Consonant Dissonance Elektramusic Berlin, 2026. Album art photo by John C.S. Keston.
I am releasing a solo, acoustic piano album titled Consonant Dissonance on Elektramusic Berlin on July 27, 2026. Among the original compositions are several electroacoustic pieces that process the piano through a modular synthesizer. For each of those the piano signals are handled in different ways. These include granular synthesis, looping, pitch shifting, reverse, analog filtering, delay, and reverberation, all modulated via a function generator, low frequency oscillators, and a sampling touch controller which I operated while playing the pieces.
The modular synth I used for the album. Ironically this was photographed at the venue Berlin in Minneapolis.
The album was recorded at The University of St Thomas, Schoenecker Center, Audio Studio on a Kawai RX-3 grand piano. Gratitude goes out to my former student Alejandro Vega for engineering assistance, and Adam Krinsky for mixing and mastering consultation. Well before I recorded the album I performed the pieces live at a few venues including Berlin, the excellent music venue in Minneapolis that borrows the German city’s name. The irony isn’t lost on me that a label based in Berlin are the ones releasing it over a year later.
The videos above and below were made with a digital piano as a proof of concept for running piano through a modular system to process the signals. I had manipulated piano through processing at concerts in the past (see this article about an electroacoustic piano concert from 2016), but this was the first time doing it with a bespoke modular synth, where the modules and patching were specifically designed for that purpose.