Interior (vinyl)

On Interior, his follow-up to 2020’s Miniatures, Swiss composer Samuel Reinhard excavates intricate resonances at the periphery of our attention. Across four movements of near-equal length, Reinhard once again follows a process whereby he layers and loops fragments of piano improvisations, imposing an asymmetric system that generates an unending growth of sound. Interior complicates its own systematicity, however, by using samples that are not only recognizable as piano notes, but as live recordings of a piano being played.

As such, the experience of hearing these interiors is driven by the delicate timelessness of a pried-open piano chord: one is invited to tender stillness, even reverence. And yet Reinhard composes from traces both analog and digital, leaving the seams of his work exposed. Texture arrives in the form of static hiss and clicks, but also the soft trace of a finger pressing a key, the shuffle of a body shifting position in the close architecture of a small room. Having already stalled and stretched our sense of time, Reinhard asks us to think about where we are, and how close we are willing to look, feel, and listen. Over the course of these four movements sounds return again and again, familiar but transformed. What sounds like repetition is something more like accumulation, a thickening of space. Whether regarded at intimate range or from a distance, these compositions reveal more the longer we linger in the presence of each.