Magda Mayas
Heartland

Magda Mayas   piano

1.    shards                  19:04
2.    slow metal skin     32:32

1 recorded in Berlin, November 2008
2 recorded in New York, September 2008

Reviews

'Heartland' was released as part of the 'Piano series'; four CDs all centred on experimental music for the piano. There were three excellent reviews covering the series as a whole:
Philip Clark in The Wire  here 
Stuart Broomer in Point of Departure  here
and Bill Meyer in Signal to Noise  here

Below are some individual reviews of Magda Mayas's disc:

“From the prepared piano pioneered by Henry Cowell and John Cage to Hiromi’s recent flashy excercises, plenty of musicians have experimented with the peculiar and gripping world of sound that comes from mucking around inside the instrument.  Yet with two stunning new albums Magda Mayas has expanded the language for internal piano music-making.  

Mayas was born and raised in Munster, Germany.  She became interested in jazz piano as a teenager, and while buying be-bop records she also picked up a couple of albums by Cecil Taylor and Alexander von Schlippenbach.  Mayas says she then quickly became enamoured of free jazz.  In 1999 she began studying piano in Berlin, where her burgeoning interests blossomed.

“When I moved there people were playing free jazz” Mayas said.  “I heard lots of concerts like that and I played with other people using extended technique.”  Two years later she moved to Amsterdam where she studied under Misha Mengelberg for a year, and in 2005 she earned a diploms from Berlin’s Hochschule fur Musik Hans Eisler under the tutelage of Georg Graewe.

Mayas has made a handful of records, including a superb duet with Necks percussionist Tony Buck, Gold on Creative Sources, but she’s made a significant artistic leap with her stunning solo debut Heartland.  The album’s two lengthy pieces showcase the full diapason of her talent, from thundering rumbles to piercing high-end screeches, from resonant glowing long tones to abrupt clattery explosions.  Each improvisation flows organically from one episode to the next, with the pianist balancing a keen sense of investigation and on-the-fly compositional logic.  

A second recording Teeming, with the French-Lebanese saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui pushes the sound palette in other directions.  Although the reader can certainly differentiate between the reedist and keyboardist, that doesn’t mean the actual abstraction of sound bears much relationship to the instrument’s expected tones.

While Mayas has been interested by what she could do inside the piano for years, it’s only more recently that she’s thrown herself into the practice.  “I don’t know what I’ll do in the future, but from playing the keyboard so much I became more interested in creating sounds inside as well, and in the last couple of years I’ve really gotten into it,” Mayas said,. “I don’t prepare it because I want to be flexible with the sounds, so I place objects on the strings or where the tuning points are, or I put gaffer tape on the strings.   Use my fingers and hands a lot.  I don’t stick stuff between the strings beforehand because I want to be able to get a conventional piano sound when I want it, or to change sounds quickly.”

Among her tools are wooden and metal objects, marbles, stones and even children’s toys.  “I discover new sounds as I play, but I definitely practice with new objects.  Sometimes I have a particular sound in mind that I have to create, so I work until I get it, but I do practice so that I can repeat certain sounds, more or less.”

Mayas also has duo projects with cellists Anthea Caddy and Okkyung Lee, and she has two unusual quartets, one with Buck, trumpeter Peter Evans and bassist Clayton Thomas, and another with Buck, Sehnaoui and guitarist Andy Moor from The Ex.  “I feel like I’m still exploring a lot, and I’m excited about it.”           
Peter Margasak, Downbeat

“There are two pieces of music that make up Heartland, a nineteen minute track recorded in Berlin in November 2008, and a thirty-two minute live set recorded live in New York a couple of months earlier. The first of these is named Shards, which is quite a fitting title given the dramatic, almost explosive nature of some parts of the piece. Mayas’ approach to the piano uses a variety of methods inside and outside of the instrument, scrapes, crashes, thuds and strumming alongside some “normally” played keyboard notes. In many ways she is doing little different to what we have heard before by other players, but her playing has real character and personal style. Much of the time she works by mixing up different methods of playing at once so what we hear is a blend of different sounds, wild shimmering scrapes at the strings underpinned by regular keystrokes for instance, the overall effect being one of depth and variety, depite the fact we are listening to a solo performer.

Shards shifts from patches of sparse, minimally picked out low notes to massive earthquakes of acoustic resonance via everything in between. The track is rich with powerfully expressed emotion however. The music builds from the slower, muted sections into the more raucous in a manner than reminds me a lot of AMM a couple of decades back, but obviously on a smaller scale. The music broods for long periods in a tense, expectant manner, before gradually shifting up through slow storms of agitated strings into the crashing, thunderous closing section that sounds like Mayas picked up a series of heavy objects and dropped them one after another into the piano’s body. Its exciting and engaging stuff, all very intense and powerful and performed with no small degree of skill and understanding of the piano’s acoustic possibilities.

The longer live set, Slow Metal Skin inhabits similar ground, though the longer duration allows the music to stretch out a little more and use a wider range of sounds. The slow pace is still there, as is the sense of acoustic warmth, but again it is Mayas’ ability to portray a sense of feeling through her instrument that really shines through here. Five minutes in, after a steady build up there is a section of the recording made up of a wide array of techniques that really portrays a dark, menacing mood to the music, all abrasive scrapes and muted strikes at prepared strings. There follows a slide away into a sparse, echoing space full of small, partly isolated notes until things build again. The music oddly makes me think of a boat thrown about by stormy seas, caught on a rock at one point, struggling free, only to be hurled against the next looming hazard, thrown about before coming to rest in the next calm moment. Slow Metal Skin (great title by the way) is not as concise and well formed as Shards, but then it is a live improvisation and naturally tends to wander about a bit. It still goes through stages of powerful emotion however. The section beginning around twenty-five minutes in and running tot he end of the track is quite remarkable. The music rises to a crescendo made up of more sounds than Mayas has hands, wild attacks at the strings, a continuously rattling note and more besides, building in volume and intensity before suddenly collapsing into a single repeated strike at a reverberant high note and rifting gradually away to a series of clunks and crashes that sound almost comical after the weight of seriousness infused in the early music.

Heartland is great, a real tour de force of solo, entirely acoustic improvisation. Unlike Lexer’s digitally enhanced music, or Fuhler’s use of electronics there isn’t much here we haven’t heard before, so this CD is not about innovation or technique, but it is a fine example of one musician using their undoubted skill to portray strong, emotional music in a very direct, powerful manner. Another really good one.”                                                       Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

“A solo CD by one Magda Mayas, who plays piano, on a label full of improvised music. Should improvisers release solo CDs - I asked myself this only recently, and just the other day I spoke about this with Dolf Mulder, our improvised/free jazz music lover. We think they shouldn't. In improvised music its the interaction between musicians that counts, we thought. That was before I heard 'Heartland' by Magda Mayas, who has two pieces of played live on the piano. I don't know her at all but I wondering how many hands she has, as at times it sounds like she has six. We hear the scraping of metallic sounds, like an improviser on percussion, the snares of the piano being plucked, while a finger hits the keys every now and then. All of which sounding at times at bit electronic. This is a great CD, very powerful and intense. The piano is the piano throughout, but Mayas knows how to pull out so many more of the instrument, the scraping, bowing and plucking that this fifty minute release is a breathtaking work.  Excellently and expertly played.”             
Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

“Talking about listening experiences, this is an avant-garde experimental album that those of you with very open ears and strong hearts should listen to. It is one of the widest and deepest adventures into the sonic heart of the piano, including its entire cardiovascular system attached to it. It is a discovery of sound possibilities, that are utterly frightening while being soothing at the same time. It is so powerful that it's captivating.  Magda Mayas is a German pianist. She is clearly a musical visionary. “                                                    
Stef Gijssels, Free Jazz

“Heartland  is the only one of the four Piano Series releases to feature a lone pianist. At least, that is what the album's credits tell us; whilst listening to this music, some may double-check that Magda Mayas was actually playing alone. On occasions here, she generates such a variety of sounds that it is difficult to believe they all emanate from one woman plus one piano.

The album was produced by Tony Buck (drummer with The Necks), with whom Mayas plays in an occasional duo. The sounds that Mayas produces combine recognisable piano tones with a range of percussive effects that are achieved by preparations or by scraping or striking various parts of the instrument's structure.

Whereas other releases here contrast the playing of two pianists, Mayas' own music alone contains a mass of contrasts. She frequently produces passages of play in which she adopts two different voices and conducts a dialogue with herself.

The real success of Heartland lies not just in the sounds that Mayas produces, but in the way that they are put together into a coherent and compelling performance. Across its two extended tracks, the energy and invention of the album never flags. It maintains a forward momentum that draws the listener in. Surprises are never far away, though. So, midway through "Slow Metal Skin" is an extended passage that most closely resembles the sound of a firework display. “     
John Eyles, All About Jazz