Dan Melchior – Hill Country Piano LP
£22.00
Dan Melchior has a wild history, brain and catalogue. Penultimate Press is honoured to add to it. The former and later that is. This is Melchior’s first piano recording. “I used my girlfriend Jessica’s piano and got a fairly cheap mic from the guitar centre that could just be plugged onto the end of a guitar cable.” The reverb is natural, as the piano sits in a large, mostly empty room. Hill Country Piano is the result of a human music box mind brimming with many a corner somehow aligning with chambers still being told. Melchior does not play the piano in any formal way, as you can probably tell. He played and recorded the piano, with simple repetitive parts, whilst listening to previous recordings on headphones. Then the magic happens. The gentle introduction of a banjo on Sparrow Song paints the reality of an America now lost. The percussion on the self-titled track unravels a psychedelic gamelan piano duo residing in the now. It didn’t start out that way,it never does, but this slow burning trip around a mind/world happened to come into formulation just as an interest in Pascal Comelade was coming into play. All original piano was recorded in Austin. 4U.
Dan Melchior is from London, England. He has lived in various cities in the USA for the last 24 years.
Melchior’s resume is as unique as it is exciting and diverse. Having cut his teeth in the land of garage rock as a collaborator with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly his vision takes sharp twists landing on Graham Lambkin’s strange and beautiful experimental label Kye with two records which broke not only the mould of himself but that of the song itself.
Melchoir is a musician with a voluminous discography which embraces many different forms of expression, from song based rock to pure textural explorations. His music has evolved significantly, to become a distant entity from some of his earlier blues-based work, showing a definite influence of more experimental bands such as The Homosexuals and The Fall, and some absurdist elements which have led to comparisons to compatriot exponents of that genre, Vivian Stanshall and Syd Barrett.
Always experimenting with form in an original manner avoiding any inherent genre anchor. Blues is referenced and extended, musique concrete is found embedded in the song.
Melchior has collaborated with artists as diverse as Billy Childish, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Letha Rodman Melchior and the LAFMS outfit Dinosaurs With Horns. Just as diverse are the record labels he has been associated with, including Sympathy for the record industry, Siltbreeze, Kye, Ultra Eczema, Chocolate Monk, Ever/Never, Feeding Tube and Penultimate Press, and more.
Melchior supports himself in recent years as a portrait artist, while pursuing various divergent paths, both artistically and musically.
Reviews:
Dan Melchior’s “Hill Country Piano” is a peculiar and poignant revelation, the kind of record that feels like a misplaced postcard from an alternate universe. Here, the blues meet the avant-garde in a sparsely furnished room in Austin, Texas, where the piano, the air, and Melchior’s eccentric genius conspire to create something raw, strange, and hauntingly beautiful.
For those familiar with Melchior’s sprawling, shape-shifting career, this album might seem like yet another unexpected detour. After all, this is a man whose discography spans everything from garage rock with Billy Childish to musique concrète experiments on labels like Kye. Yet “Hill Country Piano” feels less like a departure and more like a distillation of Melchior’s ethos: the rejection of polish, the embrace of imperfection, and the unearthing of beauty in the unexpected.
The album’s opener, “Sparrow Song”, introduces a minimalist, almost childlike motif on the piano, soon joined by the plaintive strum of a banjo. The effect is arresting – a sepia-toned glimpse of a lost America, as if the ghosts of folk and experimental music found a dusty corner to commune. It’s a lament and a lullaby, simple in form yet layered with meaning.
“The Body” stretches its legs with a hypnotic nine-minute exploration that feels like watching shadows stretch across a wall at sunset. The repetitive, clunky piano phrases loop and overlap, their imperfections magnified by the natural reverb of the empty room. It’s here that Melchior’s connection to Pascal Comelade becomes most apparent, as the track morphs into a psychedelic gamelan of clattering keys and subtle percussive textures.
With “Night Sounds”, the album drifts into the surreal. The piano grows more abstract, its melodies fractured and hesitant, like a conversation with itself. It’s music that feels nocturnal in every sense – introspective, mysterious, and tinged with the kind of quiet that amplifies every creak and whisper.
The title track, “Hill Country Piano”, closes the album with a percussive pulse that suggests a gamelan orchestra and a honky-tonk saloon caught in a dream together. It’s a fitting finale to a record that feels simultaneously grounded in place and utterly untethered.
Melchior’s decision to record with a cheap microphone and leave the natural acoustics of the room intact speaks to his commitment to authenticity over precision. The creaks of the piano bench, the echoes of the room, the imperfections of his playing – all of these elements are as integral to the music as the notes themselves. It’s as if the room is an instrument, the recording a living document of a specific time and place.
Ironically, for an album titled “Hill Country Piano”, the piano often feels like a vehicle for something far larger than itself – a vessel for memory, landscape, and the inexorable passage of time. Melchior’s playing may lack formal training, but it brims with intuition and emotion, drawing the listener into his idiosyncratic world.
Ultimately, “Hill Country Piano” is a testament to the power of simplicity and the magic that can arise when an artist surrenders to their surroundings. Melchior’s music has always defied easy categorization, and this record is no exception – it’s blues, it’s experimental, it’s folk, it’s musique concrète, and yet it’s none of these things. It’s simply Dan Melchior, sitting at a piano, making sense of the world in his own way.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s all music needs to be.
Dan Melchior Hill Country Piano Penultimate Press LP
The last decade or so has seen Dan Melchior experiment not just musically but with his life set-up as a whole. An eclectic spirit as comfortable with tape collages as retro garage rock, he’s expanded his creative interests to large scale psychedelic paintings, plus colourful portraits of iconic cult heroes – Alice Coltrane, DJ Screw, Siouxsie, Richard Pryor – which he sells and solicits commissions for on Instagram. The 2010s saw the British musician relocating within the US but still making low-key collaborations with musicians across the globe, as well as releasing experimental solo work and tying up some of the loose ends in the discography of his late wife, Letha Rodman Melchior.
Hill Country Piano is another departure, his first bash at the keyboard, and it has a similar naive honesty to kindred spirits like Charles Hayward’s album Begin Anywhere, Loren Connors and Alan Licht’s The Blue Hour, or even PJ Harvey’s terminally underrated White Chalk. The form is unusual for Melchior, too, simple vamps which repeat and accrue layers in the spirit of early Alexander Tucker, Michael Morley of The Dead C, even Terry Riley – all a world away from the sepia pop of Melchior’s work with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly. Rough-hewn piano and the relaxed parlour reverb set a peaceful mood, as Melchior sustains simple chords and lets them ring. But as the pieces roll on, gently surreal elements are added: banjo and melodica on “Sparrow Song”, a thumb piano on the title track. Hill Country Piano seems trivial at first but subtly
shifts your horizons. Even “Night Sounds” a gentle shuffle through some poignant ringing chords, becomes more than the sum of its parts through a mysterious combination of setting, intention and physical touch.
Odds and ends collection Unscripted And Hilarious meanwhile has Melchior back in garage mode in North Carolina. Some of the songs are little more than a pun and a chorus, and that’s enough to carry it for two minutes, but “Instant Expert” is a pretty good idea of what Syd Barrett would be like if he was still slinging riffs like “Lucy Leave” in the 1970s
Derek Walmsley – The Wire
DAN MELCHIOR Hill Country Piano PENULTIMATE PRESS 8/10
Hypnotic hillbilly minimalism from London-to-Texas expat Dan Melchior has taken an unusual trajectory through underground music, starting out on the British garage-rock scene as a collaborator with the likes
of Billy Childish, before reinventing himself as an intrepid sound collagist through releases for experimental labels like Kye and Siltbreeze. Hill Country Piano feels like the beginning of a fruitful new avenue, one that
finds Melchior – a self-confessed neophyte on the piano – blending the folk-blues tradition with a more avant-garde approach. Fragments of homely melody explode into dazed repetitions, with other instruments
adding colour to the palette: see the title track’s clattering gamelan percussion; or the loping banjo of “Sparrow Song”, which has shades of The Beta Band at their most zoned-out.
Louis Pattison – Uncut
“After a quarter of a century full of the most disparate experiences, Dan Melchior also joins the large group of musicians bewitched by the charm of the piano. The four long pieces of Hill Country Piano convey the instinctive approach of the English musician (but American by adoption), starting from the home recording method and through a deliberately makeshift microphone. However, neither the sound nor the setting are the object of Melchior’s research, who does not limit himself to dosing notes and timbres, associating them instead with rhythms, banjos and toy instruments, with an amused and delicately eccentric approach”
Raffaello Russo – Rockerilla
“I won’t even start counting the albums Dan Melchior has released in recent years, especially after the death of his wife, which dramatically brought his activity to a feverish pace. In any case, this purely piano outing (I believe the first of his career) let’s listen to him again in a condition that seems to be balanced, but we don’t know how precarious. Melchior is certainly not a virtuoso, but starting from very simple piano constructions (wishes that at times sound like a waltz or a sad elegy) he manages to develop hypnotic instrumental textures that add, remove and modify harmonic details little by little, capturing the attention of the listener with a certain effectiveness.”
[7.2] Federico Savini – Blow Up
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