Jon Balke

Discourses is the third solo album for ECM by Norwegian pianist Jon Balke, after Book of Velocities and Warp. As on Warp, the acoustic piano is set inside layers of processed sound, which Balke calls "distorted reflections and reverberations from the world." Sixteen short pieces blur the lines between composition, improvisation and sound design, and they share a subject: language, and the fading of dialogue in an age of confrontational rhetoric.

"As the political climate hardened in 2019 with more and more polarized speech, the lack of dialogue pointed me towards the terms that constitute the titles for the tracks," Balke has explained. He brought a hard disk of prepared soundscapes to the Auditorio Stelio Molo of the Swiss radio RSI in Lugano. It held field recordings, keyboard and software sounds, and many parts played on his own cello and then reshaped. At the piano he played against and with that material, in sessions produced by Manfred Eicher, whom Balke describes as a "very active co-creator" of the mix. Stefano Amerio and Lara Persia engineered the recording, and the cover photograph is Balke's own.

The titles read like the vocabulary of a debate, from The Self and the Opposition and The Certainties to The Polarisation and three closing afterthoughts. Most pieces last between two and four minutes, close to a series of miniatures. In The Facilitator a calm, pastoral piano line is disturbed by jarring processed sounds. The Container sets a dreamier melody over undulating electronic textures, while The First Argument opens almost like a fractured fugue before a digitally treated ending. Throughout, the electronics stay discreet and leave the sound of the piano in front.

Writing in The Times, Chris Pearson called the album "a potent, uncomfortable evocation of the clash between articulation and anger." Hans-Jürgen Linke gave it five stars out of five in Jazzthetik, and Filipe Freitas of Jazz Trail summed it up as "a dazzling album from a fascinatingly complex musician." For Nick Lea of Jazzviews the record has a warmer feeling than Warp.

CD edition, ECM 2648, released on 15 May 2020, with all compositions by Balke.