Dan Melchior – Hill Country Piano LP

Pre-Order. Out Dec 6th

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 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