modern composition
News: Hugar announce a new album, ‘Rift’, for January; come explore the delicate, glacial pulsing of ‘volt’
HUGAR, the Icelandic modern compositional duo of childhood friends Bergur Þórisson and Pétur Jónsson, who we last examined in these pages in regard to their arthouse film soundtrack The Vasulka Effect (read about that, here), are set to return in the first, budding days of 2022 with an album entitled Rift: an album written with …
Album review: Poppy Ackroyd – ‘Pause’: solo piano pastoralism excellently captures a life lived this past year
WITH four albums proper, so to speak, under her belt – Escapement and Feathers from further back last decade, and a brace for what’s now One Little Independent in 2017, an acoustic mini-album, Sketches and the full-length Resolve – we really haven’t heard nearly enough from Poppy Ackroyd in recent times; but then what with …
News: Erland Cooper unveils a new collaborative EP with vocal ensemble Shards, ‘Egilsay’; hear a first track, the stunning ‘Glimro’
ORCADIAN genius Erland Cooper has today revealed that his next musical project will be a collaboration with the vocal ensemble Shards, on an EP again an evocation and a love letter to his home archipelago. It’s to be a digital release of four tracks entitled Egilsay, and follows thus in the conceptual footsteps of his …
Album review: Neil Cowley – ‘Hall Of Mirrors (Reflected)’: ambient piano is tripped further into leftfield on this excellent remixes set
THE REMIX album is a really interesting thing, a gathering of the tribes in a meeting place that’s arisen from the sphere of dance music, in which like minds bring their aesthetics and splice it with another’s; a trading, the one overlaying, informing the other, creating a new offspring. When it comes off in the …
Album review: Adam Stafford – ‘Trophic Asynchrony’: Falkirk composer moves to a deep, cyclical set of formal minimalism to address the ecological state we’re in
FALKIRK’S Adam Stafford, the film-maker and folk artist whose lockdown notebook album Diamonds Of A Horse Famine we warmly embraced here last summer – not least because it contained the free-associating “Erotic Thistle” and its fantastic line, “melt down my death mask to fashion it into a dildo” (read our full review here) – has returned …
Track: Arandel celebrates the release of ‘InBach vol.2’ with the stirring space pop of ‘Fabula’
ARANDEL, the French artist whose album of expansions and reinterpretations – often, complete genre reshapings – of the works of the great Johann Sebastian, InBach, received deserved acclaim upon its release early last year, is looking to repeat that cultural success with a second volume released today. With that album out to purchase right now, …
Album review: Sebastian Plano – ‘Save Me Not’: a portal to a more ecstatic, more ethereal sonic safe space
ARGENTINIAN composer, cellist, and producer Sebastian Plano is set to release his sixth album and his second for one of the blue-chip labels of modern composition, Mercury KX, this Friday; it’s entitled Save Me Not and it’s an incredibly pretty place of aural safety. His most recent album for the label, 2019’s Verve, was (and …
Track: Cellist Gaspar Claus begins the imaginary journey of his September debut for InFiné with the day-into-night odyssey of ‘Une Foule’
A FRENCH cellist who sees no genre boundary, having worked with artists as fine and disparate as Sufjan Stevens, The National, Jim O’Rourke, Third Eye Foundation, Efterklang, Pedro Soler (his father), Electronic, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keiji Haino and Barbara Carlotti – and that’s just a thumbnail summary – Gaspar Claus is finally stepping out under his …
News: Erland Cooper signs for Mercury KX, buries his latest album in the soil of Orkney as a three-year time capsule with a treasure hunt ensuing; watch a short film
SIGNING today with one of the leading modern compositional imprints, Decca/Mercury KX, Orcadian composer Erland Cooper has marked the occasion in a fascinating if not entirely expected way. He already has his first album recorded; it’s entitled Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence, and is a new work written and recorded for solo …
See: Experimental clarinettist Jeremiah Cymerman pays meditative tribute with ‘From The Metaphysical To The Transcendental (For Bill Smith)’ – his album’s out in August
JEREMIAH CYMERMAN is a producer and clarinettist who’s been working within the New York avant-garde music scene for nigh on two decades now, and more specifically where the tectonic plates of improvisation, experimenta and electro-acoustic music meet. Having recently celebrated his 40th birthday, with all the societal tradition and psychic numerological significance attached to that …