It’s rare these days to find new additions to the sphere of ambient music that go beyond being merely extended, superficial, one-dimensional platitudes. So it’s been a relief to spend a mixture of active and passive time with Verdant, a recent album from US composer David Dunn, which taps into…

Considering that most of us have been spending the last 12 months in varying forms of isolation, it seems a fitting time to focus on music for solo instruments. German label Kairos clearly feels the same way, as they’ve recently brought out a short series of five albums, each titled…

Early last year, before life on earth tilted over into abject abnormality, i experienced a performance at the Dark Music Days in Reykjavík that, in hindsight, i perhaps summed up a little too succinctly. On the one hand, it was completely true when i wrote, of the performance given by…

i’ve been catching up with the latest pair of releases from the always interesting Neu Records label. In the process, i’ve been contemplating the fact that both of them pull the rug out from under you in terms of what’s certain and uncertain about the music, which often appears to…

In addition to the various multimedia / audiovisual events at Borealis 2021, the festival included a number of more conventional concerts. Violinist Ricardo Odriozola’s recital featured a mix of Norwegian, British and US works, two of which, Dániel Péter Biró‘s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Moshe Went Up and Tim Hodgkinson‘s The Landscape Theory…

Norway’s annual Borealis festival is more than just a conventional sequence of concerts primarily concerned with the way music sounds. Its aim is evidently toward a more holistic experience, one in which words and visuals are just as important – often, more so – than what we’re hearing. As such,…

A little over a year ago, my spring mixtape reflected the growing state of the world by having Virus as its theme. Shortly after that, as lockdown kicked in, i switched from a quarterly to a weekly sequence of Isolation Mixtapes, supplemented with the Outside-In series exploring field recordings from…

To bring this year’s nature-focused Lent Series to a close, i’m turning to a major work by British composer Laura Bowler. Antarctica is a 50-minute multimedia piece for voice and orchestra that constitutes a very personal, and very passionate, response to a variety of issues affecting the natural world. As…

When choosing the theme of nature for this year’s Lent Series, one of the first works i knew i wanted to include was Histoires Naturelles, a collaboration for voice and electronics by Ute Wassermann and Richard Barrett. Not to be confused with Ravel’s song cycle of the same name(!), the…

For the next work in this year’s nature-themed Lent Series i’m turning to not so much a fully-fleshed, self-contained composition, but something of a miniature curiosity, an outtake saved from the cutting-room floor that’s subsequently been restored. Olivier Messiaen‘s final orchestral work, Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà…, completed in 1991, was a…

One of the composers i’ve become most fascinated by in recent years is Mirjam Tally. Born in Estonia, but for many years based in Sweden, Tally’s work often draws on elements of folk music and is invariably imbued with allusions to the natural world. This attraction to nature extends throughout…

My nature-themed Lent Series finally gets to explore the night in La Leggiadra Luna by Albanian composer Thomas Simaku. A choral work composed in 2017, its text is an Italian translation (by Salvatore Quasimodo) of a fragment by the Greek poet Sappho. The words articulate a short reverie marvelling at the…

In The Thin Tree (discussed in my last post), Klaus Lang abstracts ideas, patterns and concepts from nature, and creates a soundworld that develops and grows from an opening 4-note idea. Korean composer Unsuk Chin‘s 2019 orchestral work SPIRA – Concerto for Orchestra does something similar, also being concerned with “the…

For me the basic idea how to translate from one field of art into another is not to imitate the surface (like programme music) but to find underlying abstract principles and give them an acoustic representation. These words of Klaus Lang (from a lecture he gave titled ‘Boston Beauties’) refers…

For the next work in this year’s nature-inspired Lent Series, i’m returning to the world of birds. Japanese composer Akira Nishimura‘s 1993 orchestral work Bird Heterophony takes its inspiration, in part at least, from a folk tale from Papua New Guinea, in which a young woman witnesses her brother transformed…

The next piece i’m exploring in this year’s nature-themed Lent Series is a vocal work by Estonian composer Evelin Seppar. Pretty much all of my experience with Seppar’s music thus far has been vocal: Поля ли мои, поля (Fields, Oh My Fields) made a strong impression at the 2017 Estonian…

For reasons geographical and pandemical, it’s quite a long while since i’ve had the chance to be by the sea. To a limited extent, i’ve been able to do this vicariously through the opening movement of To Be Beside the Seaside, the first orchestral work by English composer Joanna Bailie.…

The longest work i’ve ever written about on 5:4 is Scottish composer James Dillon‘s magnificent three-hour Nine Rivers cycle, which i explored almost a decade ago. So it’s rather nice that the next piece i’m exploring in this year’s Lent Series focusing on nature, also by James Dillon, is one…

For the majority of us, throughout much of the last 12 months we’ve been largely unable or forbidden from travelling far from home. Personally, i’ve become increasingly aware of how fortunate i am to live somewhere rural, enabling me to enter the countryside by, literally, crossing the road. But many…

Another festival that’s recently been announced is an entirely new addition to the annual list of new music events. The Baltic Music Days is in initiative that seeks to bring together contemporary music from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. i first heard suggestions about the possibility of this festival a few…