NEWS   MLO's TK has been engaging in "automatic playing" on various pianos since he was a young child. If you're not familiar with the idea of "automatic writing" or playing, it's seen by some as a form of "channeling" or mediumship. Others view it more as channeling expression from the player's own subconscious mind.

"My best friend's grandmother gave his family a battered old upright player piano when I was a little kid. She was old money from Pasadena and would show up in our working class Santa Ana neighborhood in a long, chauffer-driven Packard limo... in fact, she gave the family her old Packard -- the kind of 30s limousine where the chauffer's seat was separate and exposed, as though he were a coachman driving horses instead of the impossibly long V-12 Packard.

"I used to lose myself in the piano -- but it was in the living room and, with what would end up being 7 kids in the family, there was always a lot of noise and distraction.

"After a few years, I must have been 6 or 7, the piano was moved to the "family room" -- a thin sliver of a den with a beat up TV and the old upright, its player mechanism now trashed, and the dead key count up to 4 or 5.

"But it meant that, on rare occasions, I could sit at the yellowed, partially missing ivories for an hour or two.

"On one of those occasions -- I think only my friend's mom was home and I'd pleaded to stay when my friend and his brothers and sisters left, so that I could play the piano.

"It was an amazing session because rather than just sense the presence of another player guiding my hands, in my mind, it was as though I was having a pedantic discourse with this other entity, as though he was trying to show me all he could in the short time we had...

TK's latest solo piano improvisation, Moonrise Over Alamitos Bay, is up on the Mutant Liberation Orchestra download/stream page, now.