Freedom to Spend Announces Lotti Tauber's Concern and Simplicity + Shares "Lonely"

Concern and Simplicity Volume 1: Original Recordings, 1981-1986 documents the scarcely heard recordings of Swiss pianist and composer Lotti Tauber, moving from mystery to mystery this November on Freedom to Spend.

Tauber’s approach to minimalism and unique technique in her piano playing helped translate an inner dialogue of pain and joy. These two extremes shaped her life: at the age of four, she suffered severe hot water burns, and as an adult pianist, her playing was repeatedly hampered by pain from tendonitis.

Selected from various albums privately pressed in the 1980s, the final decade of her life, this first archival volume of Tauber’s work introduces her capacity to inflect the avant-garde with the intimacy of the personal, combining improvisation and intuition with the chance-based structures to which her intellectual and spiritual life was devoted.

Today, we share “Lonely,” originally from Tauber’s first album Roundabout Ways. The piece layers a central melodic phrase - more evocative of fond reflection than mournful solitude - atop a berceuse-like rhythm. Though this phrase is repeated, Tauber’s interest in musical structures of transformation and music as a form of self-analysis is on display in the piece’s central passage. Therein, she dissembles her phrase, questioning both its ability to hold nostalgia and nostalgia’s hold on us, and imbues its second refrain with a conceptual tranquility.

Lotti Tauber’s Concern and Simplicity Volume 1: Original Recordings, 1981-1986 arrives November 13, 2026 in vinyl and digital editions.