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,…
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Natasha Barrett
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i’m delighted to present the latest instalment in my occasional long-form conversation series The Dialogues. My guest this time is UK-born, Norway-based composer Natasha Barrett, whose music i’ve deeply admired for at least 20 years. Barrett is both a veteran and a pioneer of electronic music, utilising a convoluted mixture…
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Happy New Year! i want to begin 2022 by saying a bigger THANK YOU than usual to all of you who have actively supported and followed 5:4 during the last year, most of all my faithful band of Patrons. While 2021 isn’t a year i’m sorry to see the back…
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i’m really not a nostalgic person at all, but it recently occurred to me that when i created the first 5:4 Best Albums of the Year list, my reason for choosing to include 40 entries was due to the oh-so-many years as a teenager that i’d spent listening to the…
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One of my recurring trains of thought during HCMF 2021 was concerned with the notion of continuity. This was, very simply, due to the fact that all of the best things i heard at the festival had an incredibly clear, logical sense running through them that, regardless of their inner…
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Not everything i heard at Ultima 2021 was bound up in convolutions of meaning. Ryoji Ikeda‘s forays into the world of percussion (which i previously explored in 2018) are a sidestep away from his more central work in multi-layered representations and interpretations of data, instead concerned much more directly with…
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It’s always exciting when a new album of music by Natasha Barrett appears, and it feels like it’s been a long wait since her last release, the dazzling Puzzle Wood (one of my Best Albums of 2017), came out four years ago. While that album explored her earlier output –…
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With this week’s Isolation Mixtape, we enter the second half of the alphabet, focusing on artists, composers and groups beginning with the letter N. As ever, there are two of the most interesting tracks from each of the years 2010-2019, featured in chronological order. Here’s the tracklisting in full, together with…
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Happy New Year! i want to start this year by expressing my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have followed and supported 5:4 in the last year, particularly my delectable band of Patrons. Hot on the heels of my Best Albums of 2019 list, i’m beginning 2020 with the…
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Being the host nation, music from Norway was especially well-represented at this year’s Nordic Music Days in Bodø. Harnessing the large and impressive organ of Bodø Cathedral, Trond Kverno‘s Triptychon 2 was one of the fieriest things i heard at the festival. We tend to think of toccatas as fast-flowing,…
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There’s something absolutely right about the bringing together of Norway’s Only Connect – a festival that, as its name implies, encourages one to question (inter)connections between ostensibly disparate musics – with Tectonics, Ilan Volkov’s peripatetic festival the name of which evokes fundamental, underlying bedrocks that continually meet, connect and rupture.…
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For the new 5:4 mixtape, i’ve turned to the world of animals, assembling music that references a diverse collection of wildlife. All manner of beasts are featured, insects, birds, reptiles and amphibians in addition to mammals, from the smallest (probably, in this selection, a wasp) to the greatest (definitely, in…
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For the latest 5:4 mixtape, i’ve turned my attention to that most elusive of artistic statements, the untitled work. When i set out to assemble a shortlist of pieces in my library that had adopted the word ‘untitled’, it wasn’t immediately obvious what i’d find. Yet, with one or two…
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As today is International Women’s Day, for my March mixtape i’ve allowed myself to indulge in a celebration of fabulous music by women composers and musicians. Compared to most of my mixtapes, this was one of the more difficult to create, for two reasons. First, because the shortlist of music…
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!! As of today, 5:4 is ten years old, so first of all i want to say an enormous thank you to all of you who have read, commented, enjoyed, shared and supported this blog over the last decade, especially to my merry band of patrons. As this…
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* Please note this list has how been superseded by the one on the Best Albums of the Years page * So here they are, the best of the best of 2017. Your CD racks and audio libraries would be so much better off with these incredible gems nestling among…
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For the first twenty minutes of the concert given by the Polish Radio Choir in Huddersfield Town Hall yesterday, i was forming the view that, though what we’d heard seemed at odds with his description, Dai Fujikura had nonetheless composed not only two of his best ever works, but better than…
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Taking inspiration from the lunar events at the start of this week, the new 5:4 mixtape is devoted to music related to the moon. i’ve crammed it with a veritable shed-load of personal favourites, small and great, old and new. The mix encompasses a broad spectrum, from the kind of…