It’s probably a trite observation, but the last week of October was a good one for fans of Icelandic classical music, with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s splendid Orphée and this. Other than the coincidence of the composers’ nationality, these are actually pretty different records. Where JJ’s was clearly very personal, this is explicitly collaborative, each track featuring a […]
Tag: genre_modern_classical
The first thing to say is that the 15 short pieces that make up Orphée are some of the most beguilingly beautiful classical music I’ve heard in a very long time. In fact, for a moment I considered leaving this note at that one sentence: everything else seems secondary. But I’m probably being overly sentimental, so we […]
In which Colin Stetson, as Eric Morecambe might put it, plays all the right notes — but not necessarily on the right instruments. This is a “reimagining” of the lovely lovely Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as part avant garde exploration, part drone metal intensity, part psychedelic wig-out, part 20th-century classical symphony (well, y’know…), and part […]
This is a superbly stately piece of ambient classical. It’s centred around piano and electronics, with a touch of strings (early music favourite the viola da gamba, I gather), brass, and tuned percussion. Köner thinks nothing of leaving a single piano note hanging for five or ten seconds, echoing into the ambient wash. From time […]
This is Keith Kenniff’s first album as Goldmund since 2011’s Civil War song cycle All Will Prosper, although this harks back more to 2010’s Famous Places. Which is to say that these are short improvisations for solo piano (17 tracks here in 46 minutes), swathed (to a greater or lesser extent) in ambient swooshiness and backed […]
So, yeah, a few things we have mention is that this is over 8 hours long, it was developed in collaboration with the celebrity neuroscientist David Eagleman, and you’re meant to sleep through it. Also worth mentioning is that it’s bloody lovely. There are 31 compositions for piano and string ensemble (which still average over […]
I utterly swooned over Bing & Ruth’s Tomorrow Was The Golden Age last year, and I wasn’t the only one. So I was pretty excited to learn that RVNG were re-releasing their 2012 debut. The same elements are present here: David Moore’s wonderful piano playing ranges from intense torrents of alternating notes to delicate simple melodies, […]
There are some records I like because they challenge me. There are some records I like because, from the first notes, I feel like I’m at home. This record falls into the latter category. Which is not to say it’s uninventive, ‘cos it’s far from that… just that this combination of modern classical, ambient effects, […]
Combining classical music and electronica sounds like a great idea in theory, but in my experience it’s often pretty underwhelming in practice. Not so this collaboration, recorded live at the Palazzo Delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy, initially released in 2005, and here re-released on beautiful double LP. Bernocchi’s electronics — at times straight-up […]
I’m pretty excited about this record, which is doing something genuinely new with the modern classical / ambient form (which, while basically my favourite thing in the world a few years ago, was starting to show signs of becoming just a little bit tired recently). This is collaboration, recorded over two years, between Diana Yukawa on […]
dogrando writes about some records 