The Weight of Light

*The Weight of Light* is a phrase that has to do with physics, as Paris-based piano master Benoît Delbecq explains in a documentary by Igor Juget accompanying this innovative solo piano album. Using prepared piano techniques to fundamentally alter the keyboard itself, Delbecq generates percussion timbres and non-pitched sounds in intricately planned combination with melodic and harmonic elements to create what he calls “a music depicting seemingly randomized momenta.” To engender these “sound fabrics,” he might draw circles with differing radii to conceptualize rhythmic loops of overlapping speeds (something he sees as akin to hip-hop rhythmic practices). He might also sketch mobiles in the manner of Alexander Calder and then try to capture, in sound, the kinds of shadows such a mobile would cast. In the resulting music, Delbecq’s hands are essentially playing tuned drums, with rattles and textures akin to balafon or mbira. There are bass tones, lyrical lines, slick improvisation over dense polyrhythmic beats (“Anamorphoses”), even gorgeous passages of conventional piano chording during “Broken World,” “Havn en Havre,” and most starkly in the final 30 seconds of the opening track, “The Loop of Chicago.” But the driving force is heightened rhythmic and tonal ambiguity, a polyrhythmic pulse of no pulse, a music that allows the listener to “choose their own beat,” as Delbecq puts it. It’s a beautiful, long-evolving process that the pianist has documented on his earlier unaccompanied outings *Nu-Turn* (2003), *Circles and Calligrams* (2010), and *Ajmilive, Vol. 17* (2017).