‘Monochromes II’ is a collection of thirteen solo piano pieces written and performed by Berlin-based composer/pianist Quentin Tolimieri between 2023 and 2025. This is Tolimieri’s second release on elsewhere music, following the 2022 triple album ‘Monochromes’ (elsewhere 022-3).

In this new triple album, Tolimieri delves even deeper than in his earlier Monochrome pieces to explore the countless sonic possibilities and resonances that the piano can produce. Aiming to allow the inherently interesting qualities of the material itself to emerge naturally from the structure, he reduced the material to its simplest form by eliminating elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and formal development wherever possible. By stripping away these normally fundamental elements, listeners are able to hear all the complex resonances the piano produces—all the sounds that would go unnoticed when overshadowed by active melodies. Several pieces use extended techniques, such as half-pedaling (moving slowly between no pedal and full pedal) and placing weights on some keys so their strings ring sympathetically while playing, which often create dazzlingly complex layers of sonorities within the piano.

Tolimieri used to believe that one should select one definitive version of a piece and discard the rest. This resulted in noticeable diversity in works and approaches on his previous album 'Monochromes'. For this new triple album, however, he decided to embrace the concept of a series. This approach worked successfully, giving the entire recording a consistent cohesion.

“I think of many Bach fugues, for example, where the fugal subject really isn’t all that inherently interesting, or pretty, and definitely isn’t naturally singable, but rather the formal processes at play in fugal counterpoint take this limited material and spin it out into something quite compelling. I think this is even more true for a lot of Beethoven. I really like this sense of form overwhelming material, so to speak.” - Quentin Tolimieri