Lubomyr Melnyk - KMH

Unseen Worlds
UW02

I confess that the name Lubomyr Melnyk meant absolutely nothing to me until a few weeks ago. Then came this second effort from Unseen Worlds, a reissue of a 1979 item originally to be found on the Canadian label, Music Gallery Editions, which had also released work by John Oswald and the Nihilist Spasm Band. Melnyk, a pianist of apparently formidable technical skills, succumbed to the minimalist bug sometime in the early 70s and developed a system he called Continuous Music. Though purportedly influenced by the standard triad of Reich, Glass and Riley the results, at least to judge from this album, strike me as far closer to the mammoth vortices created by Charlemagne Palestine, though less rigorous and ultimately less ecstatic.

“KMH” (the title intended as a “neutral license plate”) is a 50-minute work that’s very much of a piece. While it migrates a bit, the overall impression is of a totality, of an endless stream of tiny variations on, if not a theme, a general tonal area. The initial cascade of arpeggios reminded me somewhat of the solo piano music of Ron Geesin (“Patruns”) as well as that heard in Carla Bley’s “3/4”. But for Melnyk, it’s all one swirl, occasionally dizzying but not as often as I’d like, a morass of rapid figures, resolutely harmonious with very mild dabs of bittersweet here and there. And if there’s one thing he is, it’s persistent. He worries these idea kernels to death, over and over and over. Of course, Palestine did much the same thing but, at his best, managed to generate such a surge that the listener could be overwhelmed, drawn into the eddy and blissfully drowned. Here, there’s a tad too much serenity, a blurred quality that causes the music to lack the incisiveness necessary to transport one.

Well, me anyway. I can easily imagine others finding the piece to be exactly what they’re after, perhaps if they find someone like Palestine too unrestrained. What Melnyk does, he does extremely well and with a high enough degree of obsessiveness to attain a certain level of fascination on that aspect alone.

Unseen Worlds