PRE-ORDER: Concern & Simplicity Vol. 1: Original Recs 1981-86 [LP]

Concern and Simplicity Volume 1: Original Recordings, 1981-1986 documents the scarcely heard recordings of Swiss pianist and composer Lotti Tauber, selected from various albums privately pressed across the 1980s. Living with musculoskeletal disability since childhood, and surviving a critical injury in her late 20s, the singular minimalism and innovative playing of Tauber's piano(s) testifies to music's ability to provide a dialogue between pain and joy. Covering a breadth of output in the final decade of her life, this first archival volume of Tauber's work introduces her capacity to inflect the avant-garde with the intimacy of the personal, combining improvisation and intuition with the chance-based structures to which her intellectual and spiritual life was devoted.Since childhood, Tauber's mobility and playing had been restricted by musculoskeletal issues of the arms and hands. In 1973 she suffered a car accident and a spinal injury that brought with it a period of paralysis and lifelong pain in addition to that which she already experienced from her worsening physical condition. After traveling to Chicago to seek surgical solutions to these problems in 1981, Tauber began recording her own musical compositions. She self-released eight albums over the following decade, each adorned with her own surrealist, and sensational, pencil illustrations: Roundabout Ways (1981), Aufgehoben (1981), Bestimmung (1982), Courage (1982), von Zeit zu Zeit (1982), Planeten (1983), I Ging (1985), and Samowar (1986). To overcome the challenges of her disability, Tauber developed an iconoclastic playing style that focused on the movements of her thumb and ring finger, and her compositions were often structured and even determined by mystical texts related to her Jungian interests. An outsider unknown even within the Swiss musical scene, she aligned her minimalism with the likes of Arvo Pärt and Phillip Glass, while making music that was still unapologetically first and foremost for and of herself. Tauber's intense period of musical productivity in the 1980s coincided with the resumption of her physical decline following the reprieve given by her surgeries in Chicago, and in 1988, she elected to die on her own terms through euthanasia. At the time of her passing, Tauber was 44.Concern and Simplicity focuses on works of Tauber's in which rhythm and melody take turns occupying the seat of the primary object under modulation. In works like "Borderline" and "Neptun," her achingly gentle transformations of each search not for rhythm and melody's final relationship, but for the model of their exploratory and ongoing communication. In "Einkehr" and "Kan," Tauber places herself in conversation with late 20th century minimalism, developing self-propelling systems of arpeggiation, and unearthing the inescapably narrative potentials of repetition. As musician and author Kristen Gallerneaux emphasizes in the liner notes accompanying Concern and Simplicity, Tauber's compositional "simplicity" functions as "a counterspell against stasis," a permission and challenge to both musician and listener to "abolish, preserve, [and] transcend" the out-of-jointedness of subjective experience.From her education in the psychic structures of Jungian psychoanalysis, to her research into an array of global and historical mystical traditions, to the DIY ethos of music production that she defended despite her disability, Concern and Simplicity captures the singular curiosity which links all of Tauber's pursuits. It is a curiosity that asks what we might we hear if we listen to those wordless parts of ourselves - what it finds, what it puts to music, are the very structures of such a listening, and the endless dialogue with the self they make possible.