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about this album
Indetermincy and the Aleatoric legacy. Torah marks the debut solo piano works composed by the British artist Bernard Oglesby. The works pay direct homage to Erik Satie's The Gymnopédies which he states remains one of the most haunting and compellingly beautiful works of art he has ever experienced. Like Satie he placed great emphasis on Contamine de Latourr's poem Les Antiques. Slanting and shadow-cutting a flickering eddy Trickled in gusts of gold on the shiny flagstone Where the atoms of amber in the fire mirroring themselves Mingled their sarabande with the gymnopaedia These short, atmospheric pieces each share a common theme and structure and use a deliberate dissonance against harmony, producing a provocative melancholy that mirrors Satie's instructions to the performer, which were to play each piece ‘painfully’, ‘sadly’ and ‘gravely’. These instructions dovetail perfectly with Oglesby's own instructions to the producer Ontak Ayer and the pianist Anton Heart, and of his painful experience as a young man, leaving home for the first time to attend art school in Newport, Wales. For him 'those initial months in a bedsit in Newport, overlooking the Transporter Bridge remain some of the most isolating and trapped experiences of my life'. His only companions at the time were Erik Satie's The Gymnopédies and a copy of the Torah. Both represented profound and deeply effecting worlds that absorbed and changed his own myopic view of life; each a reciprocal companion and neces
