Piano provided the keys for Derry musician Ryan Vail's debut album
RYAN VAIL’S debut solo album is thoroughly modern — but its inspirations lie deep in the past. For Every Silence was loosely informed by the electronica composer’s experience of restoring an old piano belonging to his wife’s family and shipped to his hometown of Derry from London in the late 1920s.
As he sat day after day with the instrument, he developed in his mind a bond with the people who had owned and played it across the decades. Such wistfulness comes through powerfully on the LP, with songs such as 1927 bathed in nostalgia even as they deploy cutting edge beats and bleeps. If someone had recorded an electronica album in the age of Prohibition and silent movies, it would have sounded a lot like this.
