CD/Digital releases

Symphony No. 10 (1971-1972) Not since Harrison Birtwistle’s Exody have i had so much trepidation writing about an orchestral piece. Pettersson’s Symphony No. 10 picks up the baton from No. 9 and doesn’t just run with it, but positively sprints for a full 25 minutes. That in itself makes the …

Symphony No. 8 (1968-1969) Allan Pettersson’s previous two symphonies, though structured as single movements, both featured what amounts to two distinct sections. Symphony No. 8 is the same, though here Pettersson explicitly divides the work into two movements. This is an interesting decision, as it can easily be argued that, …

Symphony No. 6 (1963-1966) i said previously that Symphony No. 5 upped the ante, so perhaps it seems like hyperbole to say that in Symphony No. 6 Pettersson does it again, but there really is no other way of perceiving this vast 60-minute, single span behemoth. By this point in …

Symphony No. 4 (1958-1959) By now, the paradigm is well-established: Pettersson’s music is one of disruptive struggle, where contrasting, sometimes contradictory, musical ideas jostle and collide in a cycle of seemingly unstoppable volatility. In his previous work, the Concerto No. 3 for String Orchestra, Pettersson had allowed himself a greater …

Following on from his first three symphonies, in the mid-1950s Allan Pettersson’s compositional interest returned to strings, writing two more concertos, one small, one large.

Having spent a little over a decade exploring chamber and vocal music, from 1951 onward the trajectory of Allan Pettersson’s compositional journey changed, and changed permanently. In a similar way to Mahler, as soon as Pettersson began work on his first symphony, in 1951, it evidently became clear to him …

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and String Quartet (1949) Arriving at Allan Pettersson’s first violin concerto comes as something of a shock. On the one hand, it continues the composer’s focus on chamber music that dates back to his earliest pieces, as well as his exploration of counterpoint, which was …

In the second part of this year’s Lent Series, focusing on the recently released BIS Complete Edition of Allan Petterson’s music, i’m continuing to explore the earliest compositions, which include his first large-scale work.

About a year-and-a-half ago, in the summer of 2022, i emailed the Swedish label BIS to ask whether they might at some point box up all of their individual releases of Allan Pettersson‘s symphonies. (At the time i was immersed in the box set released by CPO, featuring all of …

i’m concluding my January exploration of interesting free music with Heitsi-Eibib-Rec by Spanish sound artist Francisco López. Usually, López prefers to leave his works untitled, so Heitsi-Eibib-Rec is therefore somewhat unusual. Though the work doesn’t have an accompanying note – except to say it uses “original environmental sound matter recorded …

The next freely available release i want to explore is Devotion, by US musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. It’s a 20-minute fantastical work that lives up to its title by suggesting varying forms of ecstatic focus.

A group that i’ve come back to time and time again over the years is Natural Snow Buildings. A duo comprising French musicians Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, they mingle elements of folk, ambient and psychedelia. The result is a heady mixture that consistently falls somewhere between song, trance and …

Today’s piece of freely available music is by British ambient musician Daniel W J Mackenzie, aka (via some partial name reversing) Ekca Liena. November in Flight was originally released over a decade-and-a-half ago, on a bonus CD included in Mackenzie’s 2011 album Slow Music For Rapid Eye Movement. It’s a …

Heteromania is a collaboration between sound artist Conure (aka Mark Wilson) and cyberpunk poet Kenji Siratori, originally created around the start of 2007, but subsequently unreleased, so Wilson made it available online in 2011. While i’m only familiar with a relatively small amount of the extensive Conure back catalogue, i’ve …

It’s January, the month of resolutions and reduced bank balances, so once again i’m starting the year exploring some of the more interesting music i’ve encountered that’s available free online. It was in 2021, while in Huddersfield for the festival, that i learned about the music of Ko Takasugi-Czernowin, aka …

Delayed gratification is one thing, but i realise that i’ve been putting off listening to one of this year’s releases that i’ve been most looking forward to. When i first encountered Enno Poppe‘s epic Prozession, performed by Ensemble Musikfabrik at HCMF 2021 (and conducted by Poppe), it was all i …

Like many institutions, the Berlin Philharmonic set up their own record label some years ago, and for much of the last decade has been putting out lavish box sets, featuring not only audio recordings but also blu-rays drawn from their enormous video archive (accessible via the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall). …

Few releases i’ve explored this year have pulled me into their orbit so completely, and so (in the best sense) puzzlingly, as Draw Agreement by the US experimental duo Coppice. i’ve been following the work of Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer for around a decade, and have been consistently entranced …

It’s surprising to realise i’ve not given US sound artist Colin Andrew Sheffield some attention for a long time. His 2008 album Signatures made it into my very first Best Albums of the Year way back in 2008, since when i have to admit to playing catch-up with his work. …

Elis Hallik is probably the most interesting Estonian composer who, thus far, i haven’t written much about. During my annual trips to the Estonian Music Days in recent years, she has rarely been featured, so until recently, all i knew of her music were two chamber works, To Become A …