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Prepared Piano 1​.​0

by Marc Junker

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  • Cassette + Digital Album

    Professionally duplicated run of 100 tapes - Clear shells with Black Ink / Full color 5-panel J-cards - Photo is a mock-up, real photos will be posted when cassettes arrive.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Prepared Piano 1.0 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days
    edition of 100 
    Purchasable with gift card

      $9.50 USD or more 

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Six-panel digipak lite case with professionally duplicated CDs. Run of 50 only!

    Includes unlimited streaming of Prepared Piano 1.0 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8.50 USD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $5 USD  or more

     

1.
2.
3.
Beyond 01:27
4.
~(crashed)~ 02:02
5.
Maeve 01:10
6.
Skeuomorph 01:44
7.
Wind Theme 01:10
8.
Pour You 03:03
9.
10.
Extremities 01:42

about

Vancouver-based composer Marc Junker presents his debut release in the Doom Trip catalog with "Prepared Piano 1.0," a collection of meticulously sculpted miniatures that foreground his varied piano performances against webs of high-fidelity sound design. While Junker’s music under the moniker R23X, along with that project’s frequent collaborations with Chicago-based artist Equip, find him exploring the traditions of video game music and vaporous sample manipulation, his work under his given name highlights his forays into film scoring and orchestral composition. In truth, all these disciplines are inextricably linked throughout his work, regardless of moniker. "Prepared Piano 1.0" welds the heart-string tugging drama of film music to the dynamic short-form narratives and uncanny valley synthetic instrumentation of video game music, all frosted with bursts of hyper-digital electronic texture.

Junker’s treatment of the piano as lead instrument manifests in varied roles, often within the space of a single composition: tiers of consonant glitched loops spiral around the edges of the mix; passages of lush melody swell into cinematic grandeur; dissonant interjections burst through and steer listeners down divergent paths. Junker cites the influence of the prepared piano experiments of John Cage and the sweeping neo-classical piano sketches of Hauschka. These forebears appear in Junker’s repeated curlicue piano figures and heart-on-sleeve melodic architectures as much as his detours into atonality and moments that treat the piano as a raw percussion instrument valued as much for its textural capacity as the notes it produces. Junker works in miniature on "Prepared Piano 1.0," with six of its ten tracks clocking in at less than two minutes. Like video game composers prepared for each morsel-sized track to loop endlessly during the game’s runtime, Junker makes sure to cram each mini-narrative with enough twists to form a sinuous arc that can withstand repeated looping, but that can still keep us transfixed with just one playthrough. Like the Playstation-era output of video game composers including Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda, Junker delights in toying with the potential of synthetic orchestral instruments. Passages of vibraphone, music box, and violin take lead roles in his compositions, while orchestral string sections flow through chord progressions against networks of piano arpeggios. While modern listeners can be quick to identify a particularly evocative piece of music as a “soundtrack to a video game or movie that doesn’t exist yet,” "Prepared Piano 1.0" resists that distinction. It exists as music for its own sake, capable of flourishing in a vacuum of headphone reverie as easily as it can conjure scenes in our mind’s eye.

credits

released April 21, 2023

This album is dedicated to Vanessa and Dijon

"Prepared Piano 1.0" comprises ten pieces composed and performed by Marc Junker on the "digitally prepared piano."

All music written, mixed, produced, and performed by Marc Junker

Mastered by Z. Emerson at Doom Trip Records

Cover art by VHS Stills (Video-20XX)

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all rights reserved

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about

Marc Junker Vancouver, British Columbia

Composer/Producer based in beautiful Vancouver, BC, Canada.

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