Well, we’ve all been through Turkey Day, and the Turkey coma, and Black Friday — I did my traditional “hide from the world and mutter dark misanthropic things under my breath”-a-thon — and here we are, running up to Christmas. It might not be December quite yet, but who ever let that stop them from being jolly?
Torley Wong has been making music, off and on, for close to fifteen years. (Or possibly longer.)
Today’s album, Holidium, was released on Christmas Eve of 2008, was one of several instances of him departing from his usual style of techno. This is pure solo piano work, all of it original, but in a festive, holiday, winter solstice mood.
Wong has a musicality and complex melodic sense that are almost unequaled in the Creative Commons space. His techno work is amazing, and his solo piano explorations are not much less so.
While you will not find traditional, familiar melodies here, you will definitely hear a few echoes of them.
If you’re familiar with Wong’s earlier melodies, you’ll also hear him slyly quoting himself. The only one I’ve been able to pin down for sure is a motif from his tehcno piece “The Smile In Her Eyes” which pops up more than once in this album, most obviously at the end of “Snowflake Child”.
But that’s beside the point, really. This is excellent background music for the holidays, both joyful and contemplative, without any saccharine or oversimplification. You won’t be humming these tunes endlessly, no earworms here, but you may find yourself returning to them again and again. At least, I do.
Download Holidium free from the Internet Archive.
Holidium by Torley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
This album should have been posted on 18 July 2016.
Doing Slapstick in the Kingdom of the Blind 