In one of the most exciting teasers i’ve seen in a long while, Scott Walker has released a video of snippets from his forthcoming album, Bish Bosch. It includes clips from a number of tracks, bearing such tantalising titles as ‘See You Don’t Bump His Head’, ‘Tar’, ‘Dimple’, ‘Corps de Blah’, ‘Phrasing’ and ‘Epizootics!’ (the complete tracklist is here). The 4-minute video brings to mind scenes from the film 30 Century Man, showing something of the bewildering array of instruments and techniques integral to Walker’s painstaking compositional process. There aren’t many musicians who can bring together such extremes of acoustic and electronic phenomena and make them seem not just suited to each other but downright necessary, but on the strength of this all-too-brief trailer, Bish Bosch is going to do just that. The question one couldn’t help thinking in the devastating wake of 2006’s The Drift was “What on earth will Scott Walker be able to come up with to follow this?”. On 3 December, we’ll all get to find out.
In the meantime, there’s a Bish Bosch mini-site to keep an eye on, and some additional info on the 4AD website.
Anyone in the Birmingham area tomorrow night (Monday 13th) might be interested in the next concert my ensemble, Interrobang, is giving. The concert will feature a number of works by established composers, intermingled with four pieces by students and graduates of the Birmingham Conservatoire (where Interrobang is based). It includes a new work of my own, composed for BCMG at the end of the last year and explored in a workshop with them in the spring, but not yet performed in public. Here’s the programme: