Ross Bolleter - Crow Country

Rob Bolleter is the master of cracked-up, brought-down and smashed up pianos… No, not smashed-up the Who way, in rage and fury, but slowly degraded and worn-down by the greatest down-grader and refiner of them all; Time! Bolleter catches the instruments at varying stages of their time-consuming journey towards dust and soil, towards minerals and free-flowing molecules in the furnace of the time-space continuum, in which we all return to original building blocks of matter. As the instruments get de-constructed by Chronos, Ross Bolleter sticks his fingers into the process and picks out what sonic residue might still be there.

The first time I heard Ross Bolleter was on a CD from New Albion, called Austral Voices (1990). On that CD Bolleter participated with “Nallan Void”, which appears as track 1 on this CD, under another name; “Unfinished Business”, maybe indicating that the already almost dead piece of piano still had a few more words to say…

Anyhow, this is a highly fascinating piece of work. Bolleter recorded this ruined piano at the Nallan sheep station near Cue, seven hundred kilometers north of Perth. It had served as a bar piano at the Big Bell Hotel in the 1930s and –40s, and then it had been removed and transported to the sheep station, where it was left outdoors for a year, until it was finally stored in a tractor shed.
Bolleter says: The piano is “…prepared by its environment as it slowly returns to a state of nature: all that fine 19th-century technology of levers and moving parts becoming a heap of rusting wire and rotten wood. To hear the ruined piano playing with the dogs barking, the birds singing, the trucks starting up is to sense its destiny in that moment”.

Yeah, it’s like visiting an old age home and picking up all those signals, those fragments, those forlorn and bewildered visions from the lives of those who sit around the walls in their wheelchairs, living on overtime; residues of their own existences, almost gone back to the mineral worlds.

The sounds – due respect already paid to their philosophical significance – are themselves highly differentiated, and Bolleter draws a whole scope of tones out of the instrument. Sometimes it sounds like a out-of-tune glass harmonica, or like the piano is being played under water, and sometimes the bass strings rumble through the listening space like God-given words of repentance, and then again the tones are falling like shiny drops of metal in the desert. At times all you hear is percussione con forza! This piece alone justifies this CD issue!

Next piece is “Under Rookwood”, performed by Richard Lynn on double bass, is a piece with a long history, but I’ll just relate the latest part of it. It first had to do with the Rookwood cemetery in Sydney. Bolleter crated the final version of “Under Rookwood” right after both his parents died in 1995, within just months of each other. Taking the piece he’s already worked on in different settings, he wove together “La Golandrina” and “Forever and ever” – the favorite melodies of his mother and father. When he did that he discovered that the opening notes of each melody were inversions of each other.

“That Time (Simulplay II)” is an interesting experiment. Bolleter says that it is an intuitive piece for two musicians on opposite sides of a continent, playing at the same time, but unable to hear each other, and without any prior consultation as to style or content. Wow! I wouldn’t have guessed, on just hearing the piece, which gives a pretty collected feel of improvisation on stage! Bolleter plays piano and prepared piano in Perth, and Ryszard Ratajczak plays double bass in Sydney. The two performances, taking place between 11.00 PM and 11.27 PM on October 9, 1989, were then transmitted together to a concert audience. There are more implications to this experiment, but those are the basic facts. The recording is simply beautiful, and when you think of the fact that all the performers had to go on was the time frame, it blows your mind! Very exciting piece!

“Labyrinth Tango” is a solo accordion improvisation on different tangos, on a live occasion. Bolleter plays the accordion. Apparently this old boy has many strings on his lyre, freely immersing himself in all kinds of musical diversions, which makes him all the more interesting to listen to!