit directly, and I feel strengthened and refreshed by these clean and lucid strokes of the keyboard; a crystal chalice with a clear beverage in a wintry light.

I am surprised by this music. I had no idea that in Sweden today we had a contemporary piano literature of this stature that challenges the authority of any other oeuvre of the idiom!