Jack Sheen – Press
Composed by Jack Sheen
Performed by Apartment House
Violin: Gordon MacKay, Mira Benjamin
Viola: Bridget Carey
Cello: Anton Lukoszevieze
Piano: Kerry Yong
Recorded by Mark Knoop at City University, London
Mixed by Jack Sheen
Mastered by Nicholas Moroz
Cover photograph by Laura Hilliard of Variações para Piões by Inês Tartaruga Água
“It’s hard not to figure Jack Sheen’s compositions primordially; they lurch and rock with an abortive conviction, as if heralding culture’s approach—still half-submerged, slouched and red, ages ago. His work is somehow determinedly before almost everything; it feels like a dialectical twin to Beckett’s afterwards. Press moves with grossly impoverished intent—almost as if composed—while trembling and stumbling on the cusp of accident. This projected bodily timidity corresponds with a situation right on the edge of culture, just before language. Most of the time, it is enough simply to breathe and move: the complexity of these actions alone is astonishing, especially given the right alienating technology. This is realistic: Press renders poverty florid, but with ornaments and mordents of catgut. And then, through the buzz of wood, guts, and bluebottles, a piano appears—all shining lacquer, muscle, and grammar. It feels parabolic. Press is an extraordinary sequence.”
(Ed Atkins, 2026)
“Jack Sheen’s Press casts a rotating rallentando shadow on blithe sidewalks under the foot-traffic on its way to music. A rusted public bench has just been vacated, or is brushing someone’s hair. Your piano teacher has failed to answer the doorbell and so you sit on the steps with your papers, peeling paint off of the banister and listening to yourself wheeze. Sheen’s music steps too softly to flatter us, the agony of the lightest possible touch interposed with the motion sickness of what we still physically call gratitude. It’s music of ‘weight’ as a neutral parameter, not as the promise of benevolence. When the door opens it’s too late: the music has been swept away, leaving a flurry of dust filling up the streaks of light in this empty lobby, but a final lament deprives us of the reassurances that we may have just been imagining things.”
(Derek Baron, 2026)
