Symphonie de l’Intérieur, by Mantis Chordam.
Mixed and mastered by Damon Smith
The Night Sky Is A Jewellery Store Window Recordings
June 13 2025
This new recording shines in the shadows of two 50 year-old landmarks, one from the world of psychotherapy, one from that of improvisational piano. In combining their wisdom, Symphonie de L’Interieure weaves something wise – and fascinating – of its own.
One of my sheroes in my day job as psychotherapist is Selma Fraiberg, regarded as the Grandmother of Infant Mental Health, whose 1975 gem of a paper Ghosts In The Nursery packs as much of a punch 50 years later as it did on publication.
She used a term for her outreach therapy work: “Kitchen Psychotherapy”. This memorable term is priceless both for describing the practice accurately – taking place as it did in the kitchens and living areas of the young disadvantaged mums she set out to help – and for giving therapists ever since more confidence to meet people where they’re at. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature: The therapy you do in the kitchen could well be better than in any fluoro-lit office.
So when Damon Smith’s latest creation Mantis Chordam dropped this collection of improvisations recorded on his kitchen piano, I was curious to know if he had seen the value of bringing another human practice associated with carpeted rooms, armchairs and sofas into the beating linoleum heart of the home.
In this improvisational practice he’s in the company of the other 50 year-old gem, The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, which has brought this genre into millions of homes over half a century. The two pianists also seem to share a spirit of “rolling with what’s here” (my philosophy in therapy work too, I should add). Jarrett was famously unhappy with the piano provided that night in Köln, but you’d never know. You’d never know he was exhausted, sore and ill.
Smith is public about his life with mental ill health (a short track is Papa Ne Va Bien) so we know he’s been exhausted, sore and ill at times, and as he sings along, Jarrett-style on the last track Toujours Jouer, Jamais Grandir, that knowledge gives extra lift to his playfulness. He dares to play always, never to grow up, as the French title says.
I’m not convinced Smith is just an eternal child though; this wandering celestial-domestic music and its carefully cultivated sonic accompaniments suggest an old soul who reminds himself always to play, never to grow up.
And that’s where this record hits home for me. By placing the piano at the heart of home life, Smith dares us to reimagine the kitchen as a stage for more than food preparation and consumption, list-making and errand planning. While the sounds of life at home – much more artfully presented than the cereal-wolfing on Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast by Pink Floyd – come and go, the piano plays on, staying with the beat as loved ones walk on stage and exit into the wings.
If the kitchen is the bricks-and-mortar incarnation of the fragmented attention economy, then Smith drops into its midst a focal point, and an invitation to stay a while.
It also goes delightfully the other way: in plonking the greatest musical instrument created, in a kitchen, Smith elevates the kitchen to stage level. The goings on around the piano gain their own artistic recognition. We all know this to be true: so many vital compositions, maddening rehearsals and virtuoso performances have taken place in the kitchen, scene of some of our greatest dramas, our Symphonie de L’Interieure.
That’s why Selma Fraiberg was a genius for meeting young mums in their kitchens. And it’s why Mantis Chordam’s genius isn’t just in what Smith plays on this record, but in where he plays it.
(c) 2025 The Normal Grown Up
The Normal Grown-Up 