Adrian Klumpes

As the press release accurately suggests, this is no chill out music. Haunted, desolate and distracted, Be Still is an affecting, meditative work that, as Klumpes intended, highlights the relationship between introspection and awareness.

This discord, not necessarily in a harmonic, but metaphorical, contradictory sense, echoes throughout Be Still. Recorded during a five-hour session in Sydney, Klumpes’ gentle piano is fractured and processed out of and into existence in the same breath - the acoustic battling with the electronic, the allegorical stillness inside the room fighting against the complication outside. Indeed this motif is even apparent in the compilation of the album - take the meandering emptiness of 'Alone’ set against the insistent, battering rhythmic texture of 'Unrest’ as an example.

To horrendously paraphrase and unfairly bastardise two Mark Rothko quotations in order to make a point worth making - art is nothing but an instrument for expressing something greater, there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing... Klumpes has, in Be Still, captured the essence of this artistic ideal. Whether the ideal is discernible by the listener is very much in the hands of our imagination, but at the very least, Klumpes, like Rothko, gives us the tools to contemplate the complexity beyond the minimalism.