5:4

As in most countries, Estonian contemporary music has its share of conservatives (more) and radicals (fewer), but one composer in particular tends to flit between the two. At first listen, many would probably place Tõnu Kõrvits‘ music firmly in the conservative camp. He is, without a doubt, the country’s most…

i’m no lover of vinyl. Quite the opposite, yet some of the best musical creations i’ve ever heard all stem in some respect from its archaic world of spin and surface noise, pop and crackle. A full decade ago i was marvelling at Cosey Fanny Tutti and Philippe Petit’s miniature…

It was earlier this year that i first encountered the label Elli Records, self-described as “an independent label focused on music made by humans, for humans, with computers”. Nothing particularly unusual about that, but while i’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of their five years’ worth of releases,…

In order to write about In Blue, the new collaborative album from The Bug and Dis Fig, i need to break a couple of personal ground rules. #1: Don’t do nostalgia. #2: Don’t write about yourself. The reason i need to break those rules is because of the way In…

Considering it was released back in July it’s taken me far too long to get round to spending time with a split album featuring two field recording-based works by Chris Watson and Georgia Rodgers. Both works have their origins in installation pieces. Watson’s Notes from the Forest Floor began life five…

One of the shorter albums i’ve heard this year, but nonetheless one of the more arresting, is by the improbably named Joeri Chipsvingers (nom de guerre for Belgian composer Michiel de Naegel). Titled De Avonturen van Joeri Chipsvingers, it comes across as a sort of unhinged electroacoustic chamber farrago in…

Coincidentally, another project i’ve been involved with also materialised last week. For Gunnar Geisse‘s new CD TRIPTYCH, released on the NEOS label, i’ve contributed an essay to the liner notes. Titled ‘Liminal (un)reality’, my text explores the music’s complex amalgam of reproduced and recreated, supposedly real and actually real sounds,…

It’s a work i’d very much like to write about in more depth at a later date, as there’s so much to say about it… i wrote those words following a concert that took place almost exactly a year ago, before the time when lockdowns were a thing and i…

Forgot to say: my Best Beloved is fast approaching what can only be described as a ‘significant’ birthday this week, so i’m currently away on a not-quite-holiday-but-not-quite-not-holiday-either at the moment, during which i’ll be celebrating / commiserating as required. Back next week.

The other newly-released portrait album that’s got me thinking about polarities lately is Earthing, featuring four works for string quartet by Italian composer Clara Iannotta. The reason it provoked that particular train of thought (among many others) is due to the fact that, unlike most new music, it doesn’t so…

Something that comes up a lot in my writing about music is polarities. Perhaps it’s understandable; many composers strive to establish some kind of drama in their work, which often involves the juxtaposition and/or interplay of polarised types of material or behaviour. A lot of the satisfaction and enjoyment from…

Back in 2017, when writing about the fifth and, at the time, latest in Catherine Lamb‘s ongoing series Prisma Interius, i talked a lot about consonance and dissonance, the way that its pitches began life around a central point from which they emerged and split off, ultimately creating a harmonic…

At the more intriguing end of the Icelandic contemporary music continuum is HĪBER, a new album of electroacoustic pieces by Bára Gísladóttir. When writing about Bára’s performance at this year’s Dark Music Days (with Skúli Sverrisson), i remarked how “what we heard in the first five minutes … was essentially…

One of the aspects of contemporary music from Iceland that i find most fascinating is its tendency to position itself at extremes, rooted either in slavish convention or daring unorthodoxy. It’s a polarity that’s revealed itself again in some recent releases of Icelandic music, the results of which have been…

In recent years i’ve realised that, more than with most artists, i tend to listen to each new Autechre release in the context of what came before. i know it’s hardly a mistake to listen like that – and it obviously makes sense for anyone wanting to appreciate it on…

Many thanks to those of you who voted in this year’s Proms première polls. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the turnout was considerably lower than usual, with just under 200 votes cast. Considering that the polls were only open for four weeks this year (instead of the usual 10), and…

Another electroacoustic collaboration that’s been impressing me lately is Black Earth / Red Earth by composer Andrew Leslie Hooker and trumpeter Nick Janczak. The nature of the collaboration, involving methods being developed as part of Hooker’s ongoing PhD, is interestingly back-and-forth. The starting point comes from an electronic “sound-object” created…

One of the most interesting things to emerge amid the massive glut of stuff released last Friday – in order to coincide with Bandcamp’s latest fee-waiver day; interesting how this has come to dictate so many musicians’ output during 2020 – is something that, once upon a time, would have…

In addition to purely electronic music, this year’s Estonian Music Days once again featured many works melding instrumental and electronic elements. The most potent collision of old and new technology came at the Arvo Pärt Centre on Saturday afternoon, where Anna-Liisa Eller’s kannel (the traditional Estonian instrument, a form of…

It was nearly six months ago that i began my weekly series of Isolation Mixtapes, and even after just a few weeks it was starting to look as if i had been hopelessly pessimistic about how long the presence of lockdown and the necessity for isolation were going to be…