Rudi Arapahoe: False Self plays music for six pianos
TakuRoku

Appearance is once again deceiving in Rudi Arapahoe's third False Self recording, which presents four long-form, system-based works for six pianos. That a cheeky kind of sleight-of-hand is involved is intimated in the very presentation of the near hour-long release: though Cafe OTO's TakuRoku is releasing it digitally, ten physical copies also were created in what appears to be a cassette format but which soon enough reveals itself to be a fold-out USB tucked inside the cassette shell.

It arrives after False Self (2016) and A false memory of a sports party (2018), but it distances itself from them in its production methodology: whereas the earlier two were created using a self-authored SuperCollider algorithm Arapahoe christened False Self (ostensibly a “fractured version” of himself), the latest set was composed during studies with Jim Denizen Simm, who introduced Arapahoe to new working methods (shared by Simm and a number of ex-Scratch Orchestra members) that prompted him to abandon the software for a more flexible approach involving systems designed on paper.

Produced by Simm, composed by Arapahoe, and performed by False Self (the latter term stemming from psychiatrist R. D. Laing's writing), False Self plays music for six pianos was created after a year of study with Simm and an immersion in the history of British Experimental Music (Howard Skempton, Christopher Hobbs, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, et al.). It's certainly possible to posit a connecting line from the ‘systems music' of English composer John White (b. 1936) to the approach adopted by Arapahoe for his project.

He used integer tables to arrange cells of slow, jazz-tinged piano music that repeat and move in and out of sync (each piano possesses nine cells, eight of music and one silent). As each piece advances (all four are between thirteen and fifteen minutes), the cells exhaust themselves before the cycle begins again. Don't be misled by the six pianos detail, either: each piece plays as if a single pianist is at the keyboard, and space is plentiful.

Sourced directly from jazz piano standards, the material is repurposed in the form of six-second cells, a length substantial enough to induce occasional bouts of recognition from jazz aficionados. You might well imagine you're hearing snippets of “I Should Care,” “Autumn in New York,” or other standards performed by Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, and more as the recording plays.

Musically, it's a convincing act of bewitchery. Though the False Self pieces are, in a production sense, electronic music compositions, you'd never know it when they appear to be acoustic piano ruminations. Generally unfolding ponderously, each impresses as an elegant, introspective meditation, with the writing largely consonant and harmonious. False Self plays music for six pianos could be described in generative music terms, given that each track might have been designed to play without cessation.

April 2021