Adrian Utley reworks Chopin’s ‘Étude Op. 25 No. 12’ for Mariusz Szypura’s ‘Chopin Residue’
Adrian Utley (Portishead) reworks Mariusz Szypura’s “Étude Op. 25 No. 12” as “Chopin Residue” arrives on CD and vinyl October 16 via Cleopatra Records.
Adrian Utley, the guitarist and co-founder of Portishead, has reworked “Étude Op. 25 No. 12” from Polish composer Mariusz Szypura’s “Chopin Residue,” a project that removes the piano entirely from nine of Frédéric Chopin’s best-known piano pieces. The rework arrives today as the latest single from the double album, which Cleopatra Records brings to CD and double vinyl on 16 October; an immersive Blu-ray edition mixed in Dolby Atmos is already available.
Szypura said working with Utley was a long-held ambition: “Adrian and Portishead are among my favourite musicians. The sound, the approach to making music, the search for unobvious and lo-fi textures, all of it had an enormous influence on me.”
Szypura kept the harmonic structure and phrasing of Chopin’s originals while stripping out the instrument itself. He described the decision as a matter of respect rather than provocation: “I rejected the piano immediately. […] I decided Chopin didn’t deserve such profanation. I could only approach this material through the prism of my own sensitivity, harmony, and deconstruction. So I took the piano out. […] The piano was the delivery system, not the content.”
Adrian Utley’s rework of ‘Étude Op. 25 No. 12’
“Chopin Residue” splits into two discs: “Deconstructions,” on which Szypura rebuilds nine Chopin pieces with a cast including Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), David Pajo (Slint), Joey Waronker, Gail Ann Dorsey, John McEntire (Tortoise) and John Stanier (Battles), and “Reworks,” on which a second group of artists takes those deconstructed recordings further from the source. Utley’s “Étude Op. 25 No. 12” opens the second disc alongside reworks by Fennesz, Matthew Herbert, Masayoshi Fujita, Sean O’Hagan, Jim O’Rourke, Christine Ott, Benoît Pioulard and Abul Mogard.
Szypura described the difference between the two discs directly: “‘Étude Op. 25 No. 12’ is Adrian’s reconstruction, not my piece with his guitar on top. That is the principle of the whole second disc: nine artists, nine rebuilds, each in their own language.”
The two discs are designed to be played together as well as separately, an idea that extends into the Blu-ray edition’s Dolby Atmos mix. Szypura said: “They were built to overlap. […] In stereo you hear an arrangement. In Atmos you’re inside the harmonic space with the piano missing from the middle of it. […] That’s not a format upgrade, it’s closer to what the piece was always trying to do.”
“Chopin Residue” gets its UK stage premiere at London’s Cadogan Hall on 26 September, as part of the Polish Jazz Festival. Its packaging has also picked up a Bronze A’ Design Award and a Red Dot Award.
About Adrian Utley and Mariusz Szypura
Adrian Utley was born in Northampton in 1957 and moved to Bristol in the mid-1980s, where he played guitar in touring bands led by jazz organist Big John Patton and drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He co-founded Portishead in Bristol in 1991 with Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons, co-producing and playing on the band’s albums “Dummy” (1994), “Portishead” (1997) and “Third” (2008). Outside the band, Utley has recorded and toured with Marianne Faithfull, Jeff Beck and Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, leads his own ensemble Adrian Utley’s Guitar Orchestra, and has scored film and audio work with director Nic Roeg, naturalist David Attenborough and Britain’s National Trust.
Mariusz Szypura is a composer, producer and visual artist born in 1972 and based in Warsaw. He started out in the early 1990s in the Poznań rock band Happy Pills before founding his main recording project, Silver Rocket, releasing five albums including “Infinity Fidelity,” a Dolby Atmos record that won Gold for Music/Film Cover at the 2025 European Design Awards. His installation work includes “in:human” at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2024) and “êkhos” at Lincoln Center during Unsound Festival New York (2024). “Chopin Residue” grew out of that installation practice: Szypura first released the album digitally and on 2LP, 2CD, 2MC and Blu-ray through his own Black Element Label in Warsaw on 28 November 2025, alongside gallery and listening events in New York, Osaka, Los Angeles and Warsaw. Cleopatra Records now extends that release internationally, bringing “Chopin Residue” to CD and double vinyl on 16 October 2026 while the Blu-ray Immersive Edition remains available from its earlier release.
Support Side-Line
More people read Side-Line than ever, and there is still no paywall and no advertising. Readers pay for it instead - from $5 a month.
Why we ask
Advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations we have not put up a paywall, and we refuse to add annoying advertising, so we need to ask for your help. Side-Line’s independent journalism takes time, money and hard work to produce, and we do it to push the artists we like, who are equally fighting to survive.
Handled by PayPal.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
