Kalimba

UnCaged Toy Piano: Phyllis Chen (Bruce Lee Gallanter)
in: Downtown Music Gallery (2009)

(...) The pieces by Andrian Pertout and Karlheinz Essl are both for toy piano and CD, which add some surprising sounds to the toy piano's sound. (...) Essl's Kalimba featuring a hazy, echo effect to the piano making it even more harrowing as if time is slowing down and speeding up simultaneously. (...)

Concert Announcing Phyllis Chen (Peter Margasak)
in: Chicgao Reader (20 Feb 2009)

The tracks I’ve heard from a forthcoming CD of Phyllis Chen’s prove that the instrument’s principal limitation is that so few people treat it as respectfully as she does. In a 2005 Karlheinz Essl composition called Kalimba, which combines live performance with prerecorded toy piano played through a loudspeaker inside the instrument, it attains an otherworldly percussive resonance (...).

Celebrating Elliott Carter and Randy Hostetler (Karren LaLonde Alenier)
in: The Dressing - Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier, as the Dresser, addresses what's underneath the art (20 Dec 2008)

Kalimba (2005) by Karlheinz Essl, played by Jenny Lin on toy piano with CD playback. The Dresser was both fascinated and annoyed with this piece. It was hard to tell where all the sounds were coming from. At first the Dresser wondered if the pianist was playing accompaniment to a recording. Some of the exotic sounds seemed like those from a gamelan ensemble. In one passage, annoying ascending and descending scales seemed like a waterfall. In another passage, the sound produced was like a loudly ticking mantel clock.

Updated: 27 Oct 2009