Miel Noir — Der Honigflügel

There’s nothing quite as endearing as a simple concept executed to near-perfection. What we have here are five vaguely neoclassical pieces for piano, played with great sensitivity and skill, and combined with production and experimental sounds in such a way that the underlying feel of the music is enhanced and not obscured. That’s a tough assignment to pull off, but Dimo Dimov, the man behind Miel Noir, has done it.

There are only five pieces on this disc, all between about eight and ten minutes long, and all following roughly the same pattern: piano, electronics, and additional overlaid production. The first element is obvious enough—there’s something about a melancholy piano that commands both the attention and the imagination, especially when it’s played with the skill and sensitivity that Dimov shows here. The second varies widely from track to track. On the first one, it’s an intermittently-played piercing squeal that sounds like a bit of sampled feedback; on the last, it’s a subway-like rumbling that rises and falls, but mostly stays in the background and at first sounds like nothing more than the tape noise underlaying the piano. The third takes the form of what sound like snatches of movie soundtracks from various languages—Russian? German? Hebrew?—and which invest an additional emotional intensity into the music.

A shame my German isn’t up to snuff, or I would have done more with the liner notes. I was able to translate the title, though (thank you, Google): “The Wings of Honey”, an oddly, uh, sweet title for something this stark. It has the feel of a project like Asher’s Miniatures, but carried to its fullest possible fruition instead of simply left at the level of a curiosity. It also begs to be carried even further along on a follow-up. I hope he’s working on that as we speak.