Orchestrion

Orchestrions were mechanically-played mini-orchestras of the 1800s, often built around the player piano, and the album cover illustrates Metheny’s modern interpretation of the orchestrion. He sits dwarfed by looming racks of mechanisms, custom-built percussion instruments, guitarbots, Disklavier pianos and bottles, all controllable through his guitar via solenoids and MIDI.

Although it’s played by machines, this music sounds strikingly human. There are heartbeats in the percussion, voices humming in the strings, and wordless songs from blown bottles.

Though a daunting 15 minutes long, the title track is upbeat, with a nod to Irish folk and the consonance and dynamics you’d expect from Metheny’s music. There’s dense percussion everywhere you listen, and the whole album is steeped in his lyricism, with poignant guitar lines skating over wholesome harmonic changes.

Introspective pieces like Entry Point and Soul Search don’t work as well, though. The lack of a human touch on the piano is more noticeable, the bass can be stodgy and repetitive, and phrases don’t always end cleanly.  

Unlike Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Orchestrion doesn’t parade each instrument down a musical catwalk. It’s the guitar or piano that leads on each track, while the other instruments provide texture. The dynamics are impressive and the instruments sound natural, but the excitement of one real human ego firing off another is missing.

Despite some shortcomings Orchestrion is Pat Metheny to the core. After all, he’s composed, played and improvised every sound that you hear. He’s come close to his aim of making this album more than a curiosity, but the real impact can surely only come from seeing his orchestrion in action. --Kathryn Shackleton

Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window

Orchestrion was influenced by the primitive but evocative player-piano technology of yesteryear that has fascinated Metheny since he was a child. The player piano inspired inventors of that age to create the "orchestrion," a large mechanical multi-instrument device that imitated the sound of an orchestra. Metheny brings this concept into the 21st century, composing and playing five ambitious pieces with his tailor-made, sophisticated, musically dynamic ensemble. "Orchestrionics" is what Metheny calls this new method of performing. The resulting album, recorded in midtown Manhattan's MSR studio after months of experimentation at home, is a marvel of the digital era, yet the record sounds beautifully, stirringly, human. In other words, timeless.

To witness Metheny improvising on guitar while surrounded by these instruments, digitally triggered to play the scores that Metheny has painstakingly written for each of them, is indeed a wonder. Eager fans have already made sell-outs of the first dates of Metheny's Orchestrion tour. But hearing is truly believing: there is not a single note on Orchestrion that sounds mechanical, and some tracks, like "Expansion", have a thrillingly improvisational feel to them.

Metheny has gone into uncharted territory: every day in the studio with these instruments was a revelation as he began to comprehend what they were capable of musically-–and, more importantly, what he himself could achieve in their presence. They were not a substitute for the interaction of other players and this does not signal a shift from Metheny's other collaborative ventures. In fact, Metheny most recently proved his love for ensemble playing with his 2008 tour-de-force trio release, Day Trip.

Orchestrion is all about innovation. As Metheny puts it, "This experience so far has provided me with a self-imposed challenge that has proven to be enormously difficult and time-consuming, but the early results have been absolutely exhilarating. I am excited to share this project... I am hopeful and confident that if nothing else, this will be something truly unique. It feels like progress to me and has gotten some notes out of me that I didn't know were there. That is always a good thing."