Lori Goldston, A.F. Jones, Greg Kelley, Austin Larkin

But first, a bit of context: in the halcyon days of 1968, Seattle’s KRAB FM – which was founded and run by the Jack Straw Foundation, now known as Jack Straw Cultural Center – collaborated with the Helix newspaper and KRAB producer and musician Larry Van Over to drop an upright piano from a helicopter at Van Over’s farm in Duvall, Washington. Many decades later, in 2019, a new exhibition was conceived that would publicly display the instrument’s remains for the first time since this initial event, along with historical film footage and documents, as well as recordings of new music composed and performed on the shattered piano.

Fittingly dubbed ‘Piano Drop,’ the work we share today was conceived as part of this collective show by renowned cellist and long-time Seattleite Lori Goldston. “The idea had to do with exploring ephemeral aspects of this object that was acted on so violently, finding ways to coax it to speak through resonance,” explains Goldston. “I love hearing the wheels turning in the performers' heads as they make decisions about something that is nearly impossible.”

Recorded live in performance at the Jack Straw Cultural Center by Joel Maddox, Lori’s cello is joined by Greg Kelley’s trumpet and Austin Larkin’s violin, while Alan Jones mans the controls as the quartet’s audio technician and electronics manipulator. Together, the quartet finds, sustains, manipulates, and responds to the shattered piano’s sympathetic resonances. With Alan interacting directly with the piano board itself via a network of transducers and found objects, the three instrumentalists play off of his sonic interventions, generating a rich lattice of enmeshed acoustic feedback and shards of implied melody that focus, merge, and give relief to an implied map of the piano at rest.