CD/Digital releases

Over the last few years i’ve been more and more deeply impressed by the music of Icelandic composer and performer Bára Gísladóttir. First contact was at the Dark Music Days in 2020, when i saw her in action with Skúli Sverrisson, forming a complex double bass / electric bass soundworld …

The last time i wrote about Australian composer Brett Dean was exploring his response to the music of J. S. Bach, as part of The Brandenburg Project. This time it’s Beethoven’s music that Dean is responding to, in his orchestral work Testament, which has recently been released in a performance …

Is there a collective noun for drones? It wasn’t until i was about halfway through Twenty Twenty, the debut release from Congregation of Drones, that the question occurred to me. On the strength of this remarkable album, though, ‘congregation’ seems entirely appropriate. Congregation of Drones is a duo comprising violinist …

One of my unexpected highlights of 2017 was the album Contemporary Jewish Music by Polish composer Stefan Węgłowski, a mesmerising sequence of electroacoustic responses to a variety of Jewish sources, utterly transforming them while retaining tangible links to their origins. His latest release, PHASE_1_4, makes that album sound like an …

It’s a good sign when, despite being a passionate believer in the maxim “less is more” in terms of a composer’s output, i still find myself feeling frustrated and impatient waiting for certain artists to create something new. That’s been the case very strongly with Vietnamese-Australian musician Carolyn Schofield, aka …

While the answer to the question, “What is it good for?” continues to be “Absolutely nothing!” where war is concerned, there’s a tiny sliver of comfort to be gained from the fact that the ongoing outrage perpetrated by the Russian regime has thrown a spotlight onto aspects of Ukrainian culture …

There’s something rather depressing about the fact that, despite nearly a century separating the publication of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando in 1928, and the première of Olga Neuwirth‘s opera Orlando in 2019, the topic of gender identity and fluidity continues to be regarded as such a hot, controversial topic in …

Flow is the title of a new album featuring Belgian clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe wielding the less common basset clarinet. Invented in the 1770s by Theodor Lotz (who had previously created the basset horn), the purpose of the instrument was in part to extend the lower range of the clarinet. …

Chamber music implies a particular kind of intimacy, and that’s overwhelmingly the case on a new album of music by Russian-born composer Lera Auerbach. Part of its intensity comes from the fact that the performers are Avita Duo, comprising pianist Ksenia Nosikova and her violinist daughter Katya Moeller. This in …

far away and hidden in the lands beneath no moon,in gorges below pinnacles upon which dwell the dead,a cavern, overshadowed by encircling mountains, gapesbeneath a narrow vault across whose dark the stars are sped.from deep down in its cave there comes a sinister refrainthat resonates the barren, shadowed valleys with …

One of the more beguiling albums i heard in 2020 was Flood Dream by New York duo LEYA. That being said, at the time i wasn’t at all sure what to make of it, except that it left me intrigued, fascinated and, in a way that i couldn’t really articulate, …

i’ve crossed paths with the music of Juliana Hodkinson on a few occasions over the last few years, and they’ve always been somewhat discombobulating experiences. My response each time has been ambivalent, primarily due to the way that Hodkinson seeks to harness – and, potentially, rely upon – physical and …

Fractuur, released in 1997, occupies an interesting position in the output of British composer John Wall, coming at a pivotal point in his approach to working with sound. On Wall’s previous album Alterstill, released two years earlier, he had created five ambitious sound sculptures, playfully constructed from samples plundered from …

When it comes to drones, i tend to feel that each listener’s mileage doesn’t merely vary, but is often entirely unique. Nonetheless, from my perspective there are some nice things going on in Spectrum, a new two-track album from Netherlands artist Sietse van Erve, a.k.a. Orphax. The essence of each …

A long-standing interest of mine is exploring symphonies by composers i’ve never heard of. Apropos: Tālivaldis Ķeniņš, who until relatively recently i didn’t know was one of Latvia’s foremost 20th century composers. However, Ķeniņš was arguably as much Canadian as Latvian; after Russia re-occupied Latvia during World War II, Ķeniņš …

As an appendix to my coverage of this year’s Estonian Music Days, i want to highlight three new anthologies of Estonian contemporary music. Focusing on chamber, choral and orchestral music respectively, and featuring a diverse collection of ensembles and vocal groups, they complement and expand upon a previous series of …

i feel like i’m emerging from a bomb shelter. For the last two days i’ve been immersed in the Golden Dolden Box Set, a huge self-released compilation by Canadian composer Paul Dolden. Usually, the task of retrospective falls to curators and writers, but in the case of this box set, …

i’m really not a conductor fanboy. Composers are always getting me excited; performers too, from time to time; but conductors, in general, not so much. There are some special cases: Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly have both stunned me on countless occasions; i’ve always had a lot of time for …

It’s just over a decade since Spanish label Neu Records was established, and as i’ve explored each new release from them through the intervening years, every single one has seemed not remotely like a regular album, but a special edition. That’s in no small part due to the presentation. From …

In my series of articles focusing on free music last year, i explored Nikita Golyshev‘s remarkable album 15 Songs from Glass, Oil and Other Sources. Originally released in 2007, and long since vanished from the web, at time of writing i was only able to share the MP3 version of …