In April 2012 I recorded a piano version of The Black Page. To Frank Zappa‘s great melody, the left hand played a simple, evenly striding accompaniment in the style of Erik Satie’s quiet piano pieces. When it was released in February 2019 on the Label Musikfabrik I felt a strong desire for a more agitated version. I began to experiment with more complex accompaniment structures, with the loud ticking of the clock in my practice room perfectly representing the continuous hihat of the drum version. For the Lockdown Tape an old mechanical Wittner metronome was to replace the clock at home.

Then I thought, how great it would be, if the metronome would stop exactly after two and a half minutes with the end of the music! And that’s exactly what I did, by winding the spring only very minimally.

But then it should also be a different piano than the first time. I chose my old Fender Rhodes Piano, an analog keyboard that was very popular in the 1970s, with a very limited piano action, but the sound was just right.

Finally, a word about the already dubious precision of a mechanical metronome: No, it doesn’t get any more accurate if you wind the spring only a little bit…

Ulrich Löffler, August 2020