Codebreaker

Vinyl LP pressing. Within the voluminous catalog that pianist Matthew Shipp has created over the last three and a half decades, his solo piano work has charted a unique and compelling pathway for the evolution of the instrument's vocabulary. On Codebreaker, that path turns yet another unexpected corner, continuing to venture further while taking a surprising turn inward. Codebreaker finds Shipp in an uncharacteristically meditative state of mind. Though the language is unmistakably his own, the usual violent attacks, dense clusters and insistent circularity are in short supply, replaced by harmonic nebulae that luxuriate in the mysterious resonances that Shipp conjures from the keyboard. As ever with the work of this consummate improviser, intention had very little to do with it.