First Figure
A debut set of piano figures — small cells of three or four notes, turned over until they yield a shape. The album that gives the discography its name.
- 01 Opening 3:12
The whole album in miniature — the four-note cell stated plainly, before anything is done to it.
- 02 First Figure 4:32
The cell inverted, then stretched. The piece that taught me the record was about transformation, not melody.
- 03 Ground 5:08
Left hand only. An experiment in whether an accompaniment can carry a piece with nothing to accompany.
- 04 Memory Theme 6:20
The one explicitly backward-looking track — a tune half-remembered, deliberately never resolved.
- 05 Resolution 7:46
Everything returns and settles. The longest track because the settling is the point.
- 06 Coda 4:50
Album notes
Composition is system-building in time: a small set of materials, a set of rules for transforming them, and the patience to let structure become feeling.
First Figure takes that literally. The entire record is built from a handful of short note-cells. Nothing is added that isn’t a transformation of something already heard — inverted, stretched, displaced, harmonised against itself. The interest is not in the tune but in watching a simple thing become, by accretion, something that feels earned.
Recorded on a single upright over four mornings.