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Pontius Pilots is an electro-acoustic project that combines live piano and keyboards with pre-recorded samples. A collaboration between pianist and composer Victor Noriega and producer-musician Robert Nelson (e.R.DoN), the duo marries an array of real-instrument samples and synthesized sounds in combination with the acoustic piano to create, as Daniel Mitha wrote in the Journal of Popular Noise, “improv jazz forms imbued with inscrutable MPC-triggered samples.” Mitha described a recording in these terms: “Pithy clusters of piano notes pool and quickly evaporate. A spare clatter of brushed cymbals and cracked snares hang like bone jewelry from the baby grand’s lid. It all makes for a warm and woozy affair until a single insistent note pushes forth with Doppler-like precision. The drums tighten form while clipped guitar tones surface and put flesh to the bone. It is an exhilarating and fleeting moment of fusion and confusion.”

In recent years, Victor Noriega has emerged as one of the most impressive jazz pianists in the region. His compositions fuse classical and Filipino folk elements with a jazz aesthetic.

e.R.DoN composes music using midi-sequences and original samples. Performing live using an Akai MPC 2000XL, he samples and processes some sounds but lets other conventional instrumental sounds pass unprocessed; the result is a kinetic, captivating music, shifting and teetering between traditional and more experimental jazz elements. The result, as he says, “is a warmth and depth of sound that is not usually associated with this genre.”

-- Peter Monaghan