From a promo page for TK’s side project, The Mutant Liberation Orchestra, where the new track below has also just been posted…
This represents a very definite sea change for The Mutant Liberation Orchestra — although keyboardist TK has been exploring polytonal improvisation since the first time he snuck into the piano room at his maiden aunt Tillies’s haunted old mansion in the hills above Pasadena.
As soon as he sat down at the battered old upright grand, he was overcome by the compulsion to spread his tiny hands wide across the old, yellowed ivory keys. Slipping into a state that a concerned girlfriend would, decades later, describe as “a scary, near-catatonic trance,” little TK’s fingers seemed to fly across the keys in patterns hard to comprehend — but repeating in intricate, interlocking melodic movements that circled ever wider.
When his aunt rushed into the room she stopped suddenly and began weeping…
Years later, TK would learn that she thought she heard the playing of her long-dead protoge, a frighteningly moody young European refugee composer who would later die in a fiery motorcar crash, plunging off a twisting mountain road after an argument with the then-voluptuosly passionate Tilly, his lover, his benefactor and — he said as he stormed out of her house, the keys to her ancient Packard limousine in his hands — his warden and taskmaster…
Moonrise Over Alamitos Bay
