Composer
Kui Dong has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the Other Minds Festival that stretches back to the third festival in 1996. Her skills as an improviser are well noted and incubated in workshops at Dartmouth College with
Christian Wolff and
Larry Polansky. On Other Minds' Hands Like Waves Unfold,
Kui Dong strikes out on her own in 10 prepared piano improvisations recorded at Dartmouth in 2005. Half of the pieces were recorded on a piano prepared after a plan by
John Cage executed by one of
Kui Dong's students; rather than pull the preparations out after it took eight hours for the student to set them up, she decided to have a little fun and record some improvisations on it. Later she made a complimentary series of recordings in which
Kui Dong devised her own preparations; small bells, paper, small metal sticks, and other things. She also plays inside the body of the instrument with her fingers.
In certain pieces where the
Cage preparations are used, the "Cagean" sound of the piano comes forth, such as in "Blue Bird and Red Bird," although at times it is less obvious, such as the disarmingly simple movement titled "Floating Stars." However, in some of the other pieces, as "In Between," at times it is difficult to tell that
Kui Dong is even playing a piano -- there are so many clattery, plucky, scraping kinds of non-pianistic sounds. In her regular keyboard repertoire,
Kui Dong has interpreted very little twentieth-century literature -- mainly the German romantics and Viennese classicists -- and while technically she comes to the piano fully equipped,
Kui Dong is a novice when it comes to the typical gestures one associates with experimental piano literature. A certain freshness of approach keeps Hands Like Waves Unfold from getting into territory that might be perceived as derivative or contrived. Inside the booklet, there is a fascinating interview with
Kui Dong, where she describes her experience with this project and mentions getting "cold feet" about the album shortly before deciding to release it.
Kui Dong need not have worried -- it is a challenging and charming disc in which discovery and a sense of bold experimentalism unfolds before the listener's ears, seemingly in real time, but actually edited and carefully arranged "to tell a story," as she says.