PIANO ALBUMS BY ANDREW SHAPIRO 1. Numbers, Colors and People (2009) 2. Intimate Casual (2012)
 3. Piano 3 (2016) The following is excerpted from “Andrew Shapiro – Future Classical,” essay by Mark Prendergast. Mark Prendergast is the author of The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby: The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. “...for Shapiro, the long road to realization would finally reach perfection on the piano album Numbers, Colors & People (2009). Recorded in one day at Philip Glass’s studio, while neither avant-garde or completely soporific, the music has all the richness of Debussy and Satie coupled with the crystal clear production of Michael Riesman and mastering of Michel Geiss. A truly Ambient work, it showed how far American Ambient music had come since the days of La Monte Young or Windham Hill's George Winston. Using a soft-pedal style that would be come Shapiro’s trademark, it also contains the classic tracks Quiet Kissing and Mint Green. The latter, a six- minute jewel in its nature is furtive, an arcing pacey piano solo which rises and falls delicately, its melody slowly emerging from a Debussy-like haze of almost-hesitancy. No matter how many times it’s heard you have to return to its cascading style. Mint Green’s astonishing success –on the Internet it would go on to garner over five million plays on Pandora Internet Radio and become a regular soundtrack on American television– meant that Shapiro had arrived at a new American aesthetic, one that looked backwards with fondness and respect but was ever present and moving forward. Intimate Casual (2012), is an album of hazy piano instrumentals taking two years to write. Eschewing fancy studios with fancy pianos, Shapiro opted to record at his Brooklyn home using his Suzuki upright piano. It incorporates a mute damping pedal that enhances the gossamer feel of its ten beautiful tracks. Possibly one of the finest Ambient piano albums ever recorded, the album also includes Shapiro’s cover of Energy Flow, the famous solo piano piece by fellow New York resident Ryuichi Sakamoto."