"The internationally acclaimed composer Robert Lloyd, in his characteristic hauntingly hypnotic and polyrhythmic inventiveness, has created ten piano solo compositions that form tonight's enchanting one hour aural entertainment. These highly atmospheric lyrical creations with their Proustian tonal, textual and rhythmic subtleties, are delivered by their composer with deft and absorbing assurance, thereby transporting the listener to a world of wonderment, human fragility and creative redemption.

These shimmering haiku - like compositions, especially The Empty Boat, The Untouched Key and Time Being Time, are central to Lloyd's luminous art of sustained fluid percussive poetry. All of the compositions have been inspired by Lloyd's life-long search to cross-fertilise Western and Eastern musical and philosophical traditions and suggest a transgeneric exuberant willingness to create a highly visual and mellifluous music of different rhythmic configurations.

Lloyd's captivating piano compositions in terms of their open-ended propellant textual energy, tonal colours and harmonies are inspired by a plethora of different interconnected sources: childhood memories, Zen poetry, sculpture and philosophy. Consequently, all of the piano compositions in their respective ways, attest to Lloyd's consummate ability to synthesise complimentary influences from American minimalism as much as from traditional Balinese gamelan music. The piano compositions clearly delineate Lloyd's "farm fence" signature style of composing: that within a twelve beat cycle, melodic lines flow separately from each other, only to come together on a certain beat and then go off into their respective rhythmic direction. This signifies that Lloyd creates like a Deleurian rhizome voyager of rhythm - all compositions vary in their markedly pliable ways, as critic John Schaefer once noted, of recombining, combining, reconstructing and Reconstructing rhythms.

The Empty Boat, with its vivid pointillistic aura of silence, evokes the meditative Zen poetics of its literary inspiration: a poem from Dogen, the poet monk who in the thirteenth century, travelled from Japan to China to learn from the old Chan masters. The Empty Boat is a delicate gem of sonic stillness in its fine percussive fusion of the sacred and the profane. The central piece of the program is the therapeutically coloured The Untouched Key, a movingly difficult composition to perform, which captures Lloyd's uncanny poetic gift to create an unsettling beautiful work that speaks of the untold hurt that is inflicted on some children. The Untouched Key is a complex atmospheric evocation of sadness but also of the promise of self empowerment.

All ten compositions merit substantial comment, but let us conclude, with a few words on the temporally dynamic Panta Rei, with its apt reliance on the influential ideas of the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Panta Rei, with all of its kinetic rhythmic repetitiveness, suggests (amongst other discernible influences) the subtle legacy of Bernard Herrmann's extraordinary film score palette of repeating, extending and recolouring certain brief cells of material. All in all, Lloyd's piano compositions represent the artist at the innovative edge of his compelling art."

John Conomos, May 1998 - from programme notes for One Hour with Robert Lloyd.