The Hazelwood Boys (Benjamin Burns & Jaan Eerik Priks) recorded Un-Prepared Piano on spontaneous impulse over a couple of days in Sligo, January 2023. The album consists of three long-form four-handed piano improvisations. The piano in question had fallen into a beautifully ‘out-of-tune’ state. These performances were as unprepared as the piano and it tells, with notes flowing in a stream-like chaos that couldn’t be rehearsed. By turns manic and calm, strident and delicate, light-hearted and morose, these tumbling sequences are as capricious and changeable as the sky above Knocknarea. Freed from the strictures of Western tonality, this is the sound of two boys finding joy in the surprising tonalities that an instrument can fall into when left to its own devices.
Benjamin Burns 