Alex Kozobolis - The Seasons Are Not Four

A Closer Listen

Here is a happy story. Back in 2011-12, over a decade ago, Alex Kozobolis spent time on his friend Ingrid’s upright Furstein piano, practising what Alex describes as structured improvisation, capturing the notes he wove out of the air on a Zoom H4n complete with all the bird song, schoolyard shouts, and floorboard creaks of the environment in which the piano was situated.

Over the course of twelve months, he put together four EPs, Songs From A Distant Summer, For Snow, From November and Together. The four EPs quickly found an audience. A Closer Listen was amongst the sites that enthusiastically reviewed these gems at the time, and one of the tracks, “I Promise”, went on to be streamed more than 24 million times. As Alex himself puts it “I could never have imagined when playing the final notes of the piece that came to be called ‘I Promise’ that these lonely fumblings would go on to be heard so widely by people across the world and shape the trajectory of my journey, musical and otherwise.”

Here we were over a decade later and the world is a profoundly different place. His friend Ingrid has passed. Alex is an established visual artist, having worked with Nils Frahm, Victoria Canal, Penguin Café, Moses Sumney, Erland Cooper, to name just a few. The close-miked upright piano soundscape he helped pioneer has become part of the modern classical vernacular. Now he has gathered the four recordings together for a vinyl release… and what a package it is! Roz Edenbrow’s spectacular artwork graces the cover of a transparent double vinyl with yolk. We don’t normally feature merch here, but it’s too beautiful not to:

Listening to these recordings again, as he invites us to do now, they sound both familiar and fresh. Alex is an extremely gifted improvisor, and so while we can still enjoy the popular appeal of a well-loved piece like “I Promise”, it’s a joy to rehear slightly the more experimental, unpredictable pieces, like “Through The Leaves”, “In Sunray Gardens” or “It’s Been So Long”. There’s a lovely moment in the latter when you literally hear Alex discover the felt pedal for the first time, a tiny reminder of how much has changed. Indeed, that’s one of the many joys of these pieces: you often sense Alex reacting to what has just happened, the notes that his fingers have called from the keys, allowing us to share in the discoveries uncovered by his curiosity.

This album is a time capsule. It captures a moment when an artist’s life changed; it presages many of the developments we would see in contemporary classical music in the intervening decade; it is a tribute to a friend who is no longer with us but whose presence is still felt; it is a series of real-time conversations with the character of a piano; and it is a comment on the nature of time itself. In our review of From November, Richard suggested that maybe the EPs could work as a comment on the seasons, but Alex said that it was never intended as such. He quotes the Syrian poet Adonis, who wrote:

‘The Seasons Are Not Four, a week is not seven days, a year is more than it is, and less’

Real life is riddled with far more complexity than our neat labels for time can imply. In The Seasons Are Not Four, Alex Kozobolis has given us a beautiful tribute to life and a great album to soundtrack deep thought. (Garreth Brooke)