Sergei Prokofiev - Piano Sonata No. 6 (1940)

I've had a three disc Prokofiev piano sonatas collection riding in my car with me for a few months now, and it is a beautiful, beautiful thing. See, driving for me is unavoidably stressful. I'm a guy who is pretty turned off to the world around me, but something about driving in a car flips every "fight or flight" switch in me and it is awful. Now, normally, I don't even understand what people are talking about when they discuss things like "being in the mood" for a specific song or "I can only listen to that when I'm in a certain mood." The fuck? It's just music, you emotionally obsessive twat. Anyway, this Prokofiev stuff is really engaging and beautiful and it turns a truly hellish experience for me into something that I really don't even mind at all. So, when I am driving, I am "in the mood" for Prokofiev.

This sonata starts with some fucking heavy piano riffing, the idea behind which I plan on ripping off for a Like Rats song sometime soon. You heard it here first. This piece is also unbelievably melodically rich with dissonant, rapidfire statements that somehow still make intuitive sense and are completely engaging. Transcend your boring, stressful reality with Prokofiev's melodic mindfuck piano experience number six.

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*I started reviewing new metal releases every week for ALARM. Here's a thing I wrote on the new Autopsy, which is really good.

Sergei Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No. 3 in C (1921)

I gave my ex-GF the Miles Davis autobiography for her birthday because I wanted to read it, and I recently took it back for myself, also because I wanted to read it. In this autobiography, Miles refers to Prokofiev as a "bad motherfucker who was terrible" or something like that, which is absolutely, unequivocally true. This shit is fucking bad.

If you read any of these words that I write in this bloggie, you should understand by now that variation on a theme is one of my favorite things. And hearing the twists and turns that a godhead freak of nature genius like Prokofiev can weave from a single musical idea is unreal. In Andantino con Variazoni, things eventually head down a bleak, somber path before activity returns to the music; this time, the orchestra plays with the theme while the piano dances chromatically in the background. My god does that smell good.

Infinite recombinations mimic the cause and effect decision trees that we use to imagine the future.

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