Christina Vantzou’s No. 4 was really impressed me back in 2018, and it remains a firm favourite. So I was obviously excited to hear No. 5. It wasn’t really what I was expecting, and at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I found this much less accessible: to be honest, if it […]
Tag: genre_modern_classical
I want to talk about just intonation. I know you can look this up on the internet, but most lay-person explanations tend to be all “oh no, maths is hard” and run away from it, whereas it’s really nothing more than a bit of multiplication, and it’s quite interesting. So let’s do it. Sounds consists […]
This opens with a delicate melody played by Jonny Nash on piano and a plucky-sounding thing which turns out to be Dani Luca on cimbalom, and is soon joined by Ana Stamp singing a Romanian folk-song in a simple, intimate tone. And that, basically, is the album. Isn’t that enough for you, you monsters? Well, […]
Big ups to Another Timbre for putting together this entrancing set of performances of works from across Georgia Rodgers’s decade-plus-long composing career. There’s a decidedly minimal/drone flavour to this record, but there’s a wide variety of styles within that. The opening number, the punningly (I assume) titled Base, is a slow-burner for bassoon and double […]
This is just jaw-dropping. If I tell you it’s kind of violin-based electro-acoustic, you may think you know what to expect, but I don’t think you do. This record is packed with astonishing sounds: it wails, it thrums, it pulses, it soars, it laments, it floats. Oh, and there are some heartstring-tugging melodies, too. Elbo’s […]
Hans Op de Beeck‘s Staging Silence is a film art series in which a camera points at a table as hands come in from either side to construct and transform dioramas of various tranquil scenes, such as a wooden jetty on a moonlit lake, often out of recognizable everyday objects. Elegantly lit, and presented in […]
There is a strong lockdown vibe to this record, but in a sunny, blissed-out, lemonade-making kind of a way. The six tracks here take in gauzy, ambient synth sounds, strings both gently droning and elegantly melodic, field recordings that tend towards the splashing water and the passing buses and the children playing in the distance […]
This is one of those records where I started to feel myself falling for it about a minute into my first listen, and was head over heels by about minute five. There’s this rather lovely delicate piano sound, you see. But then there’s this helicopter. And there’s just about birdsong. Then the piano builds in […]
I feel like Irmin Schmidt would be justified in being a bit bored of being referred to as the keyboardist from Can after all this time, but there it is. In the four decades since the Krautrock pioneers were in regular business, he seems to have mostly done soundtrack work. But in 2019 he turned […]
I’ll admit that my first thought on hearing the opening track here, Futō, was that maybe it was overdoing the whole close-miked piano thing a wee bit, as the creak of the mechanism was so up front in the mix. But that was soon forgotten, displaced by my second and more lasting thought: this is […]
dogrando writes about some records 