Un Autre Décembre

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So soft, so gentle. A glitch generation update of 'Voices', Roger and Brian Eno's own update on Erik Satie's piano music. The Eno brothers had Roger playing his own brief Satiean pieces on the piano while Brian brush-stroked them ever-so-discreetly with electronic treatments - barely noticeable but utterly essential to the unique sound produced.

On 'Un Autre Décembre', Sylvain Chauveau, based in Paris, has the approach of an autodidact Arvo Pärt - untrained in musical notation, he is impassioned about the sound of the single beautiful note played on that most central instrument of Western music, the piano, striking it and then allowing it to slowly fade and die, like the ringing of a bell, before introducing the next one.

Chauveau's very short CD, running under half an hour, tips its postmodern hand with the interleafing of brief crackles of locked-groove vinyl and other very intimate, surprisingly warm electronic interventions. And it is indeed disarming how well piano and electronica complement each other here. "This is the most silent record I'll ever make,", he claims. "And this record is the work I'm the most proud of." Here's hoping that he betrays his own words and continues to make himself proud with similarly "silent" work in the future.