In the middle of the 1990’s, as a teenager, I built a little recording studio in the attic of our country cottage. It used to be a henhouse so it was accessible only by a ladder. I liked it that way though actors recording voiceovers or directors checking out my soundtracks grumbled. I made my best music there and I loved that place tremendously.

However, the cottage got flooded in 2002 and my parents reconstructed it afterwards. My dark little studio with one tiny peephole was rebuilt into a bright spacious guest room with three windows and a king-size bed.

In July 2019, my parents, after years of serving extra time, retired from work as teachers and decided to go for a trip to the U.S. For the whole October. It would be their first time in America. Since they weren’t sure about their English, they booked a language course in Britain for the last two weeks in August.

By a coincidence my wife and kids went for a vacation to Greece at that very time, together with a friend and her kids.

I had a rare opportunity to spend some time alone – and at the cottage. I promised my parents to take care of the garden and moved for a couple of days to the room that used to be my recording studio almost two decades ago.

I took a four-track cassette recorder with me, and some instruments. I would compose and record every day since morning until long after midnight, happy as back in the 90’s.

Downstairs in the living room we’ve had an old piano since I was a little boy. We never let anyone tune it as we got it for free from a guy who gave it away because it had its armour cracked and tuning it might break it. Every night after my improvised dinner I would sit by the piano and play whatever came to my mind. I enjoyed it a lot and one night, about in the middle of the recording sessions that would turn out to become my album Ultimate Answer, I got the idea to record the piano with my binaural microphones and use it on the album.

Next day I woke up, turned my recording gear on, got up and went right to the piano. I sat there and began playing. What was supposed to be a short recording session to obtain a few samples, turned to a whole day of improvising. I couldn’t move from the piano as if it enchanted me.

I didn’t adjust the mics, I didn’t set even the recording levels, so the resulting recording is quite lo-fi, distorted at times. But it’s authentic. It is a true record of an artist’s state of mind while recording an album, letting his thoughts wander anywhere. I listened to it later and felt like it would be a shame to use it just as one of the instruments. It deserved its own album.

When I discovered later there is something called Piano Day, I knew that was the right time to finish that album by. I thought up my own feast, the Untuned Piano Day, happening a day before the official Piano Day. I sorted the recordings, got rid of the ones that had recording errors in them (drop outs mainly) and kept the ones that spoke to me the most. In chronological order, like I’d played them back in August.

Before my parents got back from the UK and I went for them to the airport, I tidied up everything in my former studio as well as around the piano and moved back home afterwards. Two months later I took my folks to the airport again, this time for their US trip.

They finally returned in the middle of November and because my sister’s boyfriend brought them from Prague to the cottage this time, I had been already there, with our two kids.

While waiting, the boys were playing with their Lego and me with the piano. After singing Christmas carols for my kids, I suddenly started playing Weavings, my favorite track by Jogging House. I'd never played it before, it just came to me. I loved the nice and cozy family ambience: fireplace glimmering, happy kids playing and their lucky dad improvising. I took my phone and recorded two minutes of it all to remember. Right after the boys told me to stop playing, and I did, but the recording was here to stay. I shared it on twitter to please Jogging House. j.mp/Weavings

When my Untuned Piano Day album was conceptually almost finished, I got an idea to add this cover at the very end. I just had to loop the first two bars because I couldn’t find the original video, just the one on twitter (how lucky to have published it that day!), otherwise there’s no editing on neither of the piano tracks on the entire album.

Weavings is a cheerful ending thanks to it and it is a symbolic one, too: Both the first and the last track on this album were composed by someone else. We never own music, it just flows through us – the good sort, anyway.

So here you are. An authentic record of a guy who forgot to play well decades ago, playing a piano he’s known for his whole life, a piano so stiffened even the best players would have to fight with its keys to wheedle a good tone or two. And even they wouldn’t be crazy enough to release it.

I hope you’ll enjoy playing this album as much as I enjoyed playing that old untuned piano last summer.

Be happy, healthy and safe, friends.

Binaural Space, March 2020

…

All tracks except for the first and the last one improvised live by Binaural Space in August 2019, in the middle of the Ultimate Answer album recording sessions.

Track #1 contains a long excerpt from "Thelma And Louise Fly Away", composed and recorded by Flying Bohemian. Find the original track here:
binaural-space.bandcamp.com/track/thelma-and-louise-fly-away

Track #11 is an improvised variation of "Weavings”, composed by Jogging House. Find the original track here:
seilrecords.bandcamp.com/track/weavings

Huge thanks to both Flying Bohemian and Jogging House for their permission to use their compositions. I love you guys, you’re my heroes, inspiration and motivation.