MCKELWAY, CHRIS AND WELCH, JOHN - Piano Music

"Piano Music is a double-album of works for piano by two brilliant musicians: Chris McKelway and John Welsh. Both of these people have been moving beacons in my own inquiry into what will count as a really musical life.

McKelway's collection, Best Of, is a collection of private and occasional works for himself — as well as works for others brought back to CM's home instrument — from the past 15 years or so. Remediations of Chopin, Donnie Hathaway, and Tom Jobim threaded through lieder whose words have been suppressed but reappear as unrecoverable in the liner notes. Chris's material sensitivity to the instrument puts me in mind of the Marx Brothers — a fluid, physical comedy that might at first be mistaken for a compensation for a missing utterance until you're caught lingering with what the music has been saying throughout.

Welsh's collection, Boundaries, Endurance / Resolutions, consists of two substantial works separated by improvisatory intermezzi by himself and McKelway. Here John is continuing his music research into "the cultural and scientific reality of harmony," as he puts it in his liner notes to the album. When I first heard this music I was returned to 2016, when John and I were living together in New York, where we played in a number of projects together, including Speaker World, Causings, and Tongues. One day he asked me to come into his room to show me something. When I opened the door I saw that he had laid out thousands of pennies in extremely orderly rows throughout the otherwise bare wooden floor of his bedroom, having articulated a complex algorithmic pattern of heads and tails producing some harmonic relationships that he was exploring in his music. This is, like Sonny Rollins, centripetal music at its finest: burrowing into its interior aperture to reveal the bounded infinity of harmony.

In total, Piano Music offers 16 pieces over 90 minutes tracing the two composers' pathways for twenty-first century piano music.

Edition of 200 2xCDs in jewel case.
releases August 15, 2026

Chris McKelway: Best Of
John Welsh: Boundaries, Endurance / Resolutions

Composed, performed, and recorded by Chris McKelway and John Welsh.
Mastered by Chris McKelway
Liner note essay by John Andrew Wilhite
Additional liner notes by Chris McKelway and John Welsh
Cover Image: Silent Hill (2024) by Yuehao Jiang
Published in 2026 by Reading Group, RG35"