Keemuun by Raphael Loher

Within a few months, a chrononym nearly contemporary to the period it refers to, has emerged: “the containment”. Without the temporal limits of the term being clearly identified or shared (which containment are we talking about? the first or the second one? unless we are referring to a more indistinct continuum?), the fact remains that its use has spread massively and spontaneously. With a delay typical of the life of artworks, 2022 has seen a growing number of “containment dance” premieres, of “containment book” launches, of “containment music” releases. Quite clearly, we can now discern among the range of material conditions attached to these works, those that have invariably shaped them: some will insist on the catalyzing effect of solitude, others on the qualities of working within the small scale of the domestic space, while some will underline the thrill of creating while facing a totally gaping temporal horizon, within suddenly empty schedules, with no deadlines.

Keemuun clearly belongs to the “containment music” category. A solitary music, imagined, developed and composed within the four walls of a studio. The fruit of a daily work discipline that no musician in residence program would have made possible. Even one of the central compositional rules adopted by Raphael Loher for Keemuun (only ten notes distributed over two octaves of the keyboard have been used for the four pieces) could be regarded as a metonymy of the miniaturization of the creative space.

And yet, it took many years for the very idea of composing music for solo piano to materialize in Loher's career. As it turns out, the Swiss pianist started toying with the idea just about three months before the first lockdown broke out. Not only did the containment provide him with the right form: it also gave him the right context for the exploration of a single pianistic idea, chiseled over several months. Keemuun is indeed the result of a chrononym as much as of the meeting between an old desire to explore the keyboard through the continuous movement of the left and right hands, and a specific technique of piano preparation.

To be sure, the four mirrored pieces that Loher put together reflect his long-term practice of prepared piano as well as a deeply personal conception of his instrument: the piano as a giant resonator whose palette of available sounds shall be widened. And yet, Keemuun turns out to be a major aesthetic break in the career of a pianist who firmly believed that, to be worthy of interest, music should confront its audience. Nothing of the sort with this recording, in that it responds to a strong need to play music that shall be “beautiful but strange” and uplifting, a deceptively simple idea in which Cornelius Cardew firmly believed in his time: “music shall make people feel good”. A motto that another composer and pianist, Alvin Curran, has also made his own.

As mentioned, Keemuun is Loher's first solo recording, after many years of playing and improvising in different configurations: from KALI trio, the band he has been closely associated with for a long time, to Baumschule, the reunion of Julian Sartorius, Manuel Troller and Loher, recently released by three:four records. While composing during the lockdown, Loher revealingly confessed in a recent interview we did, that he occasionally felt the need to play the first movement of Keemuun to cars passing in front of his studio, windows open. A fascinating anecdote which echoes another wild juxtaposition of ideas: as he was talking about the specific dynamics and modes of listening of musicians engaged in collective music making, Loher also mentioned the warm-up routine exercises he spontaneously developed on the piano during the genesis of Keemuun. Namely, he was playing “to” or “from” the electronic music he regularly listened to back then in his studio – notably Beatrice Dillon's Workaround. If the pace of the 2nd and 3rd movements of Keemuun is all that he kept of this ghost music (150 bpm is a particularly interesting tempo in that it still allows the audience to apprehend each individual note while already pushing the listening experience into the world of continuous movement), truth is: in its ravishing silences, its vertiginous intervals as well as its dreamy solitude, the stage which Loher set for his solo effort is populated with musics, beings and essences.

What Keemuun actually shakes up is the very substance of the “solo” form. More than a gesture of emancipation, Loher signs a subtle record, troubled through and through by its relation to the world.


Maxime Guitton

Through the use of different materials and objects, the pianist Raphael Loher creates a wide spectrum of pulsating and shimmering sounds, radiating out of the piano's resonance body. In doing so, he combines elements of ambient, minimal and experimental electronic music.