Robin Hatch: Robin Hatch review – discover a new grammar for piano

Robin Hatch is a Canadian pianist and composer who has managed to release not one but three albums in 2019. In March, she gave us Works for Solo Piano, a series of ruminative, semi-improvised themes, pitched somewhere between Keith Jarrett and Conlon Nancarrow. In September came Hatch, an icily beautiful and occasionally terrifying piece of proggy electronica, recorded live in a single take on assorted antique analogue synthesisers and a microtonal keyboard.

Now comes the eponymous Robin Hatch, a series of solo piano miniatures.

Hatch is classically trained, studied jazz improvisation with Cuban pianist Hilario Durán and also plays with assorted Canadian indie bands. Her own piano music defies categorisation – dense and playful, rigorous but wayward. She writes her pieces out by hand, based on improvisations that she embellishes, and often keeps in the mistakes “as a form of self-humiliation”. Brad Mehldau is clearly an influence, but her playing is a lot weirder, less prissy and more unpredictable. No matter how each piece starts, you feel that Hatch could lurch off in any direction that amuses her. The first two tracks, Elegy and The Copy, both start as pretty bucolic melodies that get progressively spikier, endlessly modulating, a series of deliciously unresolved puzzles. Fugue in F minor is like a fiendishly difficult exercise in contrapuntal playing, like Czerny being played by a dozen kittens; Americana Rag reimagines a world where ragtime evolved to become as harmonically slippery as bebop. A unique talent, and one developing a new grammar for the piano.

This month’s other pics

Berlin-based cellist Anne Müller is best known for her work with the likes of Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Lubomyr Melnyk, as well as being part of the excellent Solo Collective trio, but Heliopause is her first solo album. There is some unaccompanied playing – Müller is superb at the flamboyant double-stopping you get in Bach’s cello suites – but most of it sees her multi-tracking herself, creating a one-woman string section to create strident minimalism, laying down simple piano lines and gently mutilating her cello to create ambient noises.

Reducing the Tempo to Zero, the new album by Ben Vida, former member of the Chicago quartet Town & Country, is almost a parody of minimalism. It’s a suite of four one-hour pieces comprising delicate electronic drones that barely change note, but instead explore fractional changes in timbre and texture. It’s like the sonic equivalent of the artist Douglas Gordon slowing down Hitchcock’s Psycho until it was 24 hours long – sound reduced to a series of frozen frames, meditative and blissfully comatose.