John Tilbury, home and away

It isn’t often that I get to write about the noise of dust — which, in a form amplified by the Austrian soundartist Klaus Filip, turns out to be a sort of gentle crackling, used to accompany John Tilbury’s piano on a piece included in an elegant new boxed set called At Home. This beautifully designed little coffret features a mixture of recordings made at Tilbury’s house in Deal on the Kent coast and archive pieces dating back to 1970, when the pianist was already well established as a gifted interpreter of the compositions of Morton Feldman and John Cage and a collaborator with such adventurous spirits as Cornelius Cardew and other members of the improvising group AMM. In the summer of 2022, Tilbury was to have taken part in the final appearance of AMM, held at Cafe Oto as part of the celebrations of the percussionist Eddie Prévost’s 80th birthday. Instead, health considerations led him to announce his retirement from public performance, meaning that his participation in the event…