Recorded across six sessions over three weeks while house-sitting for friends with a Steinway grand piano, the album captures performances created entirely in the moment. Each piece began with whatever happened when Wyanski’s hands first touched the keyboard, with no predetermined structure or destination. Drawing together lyrical jazz, classical sensibilities and open improvisation, the music captures the performer thinking in real time, preserving the spontaneity and vulnerability of each performance.

Although free improvisation has shaped Wyanski’s creative practice since his teenage years, We Were Not Born to Survive marks the first time he has documented that side of his work on record. While much of his compositional career has focused on creating music intended to endure, this album instead reflects on impermanence, accepting the fleeting nature of improvised performance and allowing each piece to exist exactly as it first appeared.

The album also offers a contrast to the work that has brought Wyanski international recognition in recent years, including his ongoing Schoenberg in Hi-Fi project, which reimagines Arnold Schoenberg’s music through the lens of the mid-century American hi-fi boom. Alongside that project, his compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall, New Music Miami and the Hartford New Music Festival, while commissions have come from ensembles and performers including Plus-Minus Ensemble, Duo Refracta, Roger Zahab, Krista Kopper and the Amaranth Quartet.

Named after a line from a poem by W.S. Merwin, We Were Not Born to Survive reflects on the finite nature of both music and life. Rather than documenting finished compositions, the album preserves music at the moment it comes into being, allowing listeners to hear uncertainty, instinct and discovery as they happen. The result is an intimate portrait of an artist returning to the musical practice that first shaped his creative voice.