Ian Pace & Simon Limbrick - Floating, Drifting (2018)

With 'Floating, Drifting' The Louth Contemporary Music Society brings together five transcendent, luminous works by Ligeti, Gordon, Adams, Berio and Pisaro that, through the remarkable piano playing of Ian Pace, achieve a strange, heightened beauty.

Recorded over three days, in the June of 2017, at St Peter's Church of Ireland, Drogheda, 'Floating, Drifting' is an album structured as a dream-journey, that begins, with György Ligeti's early 1950s composition, Musica Ricercata: Number 7. Under a minute long, Michael Zev Gordon's 2003 miniature, Crystal Clear, might represent a brief moment of realisation and calm before another long, ever-changing, spectral journey begins in the form of John Luther Adams' incredible 2010 work, Four Thousand Holes.

With its wry, tonal allusions to Brahms' Op. 117 and Schubert's Op. 142, Luciano Berio's 1969 composition, Wasserklavier, follows with the final journey coming from Michael Pisaro's 2001 composition, Floating Drifting. Exactly 30 minutes in duration (a stopwatch is suggested), and recorded in one take, with silences, it is a piece to be played very softly, the sound barely present. Like John Luther Adams' Four Thousand Holes, it is also a piece that plays tricks on the listener's ears, it's silences, repetitions, and decaying notes suggesting other fragile presences within the floating world.

British pianist Ian Pace studied under Gyorgy Sandor. He is well known for his interpretations of contemporary European music and has given many world premiere performances.