Polaroid Piano
Throughout the later half of the 20th century, Edwin Land’s Polaroid film came to dominate photo albums – offering the chance to ‘capture the moment’ and relive it seconds later, Land’s product revolutionised the way people documented the world around them. Yet Polaroid cameras did more than simply recount past moments – the medium itself inserted a soft-focus, dream-like quality that appeared to suggest vague recollection over exacting reality.
Following in this tradition, Akira Kosemura’s latest pop miniature for Someone Good, Polaroid Piano, shares this hazy filmic impression. It’s snapshot of his increasingly personal and evocative piano and electronics pieces, tinted with field recordings (recorded in various locations including recordings from Brisbane and Hobart by Lawrence English) and offered as a series of small but gloriously rich auditory phrases. Played notes and the mechanism of the piano itself share equal presence in the compositions – Kosemura’s physicality evident throughout the album.
Polaroid Piano, like the film from which its name is drawn captures a moment, but does so with a shimmer of the unreal and the imagined.