HAPPY NEW YEAR!
i’m starting 2017 in the usual way, with a mix tape bringing together one track from each of the forty albums on my best of 2016 list. i’m sure posterity will come to regard last year as something of a trough in human history, but this mix tape does at least testify to the fact that it also contained some truly marvellous wonders. i hope you find these three hours of music a nice distillation of the aural magic that was made in 2016; links to buy each of the albums can be found in the last two days’ articles.
The mix tape can be downloaded or streamed via MixCloud; here’s the tracklistening in full: Read more
Tags: Autechre, Bear McCreary, Bent Sørensen, C Duncan, Chaya Czernowin, Christian Fennesz, Clara Iannotta, Claude Vivier, Cliff Martinez, Daniel Wohl, Francis Dhomont, Fritz Hauser, James O'Callaghan, Jenny Hval, Jim O'Rourke, John Wall, Jonty Harrison, Katie Gately, Kayo Dot, Kroy, Ladyhawke, Maïa Vidal, Mark Korven, Matmos, Me and My Drummer, Michael Moser, Mitski, Necro Deathmort, Olga Neuwirth, OY, Richard Barrett, Robin Foster, Seth Parker Woods, Sleigh Bells, SPC ECO, Stefan Fraunberger, Supersilent, The Natural History Museum, Three Trapped Tigers, Wendy Bevan, Zahn | Hatami | McClure
You’d have been forgiven for expecting last night’s concert given by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group—titled “Parallel Colour”—to be primarily concerned with harmony, or failing that, timbre. But in fact the overriding connection between many of the six featured works was stark economy of means. It’s a phrase that sounds intrinsically praiseworthy, yet the boundary between music sounding impressively restrained (concentrated) and oppressively constrained (dull, lifeless) is a complex one, infinitely thin and all too easy unwittingly to cross. For Jonathan Harvey, whose short solo clarinet piece Cirrus Light was given an intense and excellently controlled performance by Timothy Lines, despite considerable limits of pitch range, dynamic and articulation, the music never felt anything other than entirely free and unbounded. 
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Meanwhile, here’s one of the highlights from last year’s Proms season, and a work by a favourite composer of mine, Claude Vivier. It’s the UK première of his Orion, a work that emerged following the composer’s extensive trip to the far east. With a title like Orion, it’s rather too easy to reach for an adjective like ‘cosmic’, but that word absolutely applies; its 13-minute duration has a broadness of scope that is remarkable and highly evocative. While other composers are sporadically brought to mind (Takemitsu, Messiaen, even a hint of Varése here and there), Vivier’s sound-world—as ever—is entirely his own, and it’s a ravishing, exquisite sound-world indeed, which makes it all the more surprising that his work persists in being so unknown. Admittedly, there are layers of obtusity in Vivier’s structures and textures that, for all their superficial beauty, can cause one to feel a little uncertain, even lost. But i for one am content to be taken into uncharted waters by one such as Vivier; it’s music worth a bit of trust and effort. 
