Imagine you’ve walked into a room at Café Oto on a quiet evening in 2018. The room is sparsely filled - everyone is quiet, pensive. You sit down, not quite knowing what to expect. There’s no warm-up act. No casual prelude. Just the sound of silence, punctuated by the occasional flicker of expectation. Then, "Flicker, Scratch & Ivory" happens.

This collaboration between experimental giants Kjell Bjørgeengen, Keith Rowe, and the legendary John Tilbury is, as the title suggests, all about the smallest of gestures: flickers of sound, scratches of texture, and the fragile beauty of ivory keys. It’s an album that unfolds with the slowness of a tree growing, only the roots here are electronic hums, and the leaves, spare piano notes that seem to wither as soon as they bloom. If you’re expecting something "musical", as the word is traditionally understood, prepare for disappointment - or, more accurately, revelation.

Let’s start with John Tilbury, whose piano playing here is less a performance and more of a delicate confession. Tilbury, a long-time interpreter of Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew, is not interested in impressing you with virtuosic flourishes. The notes emerge with all the patience of someone resigned to life’s impermanence, like watching the tide come in only to recede. His piano lines are whispers, a kind of minimalist poetry in sound. At times, you may even forget the piano is being played at all, as it merges into the ether of the performance.

Then there’s Keith Rowe, whose guitar playing can hardly be called “guitar playing” anymore. He manipulates his instrument like a mad scientist working on an alchemical experiment that will probably blow up in his face - and that’s half the point. His electronics hum and sputter, occasionally scratching at the edges of coherence, only to retreat again into silence. You’re reminded of his earlier work with AMM, but here, Rowe seems to be playing a more ghostly, withdrawn role. He’s not here to dazzle you with feedback and noise but to erode the boundaries between what you think music is and what it could be.

Kjell Bjørgeengen, the relative wildcard in this trio, brings his Dave Jones Synthesizer into the fray with an aesthetic rooted in visual art. If you’re familiar with his video work, you’ll know he’s no stranger to abstraction and the interplay of form and emptiness. Here, he operates more like an unseen force, turning sonic dials that control the emotional weather of the room. The electronics don’t assert themselves so much as seep into the cracks of the performance, creating a sense of tension between organic and synthetic sound, between human touch and machine noise. The result is something both intimate and alien.

The Nicolas Poussin painting referenced in the release notes ("The Gathering of the Ashes of Phocion by His Widow") provides an apt metaphor for this album. There’s an eerie muteness at play, a silence that doesn’t merely accompany the sound but becomes part of its DNA. The image of Phocion’s widow, gathering her dead husband’s ashes in secret, speaks to the album’s overall tone - both mournful and resigned, with an undercurrent of quiet rebellion. You can almost feel the figures in the painting looking on, just as the music seems to “watch” rather than unfold linearly.

The comparison Rowe draws between this painting and Poussin’s "Landscape with a Calm" adds another layer of depth. The calmness of the lake’s reflection, despite the storm raging overhead, is a fitting analogy for the album’s strange emotional terrain. There’s turbulence here, but it’s muted, reflected rather than directly expressed. The storm is implied, the calmness on the surface hiding something more chaotic underneath. Much like the music, it’s the interplay between surface and depth, between what is said and what remains unsaid, that gives "Flicker, Scratch & Ivory" its quiet power.

Now, for the uninitiated, this record could very well seem like an endurance test - a near 49-minute stretch of non-eventfulness, punctuated only by the occasional piano chord, a hiss of electronics, and the distant crackle of Rowe’s guitar. And it’s true, if you’re here looking for structure, melody, or even something resembling a traditional musical arc, you’re going to be disappointed. But that’s the beauty of this record. It asks you to stop looking for meaning in the usual places. It asks you to slow down, to listen to the space between the notes, the silence between the flickers and scratches, the weight of the absence.

"Flicker, Scratch & Ivory" is not an easy listen, but it’s a deeply rewarding one if you let yourself sink into its quiet intensity. It’s the kind of album that feels more like a conversation with time itself - a meditation on muteness, mortality, and the beauty of things left unfinished. It’s not music for the masses, but for those willing to embrace the minimal, the abstract, and the unresolved.

So, is it music? Or is it an art piece masquerading as sound? The answer, I think, is both. "Flicker, Scratch & Ivory" exists in that strange liminal space between genres, between disciplines, between the audible and the visible. It’s an album that asks more questions than it answers, and maybe that’s the point. Like the trees in Poussin’s painting, it watches. And like life itself, it doesn’t explain, it just flickers and scratches.