Pianist Magda Mayas has developed a rigorous and distinctive prepared piano practice, working inside the piano with great musicality and originality. The music on Chant captures a dramatic expansion of her vision. After a period of exploring harmony and repetition with clavinet and Fender-Rhodes, she now brings them to her piano work. The album’s three pieces situate this interest in radically different ways, mixing the pianist’s prepared piano mastery with the recent embrace of sustained chords, acoustic and electronic dialogues, and her experiments with digitally time-stretching the recording to enhance resonance.

Chant is Magda’s third collaboration with Unsounds records. Peter Margasak has written detailed notes on the album.

TRACKLIST

1. Embodied (20:42)
2. Halcyon (18:42)
3. Chant (19:32)

Embodied (excerpt)

Halcyon (excerpt)

Chant (excerpt)

PROGRAMME NOTES

Over the last couple of decades it’s hard to think of another musician who has developed such a rigorous and distinctive prepared piano practice as Berlin’s Magda Mayas. Across many disparate contexts, Mayas always privileges coherence and flow, never allowing her dynamic language to overshadow her innate musicality. While she scoffs at the idea of abandoning prepared piano—" I love sound too much and I don’t get bored with the inside piano,” she says—the music on Chant captures a dramatic expansion of the pianist’s vision.

Reflecting her devotion to social and musical communities through recent stretches of political upheaval and the disruption of the pandemic, she’s found solace in harmony and repetition, and after a period of exploring such sounds with clavinet and Fender-Rhodes, she now brings them to her piano work on Chant. The album’s three pieces situate this interest in radically different ways. The only preparations on the title work are organic, embracing the tonal and mechanical degradation wrought by time and environment upon the 16 upright pianos housed in and around the Piano Mill residency in Australia, including a few that reside outdoors. Two different chords articulated on all 16 keyboards ring out over nearly 20 minutes, the wildly varied condition of each instrumentation imparting its own character on the piece and altering the timbre to undercut the surface serenity. As the piece unspools, Mayas increasingly plays with certain chords, breaking them up into irregular arpeggios without disrupting the elegant, leisurely pace.

“Embodied” is a work that straddles two worlds, mixing the pianist’s prepared piano mastery with the recent embrace of sustained chords. The sound worlds blend beautifully, Mayas’ internal machinations spilling into the resonance emanating from luxurious notes produced with keys. As usual, her preparations suggest a full ensemble, with sounds that chime, clatter, twang, and swell, a densely varied, multi-dimensional topography enhanced and caressed by the plangent chords surrounding it. A different blend emerges on the final piece, “Halcyon”, thanks to Mayas installing a small guitar amplifier inside the piano. She deployed the usual pair of microphones to record the prepared piano sounds, while a mobile guitar pickup on other strings was fed into the amplifier, producing guitar-like notes and corrosive feedback. The beguiling dance of acoustic and electronic resonance is enhanced by digitally time-stretching the recording so we hear the interactions with greater sharpness and impact. “I am definitely interested in bridging the tonal piano playing with inside piano sounds”, she says. “But it’s important to me that this happens organically, intuitively, not as a concept I force. I just like discovering things in a playful way, and if it takes years, so be it.” From what we hear on Chant, it’s worth being patient.

— Peter Margasak, Berlin, January 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Magda Mayas (b. 1979) is a Berlin-based pianist, composer, and performer whose work over the past 25 years has redefined the sonic possibilities of the piano. She has developed a distinctive vocabulary that explores both the interior and exterior of the instrument, employing amplification, preparations, and objects that serve as extensions of the piano itself. Drawing from the traditions of prepared and inside piano techniques, Mayas has crafted a highly personal and innovative approach that expands the language of internal piano making.  She holds a PhD in Music Performance and Interpretation from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a professor and researcher at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
https://www.magdamayas.com/ 

CREDITS

1. Embodied 
Live at SoundOut Festival in Canberra, Australia, February 2025 (piano, objects).
Recorded by Kimmo Vennonen.

2. Halcyon 
Berlin, July 2025 (piano, objects, guitar pick up, guitar amplifier).
Recorded by Tony Buck at Brief Sand Studio.

3. Chant 
Piano Mill residency at Harrigans Lane CoLab, Queensland, Australia, June 2023.
Recorded on 16 upright pianos by Magda Mayas.

All tracks mixed by Tony Buck, mastered by Joe Talia, 2025.
All music by Magda Mayas. Liner notes by Peter Margasak. Cover design by Isabelle Vigier.