- Much of Peter Broderick's new LP Partners has been left to chance. Inspired by the aleatoric music of John Cage, Broderick relinquishes control to dice-rolling, records directly to tape without listening to the results, and even leaves the album's title to a random process. Returning to solo piano as the central sound in this record, he has delivered a package which serves equally as food for thought and a soundscape of lush melancholic beauty.

Despite Broderick's artistic goal of removing himself from the process, the album nevertheless sounds distinctly his, and forms a coherent addition to Broderick's diverse catalogue of chamber music, pop, and spoken word recordings. A certain ethos of imperfection has always been part of Broderick's work – his aim appears never to be about contriving perfection, but rather the honest capturing of his thoughts at a moment in time. Those instances where he has approached perfection (see When I Blank I Blank or Colours of the Night (Satellite)), one assumes it's because that's simply what was there to be captured at that time.

Partners opens with a spoken word track, followed by a rendition of John Cage's In A Landscape for solo piano. Often seen as an outlying moment of sublime consonance within Cage’s otherwise dissonant and oddball output, In A Landscape forms an apt bridge between Broderick and this mid-20th century composer with whom he explores a sort of musical kinship on Partners. The record closes with a cover of Sometimes by Brigid Mae Power – an artist whose connection to Broderick is much more local and contemporary. Sometimes contains a wonderfully disarming false start, where we hear Broderick admonish himself for getting “nitpicky” before restarting the take.

The space in between these two homages is filled out with solo piano inventions, peppered with ambient vocals and live effecting of the piano signal. Producer Tucker Martine’s real-time manipulation of tape delays and reverbs is as much a performance as Broderick's piano, making Partners almost like a duet. The production has a rawness throughout, underlined by a warm analogue hiss that reminds us at each transition that we are listening to an unpolished spontaneous sonic artefact. Amongst Broderick’s own compositions, standouts include the rhythmic slow-build Conspiraling, and the calm and graceful Up Niek Mountain, the latter reminiscent of Cage’s In A Landscape, with its rolling waves of ascending arpeggios.

Partners does not contain the Peter Broderick track that you might play to a friend as a primer for his work. Nor is it the ultimate record of Nils Frahm-esque post-classical piano to play at your next candlelit dinner. But it captures yet another angle of an artist who, in a time of sheen and polish, continues to generously document his unedited self through his work.

- Chris Perren.