Insight Piano: Within just a few years Tom Schneider moved the scope of the sampler as an
instrument into entirely unexpected zones of expression. On keyboards with pioneering cut-up pop
band KUF he developed a key-triggered vocal style that features no singers on stage. With trio Loom
& Thread he devised a new wave of digital improv where the sampler amplified the piano and
engaged the acoustic musicians in some sort of multidimensional musical chess.
'Isotopes' is Schneider's first solo album and witnesses him being an astonishingly sensitive and
imaginative pianist. The album's material was developed and recorded in an intimate session at Bauer
Studios of Ludwigsburg – a site laden with the history of some of the most significant recordings of
contemporary jazz. Yet things don't stop at bringing just another piano solo effort.
Schneider's approaches to the instrument, which range from tender hesitance to eruptive, clustered
attacks, merely set the starting point. These utterances are sampled and mirrored back, ultimately
rendering a unified performance which combines the depth of intricately executed composition with the
urgent immediacy of free improvisation.
Over the past decade we have witnessed a resurgence of apparently opposed trends: repetitive,
minimalistic sensitivity and dashing, complex virtuosity. The linear thinking that defines these
approaches as polar opposites turns out to be entirely useless when facing 'Isotopes.' Both, the
uninhibited speed of granular clouds of tones and the dense texture of multiple layered phrases fired
off all at once, require a complete reconceptualisation of the meaning of complexity in music. Yet
Schneider offers less of a tongue in cheek critique of the pretense usually inherent in virtuosic display
– instead, the playing field is being thoroughly leveled: Now, and really for the first time, a singular
tone potentially carries exactly as much weight as the peaks of physiological sophistication.
This is not at all what the axe-wielding avant-gardes of the past were after. What we are witnessing
here is a thorough de-ideologisation of the instrument: Neither traditions need to be shattered nor
innovation kept at the gates. In a world of zero-sum thinking (‘if you get to eat I must go hungry’), here
we find an integrative approach that shows that we can indeed lift up without simultaneously pulling
down.