The experimental great approaches the piano like never before.

Though the experimentalist David Shea has spent decades composing for and playing piano his new album on Lawrence English’s Room 40 remains unique.

Titled Piano I, and following last year’s Room40 reissue of Shea’s The Prisoner, it’s a collection of entirely solo piano compositions made over a year of “practice, writing, listening, exploring and recording”.

In the past, Shea has written extremely complex pieces intended for technical masters of the instrument, but Piano I finds the composer reflecting on his own physicality and writing pieces for himself and his own technique.

“Although I’ve always played and performed on keyboards in my solo and ensemble works, I never took on the huge task of being able to play the technically challenging (at least by my standards) the type of scores I had written for others,” he writes on the Room 40 website. However, after English approached Shea with the idea of a collection of solo piano works he began to unravel his own relationship with the instrument.

“It was this time spent with the piano, the ritual of playing and this re-working of my own physical and conscious process that forms the core of these pieces,” listening to the hypnotic opener ‘Mirror, Shea seems to capture the process in real time.

Listen to ‘Mirror’ below and grab Piano 1 before its June 3 release via Room 40.