Unpiano Trio
UnPiano is Derek Pascoe (saxophone) UK/Australia, Johannes S. Sistermanns (electronics, voice) Germany, and Gabriella Smart (synthesizer) Australia. The Trio was established in 2017 by three musicians from diverse backgrounds who are united by the love of composed and freely improvised music. Through exploring acoustic and manipulated electronic sounds to create a textural melodic narrative that explores emotional boundaries, they create an intimate connection to their immediate performance space.
Grand Silence (60’) (2017)
One hour of intense, spontaneous conversation between synthesizer, saxophone, electronics, voice and pre-recorded audio, Grand Silence is an improvised response by UnPiano Trio to the monumental soundscape “The Grand Cenotaph” composed by Sean Williams (AUS). Williams intermixed all surviving recordings of the memorial observances at the Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the Cenotaph in London from 1929 to 2000. Stretched from two to sixty minutes, these reverent silences are transformed into a single, passionate roar, a fitting response to the horror of war as well as the provocation of John Cage’s 4’33. Grand Silence is an improvised threnody to this remarkable memorial.
The earliest surviving recording of the two-minute silences at the Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the Cenotaph in London is from a British Movie-tone newsreel of 1929, the last is 2000. The remembrance ceremony was invented by a government committee in 1919 to commemorate the first anniversary of Armistice Day and the two minute silence was suggested by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, former high commissioner of South Africa. The entire country came to a standstill on the 11th hour of the 11th day, with trams and trains stopping, telephone exchanges cut off, and factory machinery shut down.
Archive recordings reproduced under license from BBC TV, BBC Radio, British Movietone, ITN Reuters.
Works
sound listens to sounds (60’) (2020)
As a Trio that exists through using continents as interstice and as common work phases, we are always listening from the distance: to each other, away from each other, and into empty spaces between our continents. Our collective instincts become sound. I play with you, where are you? Through sound, we seek to reach each other. We play on presumed resonances. We live now, yet we are in other hemispheres, times of day, seasons. And this simultaneity of the non-simultaneous speaks of only one thing: our listening, sensitive, soulful, continent-piercing continuity. At the same time, we always share a moment. This is what we have communicated through travel over the last two years. Bound in sound, decoupled in time and space. At times we feel closer in listening to each other than in our physical presence. What is temporal seems finite. What binds us spiritually is infinite.
UnPiano have performed Grand Silence in Adelaide, Katowice (Poland), Cologne and Berlin. It has developed into a poignant commemoration of the people who lost their lives in World Wars 1 and 2.