The 28-year-old award-winning pianist Elliot Galvin switches to a stripped-down, purely acoustic model for Modern Times, his fourth piano trio album as leader and third for the UK's Edition label. Experimentation for him is largely founded on stretching the sonic potential of analogue rather than digital media, hence an engagement previously with manually sampled cassette recordings, synths, unusually quaint instruments and an inventively percussive ‘prepared piano’. There's plenty of the latter on the new album while the move to a more direct communication via acoustic music was inspired by a solo performance he recently witnessed at Montreux jazz festival by US pianist Jason Moran. On the hunt for new old sounds this time, the pianist-composer turns to retro techniques of recording and production. Modern Times was recorded straight to vinyl with no mastering or mixing, a regular practice in the 1940s before the introduction of audio tape, the trio's refreshingly raw, tightly nterlocked sound giving the recording a haunting, hypnotic quality. The best way to listen is to pump up the volume. The ‘live’ mix was recorded in one continuous take, aside from flipping the vinyl over. As a result, Galvin organically propels the musical narrative in ‘real’ time, creating something that's missing from a lot of albums today that tend to sound more like a series of single tracks. Highlights include the pianist's long-time partners McCredie and Dick's grungy backbeat for the Monk-ish gospel-inflected ‘Change’; the eccentric latin-jazz dance of ‘Jackfruit’, through to the poignant ballad ‘Into the Dark’ with its early Keith Jarrett-ish country music-like theme.