As the lockdown continues here in the UK, i hope all of you are keeping safe and well. This week in my ongoing series of Isolation Mixtapes exploring some of the best music from the last 10 years, i’m focusing on composers and artists starting with the letter C. The mix features two tracks from each year, once again in chronological order.
Here’s the tracklisting in full, together with approximate timings and links to obtain the music. As usual, the mixtape can be downloaded or streamed via MixCloud. Read more
Tags: Carly Rae Jepsen, Cemeteries, Charlotte & Magon, Charlotte Bray, Chelsea Wolfe, Chisu, Christopher Bissonnette, Christopher Trapani, Chromatics, Chrome Hoof, Chvrches, Claude Vivier, Clem Leek, Cliff Martinez, Coda, Colin Stetson, Conure, Coppice, Cristobal Tapia De Veer, Cyclobe, Isolation Mixtapes, Kenji Siratori
i’m bringing this year’s Lent Series to an end with the last large-scale work by one of Britain’s most strange and singular composers, John Tavener. Tavener died in November 2013, and in some respects it would be hard to go out with a bigger bang than with Flood of Beauty which, though composed many years earlier (between July 2006 and July 2007), only received its first performance in the autumn of 2014. At 104 minutes’ duration, the piece is significantly shorter than many of Tavener’s multiple-hour works – none more so than the 7-hour behemoth The Veil of the Temple (2001) – but the piece is nonetheless massive in its own right, and for reasons other than just its (still very lengthy) time-span.
In his later life, the nature and articulation of Tavener’s religious outlook became increasingly nebulous and non-specific, moving away from clear Orthodox inspirations to embrace other modes of thought and belief, ultimately favouring of a more Universalist mindset. In terms of the effect that this had on his work – from both compositional and listening perspectives – i’m not sure it really made that much of a difference. As i’ve discussed previously, Tavener always tended to take a de facto approach to the presentation of religiosity in his work. Far from attempting to sonically contextualise his beliefs – for example, dramatising them, or at least giving them a kind of parabolic or allegorical quality – he instead presented them in an unequivocal, fait accompli fashion, likening this to the experiencing of entering an Orthodox church and being instantly surrounded and enclosed by decorative glory. In practice, the experience was usually akin to skipping over the first two volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy and leaping straight into the Paradiso; if transcendence is all you’re after then perhaps the result is satisfying enough – you get, in essence, what you came for – though one can’t help feeling that the culmination of Dante’s experience is so much more emotionally (and, if you like, spiritually) meaningful and relatable in light of the incredible journey to arrive at that point. Perhaps Tavener felt that the real world – the concert hall, and the audience sitting within it – was the context to which his music provided some kind of contrasting quasi-divine apogee. But for me, the way his music always tended to hit the ground running, so to speak – assuming rather than demonstrating; taking for granted rather than attempting to convince – seemed the epitome of preaching to the converted: perfect if you already shared his outlook; alienating and downright eccentric if you didn’t. This applies to a great deal of his work (and not only his, of course), both the more purely Orthodox as well as the later, more Universalist compositions, so from a listening perspective the only significant change in this regard is the sense that the music has undergone a shift from what we might conventionally regard as ‘sacred music’ to something less easily categorisable, though aesthetically sharing aspects of New Age music. In this respect, a title like Flood of Beauty is telling; it evokes… something, though what that something is is ill-defined and subjective. 
The field recording in April Triptych is a neutral one, inasmuch as it doesn’t sound obviously manipulated or edited (actually, it comprises three recordings made in the morning, afternoon and evening), and is less about presenting specific sound objects than providing a broad ‘open’ atmosphere for the piece to inhabit. We hear generalised ambiance, leaves and trees rustling, birds calling and singing, the gentle hubbub of traffic, the purring of a nearby engine, all of which forms a passive sonic backdrop. Two additional layers are added to this. The first begins a little under two minutes in: slow-moving harmonies articulated by soft-edged sine tones, their timbre akin to an organ. According to Thomas’ notes on the piece, these drawn out chords are “an extremely elongated renaissance madrigal”, but they are sufficiently extended that they instead take on a nebulous kind of connectivity: sometimes the chords seem to be drones, inviting no sense of a harmonic past or future of which they form a part; yet at other times such a sense is distantly projected, though rarely to the extent that we would exactly think of them as “chord progressions” (there is, if you deliberately listen for it, a cadential finality at the very end). The second additional layer, which first appears around 12 minutes in, is its behavioural polar opposite: brief, sporadic piano gestures, sprinklings of notes like small splashes on the surface of a millpond, their droplets and ripples instantly gone. 
i feel terribly sad to have just read the news 
Even more recently, McKenzie has dusted off and polished up his three contributions to the first series of releases by Fovea Hex. The Explanation, The Discussion and An Answer were originally released as limited edition bonus discs accompanying the EPs Bloom (2005), Huge (2006) and Allure (2007). While many Fovea Hex releases have included accompanying remixes of their music, the three Hafler Trio pieces are rather more ambitious, best regarded as self-contained electronic works into which fragments and morsels of Fovea Hex material have been to a greater or lesser degree folded, embedded and woven. A decade and a half on from their original release, McKenzie has released a standalone edition of these pieces under a new, typically Haflerian, collective title: This is Our Problem: What Will Our Joy Be Then?. 
Saunders’ 75-minute response to the text creates a musical analogue of this experience. A work for soprano and 19 soloists, Yes disperses the players throughout the performance space, establishing a sound environment that the audience is positioned within. One could fancifully regard this arrangement as like sitting inside Molly Bloom’s head, being surrounded by her tangled criss-crossing recollections and sentiments fired out by the neural network of musicians all around us. My own experience of the work, at the UK première that began the 2018 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, was very much like this. On that occasion i commented 
The way The Last Voices harnesses time is fascinating. It’s tempting to ponder whether the piece ultimately does anything or goes anywhere – but that immediately prompts a necessary follow-up consideration: how do we define ‘doing’ or ‘going’? The opening minutes of the piece act as something of a paradigm for everything that follows. It’s like listening to a half-focused or blurred ‘tonic’ chord gently oscillating on its axis. As such it sounds resolved yet not exactly final; there’s a prevailing impression that there’s more to come, though equally a sense that if the music were to stop right now it would sound completely natural and make perfect sense. As time passes, it consolidates the feeling that something fundamental – in both musical and non-musical senses – is omnipresent, yet Baquet-Long has allowed considerable scope for the music to move and roam, to explore and grow, never sounding constricted. This movement is generally, though very loosely, articulated in what could be thought of as extended exhalations, punctuated with brief gathering points to draw breath that also allow a moment or two for the preceding resonance (sonic and internal) to be savoured. 
i’m beginning this year’s Lent Series with a recent work by a composer who has made me think more about time than anyone else: Kenneth Kirschner. Kirschner’s work has intrigued and fascinated me for many years. On the one hand, in many respects i feel i know it well; i’ve spent time with everything he’s made available over the last couple of decades – which, depending how you classify what counts as a ‘composition’, amounts to as many as 185 pieces – and have written about his music on numerous occasions, most extensively in the 2014 book Imperfect Forms: The Music of Kenneth Kirschner (available as a 
There are times, believe it or not dear reader, when i honestly wonder if i’m starting to get a little bit jaded. Listening can feel like a chore, and the endless parade of the novelty and the newfangled can blur into a torrent of ‘musica generica’ that becomes (at best) boring and (at worst) suffocating. Enter Jennifer Walshe. If there’s one artist whose work is always guaranteed to beguile, intrigue and fascinate, it’s Walshe. Above all, she is endlessly refreshing, presenting unexpected ideas in unexpected ways that are often as hilarious to experience as they are engrossing and confusing.
Most imminent, this coming Friday (14th), is Riot Ensemble at King’s Place in London. They’ll be kicking off their new concert series ReNew with a trio of works: Liza Lim‘s Extinction events and dawn chorus (which has just been 
Also this week, also in London, is the latest Illuminate concert, which this time finds them at the Royal College of Music. The programme once again consists of an interesting blend of new and not-so-new, including Jennifer Higdon‘s Dark Wood and Kaija Saariaho‘s Mirrors alongside Amy Beach‘s Pastorale for Woodwind Quintet and Henriëtte Bosmans‘ String Quartet.
Next week sees the return of the Electric Spring festival in Huddersfield. Once again spread over five days from Wednesday to Sunday, this year’s concerts will feature five new works for organ and electronics performed by Lauren Redhead & Alistair Zaldua, a large-scale workout for Huddersfield’s equally large-scale HISS system from Louise Rossiter, an evening of who-knows-what from Weston Olencki and what will surely be a typically marvellous son et lumière display from Leafcutter John. There’ll also be a couple of installations running throughout by Simon Whetham (in the Richard Steinitz Building’s vast Atrium space) and Jackson Mouldycliff, plus a workshop with Pam Hulme and the usual Creative Coding Lab Symposium and geekalicious Modular Meets session on Sunday afternoon.
Beyond these shores, the programme for this year’s Borealis festival in Bergen has been announced. Borealis remains one of the most adventurous new music festivals i’ve ever attended, and this year is no exception. Trying to single out highlights is ridiculous considering pretty much everything is likely to be one, but especially interesting will be the world première of SOLD (a dog and pony show) – a new performance piece from chameleon-like vocalist Stine Janvin; assorted works by George Lewis performed by the wonderful Norwegian Naval Forces Band at the Natural History Museum; Ecstatic Material, a multimedia work from Beatrice Dillon & Keith Harrison that sounds like it will be not only sonically interesting but also downright sticky; Knut Vaage‘s new electroacoustic piece Hybrid spetakkel being premièred by BIT20 Ensemble; a three-way concert featuring John Chantler, Okkyung Lee & Nina Pixel; and a four-part evening of music celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landings featuring the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Philharmonia Orchestra’s next set of Music of Today concerts (curated by Unsuk Chin) is looking good. Next month there’ll be the chance to hear music by Xenakis and Aribert Reimann on 5 March (featuring pianist Nic Hodges), and two weeks later works by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Helena Tulve. On 14 May, percussionist Colin Currie will be giving the first performance of Luke Bedford‘s latest piece alongside music by Philippe Hurel, while the following week’s concert features three world premières from Joel Järventausta, Jocelyn Campbell and Hollie Harding.
Slightly further ahead is Louth Contemporary Music Society‘s annual two-day shindig, which this year is titled ‘The Gathering’. It gets its name from a string quartet by Christos Hatzis, which will be performed by the Esposito Quartet. There’ll also be new works from Leo Brouwer, Pascale Criton and Gloria Coates, and the festival will close with one of Estonia’s finest choirs, Vox Clamantis, presenting works by Helena Tulve, Kevin Volans, Siobhán Cleary and (surprise, surprise) Arvo Pärt.
To conclude my Éliane Radigue birthday weekend, i’m returning to a work in the Occam series that 
