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  • About
  • Patrons
  • The Lists
    • List of compositions reviewed on 5:4
    • List of albums and EPs reviewed on 5:4
    • Festivals reviewed on 5:4
    • Best Albums of the Years
    • The Proms premières – Poll results
    • Complete list of ratings
  • Mixtapes, etc.
  • Contact
    • Contact Form
    • Submission Contact Form
5:4
CD/Digital releasesFree internet musicThematic series

Free internet music: Christina Vantzou – Nº2 Remixes

by 5:4 January 21, 2021 • 05:00 0 comment

Free internet music: Nikita Golyshev – 15 Songs from Glass, Oil and...

by 5:4 January 18, 2021 • 11:18 2 comments

Free internet music: Brothomstates – ReKobn-Tich-Ey

by 5:4 January 13, 2021 • 10:06 0 comment
CD/Digital releasesFree internet musicThematic series

Free internet music: Chelsea Wolfe – Folkadelphia Session 5/31/2014

by 5:4 January 11, 2021 • 10:40 0 comment

Free internet music: Nhung Nguyen – Oblivion

by 5:4 January 8, 2021 • 05:00 0 comment

Free internet music: Andrew Leslie Hooker

by 5:4 January 6, 2021 • 12:11 0 comment
Best of the YearMixtapes

Mixtape #59 : Best Albums of 2020

by 5:4 January 1, 2021 • 07:45 0 comment

Best Albums of 2020 (Part 2)

by 5:4 December 31, 2020 • 00:00 0 comment

Best Albums of 2020 (Part 1)

by 5:4 December 30, 2020 • 00:00 0 comment
CD/Digital releases

SWR Vokalensemble – Baltikum

by 5:4 December 22, 2020 • 11:32 0 comment

Adam Janota Bzowski – Saint Maud (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

by 5:4 December 18, 2020 • 05:00 0 comment

Best Albums of the Year, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying...

by 5:4 December 16, 2020 • 10:50 4 comments

latest articles

  • FestivalsInterviews

    Proms 2019: pre-première questions with Outi Tarkiainen

    by 5:4 August 4, 2019 • 06:00
    August 4, 2019 • 06:00

    This evening’s Prom, given by the BBC Philharmonic, includes the world première of Midnight Sun Variations by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. In anticipation of that, here are her answers to my pre-première questions, along with the programme note of the piece. Many thanks to Outi for her responses.

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2019: Peter Eötvös – Alhambra; Tobias Broström – Nigredo: Dark Night of the Soul (UK Premières)

    by 5:4 July 30, 2019 • 17:23
    July 30, 2019 • 17:23

    The last two premières at the Proms have both been concertos: Alhambra, the third violin concerto by Peter Eötvös, and Nigredo: Dark Night of the Soul, a double-trumpet concerto by Swedish composer Tobias Broström. It’s been interesting to note how their overall approach to narrative is, at a fundamental level…

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  • Announcements

    Music Beyond Airports

    by 5:4 July 30, 2019 • 11:12
    July 30, 2019 • 11:12

    In February last year, Monty Adkins and i organised Ambient@40, the first academic conference devoted to ambient music, which took place over two days at Huddersfield University. The conference was designed to explore the history and legacy of the genre forty years after the release of Brian Eno’s pivotal album…

    Read more
  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2019: Anna Þorvaldsdóttir – Metacosmos (UK Première)

    by 5:4 July 29, 2019 • 17:10
    July 29, 2019 • 17:10

    Performed last Monday by an orchestra combining students from the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School, conducted by Edward Gardner, Anna Þorvaldsdóttir‘s Metacosmos is a work i know quite well. Anna and i discussed it at length during our Dialogue together, and i explored the piece further following…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2019: Hans Zimmer – Earth; Alexia Sloane – Earthward (World Premières)

    by 5:4 July 26, 2019 • 11:52
    July 26, 2019 • 11:52

    The most significant love-hate musical relationship of my life has been – and continues to be – with film scores. Few idioms have the power to elevate, charm, horrify, astonish and amaze us more while at the same time displaying the irresistible propensity to eschew all originality and imagination in…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Proms 2019: Zosha di Castri – Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Memory (World Première)

    by 5:4 July 25, 2019 • 11:45
    July 25, 2019 • 11:45

    Many of the Proms seasons in recent years have begun with a world première, and that was again the case this year. In 2018, the opening work commemorated the end of World War I, whereas in 2019 the topic of commemoration is altogether more triumphant: humanity walking on the moon.…

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  • FestivalsInterviews

    Proms 2019: pre-première questions with Alexia Sloane

    by 5:4 July 22, 2019 • 06:00
    July 22, 2019 • 06:00

    This afternoon’s Prom is the first of the festival’s usual parallel strand taking place at Cadogan Hall. Primarily featuring early choral music performed by vocal group VOCES8, the concert also includes the first performance of Earthward by British composer Alexia Sloane. As an introduction to the piece, and to Sloane’s…

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  • FestivalsInterviews

    Proms 2019: pre-première questions with Zosha Di Castri

    by 5:4 July 19, 2019 • 06:00
    July 19, 2019 • 06:00

    This evening, the 2019 Proms festival begins in earnest. As on many previous occasions, they’ve opted to get things started with a world première, which this year is by Canadian-born, US-based composer and sound artist Zosha Di Castri. As an upbeat to that, here are her answers to my pre-première…

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  • Announcements

    Fermata

    by 5:4 July 17, 2019 • 06:00
    July 17, 2019 • 06:00

    i’m setting off this morning for the Faroe Islands, where i’ll be spending the next six days exploring some of Summartónar, their annual music festival. While i’m away, the first of this year’s series of ‘pre-première questions’ articles with composers featured at the Proms (which begins on Friday) will appear.…

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Esa-Pekka Salonen – Cello Concerto

    by 5:4 July 15, 2019 • 16:27
    July 15, 2019 • 16:27

    One of my highlights from last year came at the end of the summer, during the final concert at the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm. An occasion given over to celebrating composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (which i reviewed elsewhere), the concert included a performance of Salonen’s Cello Concerto given…

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Juhani Silvola – Post-biological wildlife

    by 5:4 July 8, 2019 • 17:23
    July 8, 2019 • 17:23

    We might call it “conjectural anthropology”. What i’m referring to here is music (or any art, for that matter) that seeks to fabricate and/or otherwise be inspired by fictitious notions of organic life and activity. We find examples of this in, among other places, the strange electronic languages being uttered…

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Clemens von Reusner – Electroacoustic Works

    by 5:4 July 5, 2019 • 15:00
    July 5, 2019 • 15:00

    In contemporary electronic music it can be hard to find a good balance between a robust sense of purpose while retaining the possibility of spontaneity. To an extent, the sculpted nature of fixed media works tacitly tends to enforce the former over the latter such that, like the dialogue in…

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  • Mixtapes

    Mixtape #55 : Sun

    by 5:4 July 3, 2019 • 12:29
    July 3, 2019 • 12:29

    For the latest 5:4 mixtape, inspired by the incredible heat that’s been sizzling its way across Europe recently, i’ve turned to the Sun as my theme. The mix has a somewhat different tone from my Summer mixtape from four years ago (which was, generally, intended to be quite upbeat and…

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann – LP1

    by 5:4 June 24, 2019 • 12:51
    June 24, 2019 • 12:51

    It was perhaps inadvertently helpful that i first listened to LP1, a new release from Joseph Branciforte and Theo Bleckmann, in bed late at night. Not because it’s nocturnal, as such, but more to do with the fact that it sounded in sympathy with the pitch blackness all around me.…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Forum Wallis 2019 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 June 20, 2019 • 18:53
    June 20, 2019 • 18:53

    The main focus during the five days of concerts at Forum Wallis was on ensemble and chamber music. An important and impressive feature of these concerts was their aesthetic diversity, not showing a marked preference for certain kinds of music-making. This resulted in extremely different – sometimes, practically opposite –…

    Read more
  • Festivals

    Forum Wallis 2019 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 June 18, 2019 • 12:50
    June 18, 2019 • 12:50

    It’s impossible to be aware of everything that’s going on in new music. For me, that fact is usually associated with new CD releases, but i’ve come to realise it’s just as true for concerts and festivals. Apropos: Forum Wallis, a five-day festival of contemporary music that takes place annually…

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  • ConcertsPremières

    St Mary’s Church, Penzance: Kevos – Old Kings in Exile

    by 5:4 June 4, 2019 • 13:22
    June 4, 2019 • 13:22

    Last weekend i made a pilgrimage to the far south-west of England to catch the latest concert given by (as far as i can tell) Cornwall’s one and only contemporary music ensemble, Kevos. The title of the concert, named after one of the works being performed, Old Kings in Exile,…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    Only Connect 2019 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 May 31, 2019 • 15:18
    May 31, 2019 • 15:18

    The lack of ostentation in most of the music at this year’s Only Connect festival was perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than in a concert last Saturday devoted to French composer Pascale Criton. Performed by violinist Silvia Tarozzi, cellist Deborah Walker and singers Stine Janvin Joh, Signe Irene Stangborli Time and…

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  • ConcertsFestivalsPremières

    Only Connect 2019 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 May 29, 2019 • 14:41
    May 29, 2019 • 14:41

    There’s something absolutely right about the bringing together of Norway’s Only Connect – a festival that, as its name implies, encourages one to question (inter)connections between ostensibly disparate musics – with Tectonics, Ilan Volkov’s peripatetic festival the name of which evokes fundamental, underlying bedrocks that continually meet, connect and rupture.…

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  • CD/Digital releases

    Kyle Bobby Dunn – From Here to Eternity

    by 5:4 May 22, 2019 • 11:40
    May 22, 2019 • 11:40

    Ambient music has been on my mind a lot lately. Monty Adkins and i are nearing completion on our forthcoming book about Ambient that we’re co-editing – following on from the conference we organised last year – and i completed my own lengthy contribution to this just last week. Since…

    Read more
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Nils Henrik Asheim: Lydkilder Sound and Image: Aesthetics and Practices Music Beyond Airports: appraising ambient music Simon Cummings | 間 Studies vol. 6

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