The urge to create music often strikes me at the worst time, usually when I am bereft of a means of recording and too stubborn to figure out how to go about ending my bereavement, knowing that perhaps by the time I do I will have invariably been pulled away by some other equally brief muse. But always handy in times of boredom or inspiration is my brother?s old Casio PT-87, a keyboard about the length of my forearm, complete with its own drum beats, and several excellent ?instruments?: harpsichord, trumpet, flute, piano, all of which of course sound nothing like their source. Occasionally I?ll whip that thing out and, given that it is limited to one voice, play some simple, Glassian arpeggio to a moderately uptempo beat until I either fall into a deep nap or annoy a roommate. Occasionally, I?ll even set the thing down in front of my laptop and lay down several tracks on some free software, but since my laptop?s microphone is buried somewhere under the keyboard, I mostly pick up the sound of my hard drive overheating. Usually the tune ends up sounding like a demo tape for an old Nintendo cartridge, but it?s a comforting experience that keeps the muse at bay, especially considering I am so very formally uneducated when it comes to music, and electronics for that matter.

The point is that these little exercises are fun to do, the simple wiring of the Casio produces incredibly lo-tech, but surprisingly rich voices that swell up all sorts of pleasant memories. I haven?t circuit-bent the thing, I don?t know that certain trick that allows me to play percussion voices on the actual keys?I just use it as Casio intended, as a toy for children.

Leighton Craig operates a bit differently, as his familiarity and expertise with keyboards and electronic synthesis obviously far, far exceed my own. However, his aesthetic is the same: ?11 Easy Pieces? was recorded on 4-track using a Casio MT40 ?lovingly toasted by valve tubes during mastering?. Keeping in mind the that MT40 is, if I am correct, the same size if not smaller than, my dinky toy Casio, the volume of rich, thick, professional tones Leighton Craig is able to produce is staggering. ?11 Easy Pieces? is ripe with simple, lulling vignettes that reveal Craig?s mastery over the most inconspicuous of instruments, and certainly verifies for me the splendor and comfort that lies in a tiny keyboard.

I still can?t get over how many of the tracks on ?11 Easy Pieces? sound like they really are emanating from some over-sized floor-to-ceiling analog synthesizer, but my amazement is stifled by the album?s choice of brevity. Tracks average a minute and half, and though brief, exhibit some great ideas. But they end up being just that: ideas. The brief moments ?11 Easy Pieces? ought to be the stuff of drones: long, simple melodies that bleed seamlessly into the next or layer one on top of the other. If this collection was entitled ?11 Easy Movements? and was just a single, half-hour track, perhaps many of the interesting moments would be more pronounced. It?s no wonder that the standout is the appropriately titled 10 minute piece, ?Threnody?, the only moment where Craig allows an idea time to ferment and stick with its listener, a track that saves the entire collection from sounding like a half-hour collection of half-hearted noodling.

?Threnody? begins with some soft almost white noise, like a distant shoreline, that gives birth to a few deep whirring tones that move in and out of the low end of your hearing range. These give way to some trembling, higher-ranged, almost vocal sounding tones. It remains throughout a very sparse, muted piece, but there are a lot of well-executed changes in subtlety brought about simply by minor amplitude and frequency modulations and, again, by the length of the track. Time is what saves ?Threnody?. Time is what lets the piece break into a satisfying drone rather than remain a brief sample. Ultimately, the material on the majority of the release seems to be the latter. It sounds at times like a notebook of brief but lucid ideas, a blueprint of some longer, more meditative work in progress. Hopefully, down the line, Leighton Craig will release such a thing, because damn if it wouldn?t be beautiful. 6/10 -- John Ganiard (25 June, 2008)