MARY OCHER — THE NARRATIVE (FIRST MOVEMENT)

How so much power exists in one minute and thirty-seven seconds of music! 'The Narrative (First Movement)' by Berlin composer and musician Mary Ocher exists in a state of defiance, atonal chords and stuttering staccato rhythms battling against a tide of silence, with such force exerted on the keys in some places that my own fingertips started aching.

An essentially minimalist piece, we move quickly from a conventional arpeggio into a frenzy of figuration, a simple melody exploded into frenetic collages of rapid-fire playing, notes cut up in a succession of glitching fractions of themselves, shifting between soft moments of surrender and violent fury — occasionally the left hand erupts in storms of thundering bass notes leaving a thick smoke of sustain in their wake.

We have a narrative, as intimated by the title of the piece. But in trying to spell out that narrative, in telling her story, Ocher jettisons the regulated ascending notes in triple time like a deadweight and takes the wheel, cutting through the void in sturdy acrobatics, siphoning her craft not to tell us listeners but rather show us the de-profundis-clamavi depths.

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• 🔔 Mary Ocher's 'The Narrative (First Movement)' has also been visualised by artist Boris Eldagsen in video form. Using generative AI, the video depicts a psychically pained man merging with, and being destroyed by, a derelict piano that folds in on itself, falls apart and deposits ephemera among other things, kind of like a dream in which one's teeth fall out, in a series of monochrome vignettes. You can watch the video here.
• 🔔 This piece of music is taken from her upcoming album Weimar which is will be released on 13th March 2026. You may, if you choose, pre-order the vinyl or digital form of the album on Bandcamp.

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☟ Mary Ocher Internet Presence ☟
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「PREMIERE」COLIN RILEY, LOTTIE P, NIC PENDLEBURY & STEVE PRETTY — EBB AND FLOW

How do you capture the sea in sound? Maybe you'd record the sound of waves on a shoreline, or perhaps you'd focus on replicating the contrasting sides of the ocean, calm and catastrophic. Or, as is the case with 'Ebb and Flow', you create a piece of music that sounds instead like a grand adventure on the open seas.

"It's a huge blank canvas," says composer Colin Riley, "and we wanted to have lots of sounds to draw on."

Along with violist Nic Pendlebury, Riley is one half of Sonic Collaborations, the creative partnership behind 'Ebb and Flow' in its initial form. It began when the pair were tasked with creating a soundscape for visitors to the Cutty Sark (a late 19th-century tea clipper and once the fastest ship of its day).

"One of the pieces was crying out to be a song," says Riley, "and we really just followed our nose with it." For this they enlisted Lottie P (vocalist of London band Goat Girl).

The piece was 'Ebb and Flow'. It begins as if in ancipation of a voyage, pizzicato strings tense and poised with potential play a simple, shanty-aligned melody in kinetic syncopation with soft minimalist piano. Rising from this mist, slow vocals provide a textured sirensong crossed with a dawn chorus, aching for the land and sea simultaneously.

“Writing ‘sea music’ is a huge blank canvas and we wanted to have lots of sounds to draw on”

The percussion skitters, clattering like ropes fidgeting in the wind against sturdy a mast — in fact, these sounds are sampled rigging ropes, sampled and manipulated to form the sparse, echoing rhythm section of the song. Reflecting these rapid percussive elements, chopped vocals stutter throughout, providing an organic, human gabber that helps soften the harsh sounds of the ship.

The addition of a vocalist turned 'Ebb and Flow' into a song. But with the addition of trumpeter Steve Pretty, the song is elevated once again, and will be appearing in this form on Sonic Collaborations' upcoming album, Ocean Songs.

Pretty came aboard after performing back-to-back at sunrise with Nic Pendelbury at the UK's First Light Festival.

"Steve uses a lot of conch shell sounds treated with electronics in his recent music, and Nic uses electric viola with electronics, so there was a musical affinity," says Riley. "Plus, of course, Steve's work uses sounds that are literally from the ocean!"

As this piece of music continues onward, we hear the flugelhorn in all its splendour, adding not only a playful jazz lilt to proceedings but a sense of maritime charm. "The title of the track is so evocative," Pretty tells us. "When improvising flugel horn lines, I was very much working with this idea of overlapping, swelling, and the cyclical but unpredictable nature of the way that water - especially large bodies of water - moves."

Part epic voyage, part meditation on the nature of the sea itself, holding a mirror up to both ourselves and the briny deep, 'Ebb and Flow' showcases the power of collaborative songwriting — and how the life of a piece of music itself can evolve in fluid, oceanic ways.

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Ocean Songs · Ebb and Flow

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• 🔔 'Ebb and Flow' is out on 16th February, ahead of the upcoming album Ocean Songs, which is set for release on 24th March.
• 🔔 You can read more about the soundscape that Sonic Collaborations made for the Cutty Sark over here.

  "The idea for the soundscape is that it provides an alternative to the spoken audio guide," Riley says. "You listen in your headphones while walking around Cutty Sark. There’s no voiceover, just music and sounds of life at sea blended together, so it’s more meditative. We created music for different decks, each in three versions to match weather conditions from calm to near gale. Remixes if you like."

  Continuing, he says: "Participants in the immersive experience around the boat have an ever-shifting sonic experience, with the music changing automatically as they enter each deck, but they importantly also have some control. They can, in effect, make their own story by changing the weather conditions and hearing the music develop, growing or receding."

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☟ Sonic Collaborations Internet Presence ☟
bandcamp ⚘ instagram ⚘ official site ⚘

☟ Colin Riley Internet Presence ☟
official site ⚘ blog ⚘ instagram

☟ Lottie P Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ instagram (Goat Girl) ⚘ wikipedia (Goat Girl) ⚘ spotify ⚘

☟ Nic Pendlebury Internet Presence ☟
⚘ instagram ⚘

☟ Steve Pretty Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ official site ⚘ instagram

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SELKOLLA — SOLARIUM

'Solarium' by composer and pianist Selkolla (who is named after a being from a spooky chapter in Icelandic legend; real name Sara Jackson-Holman) does more than simply summon Erik Satie. But you'd be correct in hearing his ghost in this piece of music.

"I absolutely love Satie," Jackson-Holman tells us over email. "I learned Gymnopédie No. 1 when I was in third grade, and it was memorably one of my favorite pieces I learned growing up. I love the spaciousness of his pieces, and the way that they’re gently supportive rather than flashy and demanding."

Certainly there is Satie in 'Solarium', but there is also a sensitivity to pop melody that can only have come from a cocktail of influences on a modern musician; the four-note ascending melody in the mid-section, for example, is tinged with pre-chorus preamble, the stepping stones before tumbling into a Lana Del Rey-esque refrain. And then there are flourishes that feel more virtuosic, Chopin-flavoured, showcasing Jackson-Holman's classical background.

Written with "a memory of sun on water, the feeling of being suspended and weightless in a deep green lake", 'Solarium' serves as "a sonic portal" for the composer, taking her back to this time. It's achieved through this Satie-level intentional simplicity, and in its three-part, sonata-esque brevity.

Themes are introduced, reversed and inversed, transposed into the relative minor and recapitulated in the final third — a reflection of the constant cycle of memory and the fluid nature of our connection to recollections as we hark back, ache with yearning, and return to hazy remembrance. And all played with a seamlessly phrased singing tone — wizardry, an incantation for that "sonic portal".

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• 🔔 The disarmingly simple 'Solarium' is Selkolla's first foray into the classical world. It is currently available to stream on Spotify.

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☟ Selkolla Internet Presence ☟
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RAYONS — A FRAGMENT OF SUMMER

⌾ LISTEN TO A FRAGMENT OF SUMMER BY RAYON ⌾

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Images of summer float by to the drifts of piano in 'A Fragment of Summer'. A cicada screams in the humid green park. Bright blurs of dappled sun wave on tree-shaded grass like living islands. A collection of clouds cruise in a pale blue sky. Cricket and frisbee, sunset drives, salt-washed skin and sandy feet, mopping sweat off your brow on a melting pavement beneath tall gleaming buildings. While the song is a fragment of summer, it evokes many fragments of summer, like a beam of light shot through a prism, dazzling with an iridesence of vignettes and beaming photos.

This is the quiet power of Rayons, aka Masako Nakai, whose playing feels like waves, rhythmic and organic. Nakai weaves in a melody like a tapestry pattern, a motif following a swing beat like the rhythm of a train, a cantering horse, an active hearbeat. Washes of emotion range throughout, encapsulating the contentment, sadness and promise of summer. In Japan, this season comes and goes in a whirl of mind-altering heat, merging the human world and something altogether more earthly, deeply entrenched in the buzz of insects, the burning green of leaves, the hot grey heavy skies.

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• 🔔 This slice of new music is the second in Rayons' digital single series, following on from her previous release 'Luminescence'. Stream and/or download it courtesy of her label home, Flau.

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☟ Rayons Internet Presence ☟
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FÁBIO CARAMURU – CIGARRA

The releases of Tokyo-based flau records span the distance from Japanese music like the constructivist electronica of CRYSTAL and the constant dreamworlds of cuushe, to the music of artists from all over the world, like Taiwanese cello-guitar-violin ensemble Cicada, with many genres represented in between—and never do they disappoint. It's ever the same with a beautiful new piece called 'Cigarra'.

A mix of natural found-sounds and fluid waxing-and-waning piano-playing, 'Cigarra' is the work of Brazilian pianist and composer Fábio Caramuru. Taken from an upcoming collection of pieces in which Caramuru "speaks" to the fauna of his home country, this particular track is a conversation with the ostensibly whining and screeching of cigarra – meaning cicada in Portuguese. Its violent buzzing, though, feels like a lament here, the piano reflecting brightly and empathising with grave and tumbling tones the constant call of this long-living insect.

Like the the cicada, the piano too seems to be calling out, mimicking its song with a rapid refrain, soaring into flighty introspection at times, and falling to its refrain again by the coda, repeating endlessly with a certain sadness alongside the cicada, into the air, where the music goes to whose ears that will hear it.

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• That collection of pieces is an album called EcoMúsica - conversas de um piano com a fauna brasileira - ("conversations between a piano and the fauna of Brazil") and it will be out on flau on 7th September 2016. Alongside the album opener 'Cigarra', other tracks/animals included are 'Uirapuru' (musician wren), 'Anu-branco' (guira cuckoo), and 'Tuim' (a type of forpus parrot). And you may pre-order it from flau here if you like the sound of that.

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☟ Fábio Caramuru's Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • official site • Wikipedia

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