The Bliss of Bliss finds Pat Thomas at the peak of his creative powers, presenting a monumental forty‑minute solo improvisation recorded live at Cave12 in Geneva. Across this expansive performance, Thomas redefines the relationship between pianist, instrument, and space, reaching a sound world at once physical and metaphysical. The work stretches from violent tone clusters and compressed harmonics to fragile melodic suspensions that seem to hover on the edge of silence, capturing the paradox of total motion within stillness. Long recognized as one of Britain’s most visionary improvisers, Thomas has, since the 1980s, stood at the crossroads of free jazz, electroacoustics, and spiritual experimentation. In The Bliss of Bliss, he draws upon these traditions but transcends them, using piano as a site of ritual encounter. Within the opening minutes, listeners are enveloped by thick, overlapping sonorities—hammered chords layered until they blur into percussive fog—which eventually dissolve into radiant harmonic resonances. Each attack generates an afterimage, a secondary vibration that recalls Gagaku’s ceremonial breath or Cecil Taylor’s sculptural polyphony, yet the energy here feels distinctly Thomas’s own: dignified, urgent, and devastatingly alive.

The improvisation unfolds as a kind of topography: valleys of density give way to sudden plateaus of air where sound drifts into vibration and decay. In these suspended passages one hears Thomas shaping silence with palpable intention. The instrument becomes an organism—creaking, breathing, shimmering—with the pianist summoning entire landscapes from its interior. At times, his approach is tactile and direct, even percussive; at others, it feels disembodied, as if the music were conjured by invisible forces. This tension between exertion and surrender drives the piece forward, maintaining a constant equilibrium of intensity and poise. Following the vast title work, two short pieces—Twilight and Soca Time—reveal the pianist’s playful side. The former relishes asymmetry: fragments of lullaby reframed as fractured dance. The latter, by contrast, reinterprets Caribbean rhythm through the prism of contemporary improvisation, turning the keyboard into a deck of plucked strings and ghostly percussion. Together they provide coda and release, refracting the monumental weight of the opening improvisation into brief flashes of exuberance and humor.