Electronic / Experimental · 2025
Ivory Abyss: Trials of the Virtuoso is a rigorous and expressive exploration of technical musicianship pushed into electronic form. On this album, Jonathan Kendall channels the discipline, tension, and emotional weight of virtuosic performance into a modern, digital soundscape—where precision and instability coexist.
The album unfolds like a suite of demanding études, each track acting as a self-contained trial. Angular rhythms, fractured melodic lines, and evolving harmonic systems create a sense of constant motion, as if the music itself is testing its limits. While rooted in electronic production, the compositions carry a strong instrumental sensibility, evoking piano études, mechanical waltzes, and recursive structures that feel both classical and futuristic.
Tracks such as “Fury Etude in Dissonant Spiral” and “Polyphonic Maze” lean into controlled chaos—layered patterns colliding and resolving with deliberate tension—while pieces like “Recursive Nocturne” and “Elegy in Microtones” slow the pace, revealing a more introspective side shaped by microtonal shifts and subtle emotional weight. The closing stretch of the album brings these ideas together, culminating in a finale that feels earned, exhausted, and resolute.
Visually, the album artwork reinforces the concept: a solitary figure at the piano rendered in fractured, expressive strokes, suggesting both mastery and strain. It’s an image that mirrors the music itself—focused, demanding, and deeply human beneath its technical surface.
Ivory Abyss: Trials of the Virtuoso stands as a statement piece within Jonathan Kendall’s body of work: an album that embraces difficulty, celebrates craft, and finds beauty in the struggle between control and collapse.
Listen & Explore
- Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/za/album/ivory-abyss-trials-of-the-virtuoso/1810635202 - YouTube (Official Channel):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi1oCXt3XKi-D59RLvQnjrwapp=desktop