Nathan Ben-Yehuda & Astral Mixtape The Power of the Keyboard 180g 45rpm LP

TAS Rated 4.5/5 Music, 5/5 Sonics in the April 2024 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Executive Producer: Jim Mulally

Nathan Ben-Yehuda pursues a fulltime solo concert career as a classical pianist but also plays with Astral Mixtape, an innovative crossover quartet writing new works and reimagining classics from Monteverdi to Rimsky-Korsakov, and playing with ideas and thematic material from Sigur Ros to Radiohead and Four Tet. We end this album with two tracks by Astral Mixtape. The second side offers Goddess Gardens, including intoxicating "mixtape" snippets from Scheherazade and Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending, as well as more recent fare. Seven Hellos closes the album on side two, an original composition by the four members of the quartet. Astral Mixtape is clearly close to Nathan's heart:

"I am part of this wonderful band of fellow classical musicians who are seeking to reimagine the conventional roles of our instruments, and applying non-classical approaches to arrangement and composition in our works. Astral Mixtape is the collaborative project most personal to me."

Before we get to Astral Mixtape, however, Nathan's solo piano repertoire makes a powerful statement. Not only can Nathan handle the delicate Haydn beautifully, but also kindly agreed to play Peter Sculthorpe's Nocturnal for us.

—Bob Attiyeh, producer

The sonics in the recordings of solo piano pieces are outstanding. Nathan Ben-Yehuda is a compelling young pianist. The recording quality is also top-drawer, just as I've come to expect from Bob Attiyeh's recordings.

Nathan Ben-Yehuda is a young Juilliard trained pianist with an elegant and introspective manner that is immediately apparent in the opening music on this record, Haydn's Piano Sonata in G. The two-movement work contrasts a dreamy, if somewhat quirky Allegretto with an ingenious madcap Presto, and Ben-Yehuda deftly underlines the dramatic shift. This 18th-century music segues neatly into a Nocturnal by contemporary Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, which gently plumbs the lower half of the keyboard, evoking the dark nights of the outback. Side two of this meticulously produced LP is a sampling of Ben-Yehuda's quartet Astral Mixtape, which also includes a pair of violinists and a cellist, as well as copious computer effects. Ben-Yehuda plays both piano and synthesizer. Like many classical musicians of their generation, this foursome grew up surrounded by popular music influences, and their work is meant to find a synthesis of that cultural diversity. Thus, strains of Rimsky-Korsakov and Vaughan WIlliams bleed into jazz and prog-rock sounds. It works surprisingly well, thanks in no small way to the technical skills of the musicians, but mainly for the taut construction and unpretentious melodic content of the music itself.