Last year, the Hyderabad-based guitarist and musician Vivek Venugopal put out ‘The Ascent Of Mount Purpose’, an ambitious effort at an entire concept album featuring nothing but a solitary fingerstyle acoustic guitar. It was a pretty cool way to tell a story, albeit quite abstract and not easy by any means to grasp. But maybe that is the point of such an approach; it is more about the feelings and thoughts the music generates that trying to hang a narrative around the listener’s neck. On this new project, the idea is the same, except there’s way more to digest.

So, to put it simply: ‘Chronicles: Consolation’ is the first EP in a double EP split that when put together are technically one project. And what’s more, this EP consists entirely of solo piano, with Vivek shifting roles to be a composer and working with a couple of pianists to make the 7-track release happen. And it is patently obvious that the obscure, conceptual and abstract elements of his music are still very much there for all to hear. Performed by Mitali Saraf, ‘The Maze Of Existence’ is a pretty solid example of this. It has this very dry grand piano sound and consists of two or three motifs around which the ‘lead’ (and I’m using that word very, very loosely) melodies move. There are definitely points that are genuinely uncomfortable and wonky to listen to, but not in a way that you can’t appreciate what the song wants to do. And of course, it being as indirect as it is, it exists in that grey area where the ‘meaning’ (used even more loosely) of the track is whatever runs through your mind when you listen to it. It sort of eliminates that argument a lot of badly made abstract music causes, which is ‘What on earth am I listening to?’, and that is greatly to its credit.

Listen to the track