The opportunity to hear two new works by Laura Bowler within a single week isn’t just a exciting prospect, it’s a daunting one. Her subject matter has oscillated between the personal and the global, at both extremes seeking to address the pain and damage that far too many people are…

In the previous part i highlighted the works heard at BEAST FEaST 2022 that went against the grain and handled their materials with gentleness. However, not surprisingly the dominant compositional attitude was one aspiring to power and heft. Though unassumingly titled, Helena Gough‘s Yolk featured an almost flamboyant display of…

The key word, i think, is “feast”. There was something gloriously gluttonous about the quantity of music performed at BEAST FEaST 2022, though considering the festival was celebrating both the 40th anniversary of the founding of Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre and the recent 70th birthday of its founder Jonty Harrison,…

Almost as soon as i finished the previous 5:4 mixtape, focusing on war, it seemed necessary that the next one should go in the opposite direction. For this love-infused mix, i’ve not allowed myself the usual interpretative free rein but have for the most part focused on songs and tracks…

i’m heading off to Birmingham this evening, to savour the next few days’ acousmatic delights and disorientation at the BEAST FEaST festival. Words to follow once i’m back next week.

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…

It’s no fewer than 40 years since the formation of BEAST – Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre, one of the leading organisations pioneering the creation and presentation of electronic music. To celebrate this milestone, next week Birmingham University will be hosting BEAST FEaST 2022, a four-day extravaganza of concerts, installations and…

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…

A disconcerting aspect of some of the pieces performed at this year’s Estonian Music Days was the extent to which their material, language and / or behaviour was obviously begged, borrowed and / or stolen from heavily-worn musical conventions, to the point of outright cliché. This was especially apparent in…

In addition to conventional acoustic and electronic music, there was the opportunity to explore a variety of audiovisual work during my time in Tallinn. This was primarily due to COMMUTE, a fringe festival run by the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, with late evening concerts each day, after the…

The smallest-scale events at this year’s Estonian Music Days were a pair of chamber concerts at each end of the festival. Irina Zahharenkova’s keyboard recital at the Arvo Pärt Centre encompassed extremes of musical invention. The most egregious were two works dating from the early 1990s by a Russian guitarist…

This year’s Proms season has been announced in the last few days, and alongside all the standard fare, there’s the usual small smattering of contemporary music to get mildly excited about. Scanning through the programme, the most immediate thing that leapt out was familiarity, even predictability, the festival in general…