METROPOLIS ENSEMBLE, ERIK HALL & SANDBOX PERCUSSION — CANTO OSTINATO SECTIONS 74-87

In 2023 Erik Hall released his fresh take of Canto Ostinato by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt. The 1976 work "voor toetsinstrumenten" (keyboard instruments) took on Hall's now characteristic aesthetic, with the softness of felted piano and robust electric piano creating a sense of intimacy, like a miniature symphony played within the feather-lined court of a pillow fort.

Three years later, Hall, along with Andrew Cyr of the Metropolis Ensemble and members of Sandbox Percussion, have announced the release of a collaborative recording of Canto Ostinato.

The new interpretation sees the flavour of ten Holt's composition much altered — and the first offering from the release, 'Sections 74-87', gives cause for anticipation. Taking up the reins of freedom offered by the composition, we see mallet instruments of Sandbox Percussion give a muscular yet chiming backdrop to the piece, while an octet of woodwinds (led by saxophonist and composer David Leon and eighteen strings, headed up by violinist Kristin Lee, give the piece a new, soaring direction. Hall's grand piano ties the piece together, providing a link to the toetsinstrumenten for which it was first intended.

Arriving in its entirety 3rd April, Canto Ostinato has been transformed, morphing – via some of the foremost talents in contemporary classical music – from a monumental but minimalist chamber music journey into a multifaceted symphonic epic.

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• 🔔 Canto Ostinato by Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall & Sandbox Percussion releases 3rd April on the Austin, Texas-based label Western Vinyl. You may pre-order it in vinyl or compact disc form (or indeed digitally) via Bandcamp.

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LOUISE SHRØDER — UNG KVINDE

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The repeating rhythmic sway of the piano in 'Ung Kvinde' (Danish for "young woman") is one thing, but after a few turns of this arpeggio comes one crashing chord, ushering us into the world of Louise Shrøder. Charged with this swaying motif throughout, like cyclical thoughts unravelling, the to-and-fro of daily tasks, morning feelings, nightly reflections, 'Ung Kvinde' contrastingly flutters with a sense of freedom. But freedom in itself, its achievement and maintainence, is a flighty burden.

Written by the Danish composer to reflect "the development from a young girl to a young woman", the song feels close, intimate, with samples and ambient fragments making up the soundscape alongside the strains of cello, which ebb and flow like waves of vague memory. By the song's close, all that's left are picked pizzicato strings, playfully extolling the lightness of life. Joyous but anchored in reality, 'Ung Kvinde' is a song that soars up to see how far you've come since yesterday.

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• 🔔 'Ung Kvinde' is part of Louise Shrøder's Flyv EP (her second), set for release in the near future via Copenhagen-based neoclassical record label, ExoPAC.

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OLIVIA BELLI — VALADIER

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⌾ LISTEN TO VALADIER BY OLIVIA BELLI ⌾

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Speaking about her new track 'Valadier', composer and pianist Olivia Belli states that she was "inspired by the homonymous temple in Genga: a place of pilgrimage where many seek silence, introspection and spiritual growth." That's the town Genga, in Marche, Italy, not the Pokemon Gengar. That said, it seems there's a spiritual, ghost-adjacent energy to Genga: "It is the place where I go to train myself to see what is real but invisible," Belli adds.

Hailing from Mantova, aka Mantua, home of ancient Roman poet Virgil (if you know, you know, right?), Belli has moved from the ambient intricacies of her earlier releases (2018's Other Lines EP, for example). The Belli of today looks back, waving, atop her most recent masterful work. It arrives accompanied by a video of Belli herself wandering the Sanctuary of Santa Maria Infra Saxa, hidden in a karst cave system since 1029 (the octagonal temple, crafted from travertine, was finished in 1827).

In 'Valadier' her piano brims with kinetic potential, as if the galloping flurry of notes could send it to the skies at any moment. Rhythm and melody intertwine throuhgout, the one being the other and vice versa, allowing for this sense of movement in the mind, a wondering at history and primordial rocks and the centuries of people who have come before. Warm yet razor sharp, with strings providing additional colour and texture, 'Valadier' is a dynamic and powerful illustration of introspection.

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• 🔔 'Valadier' is the first single taken from Olivia Belli's forthcoming album, Intermundia, scheduled for release 23rd February, 2024, via XXIM Records.
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KOKI NAKANO — MUE

⌾ LISTEN TO MUE BY KOKI NAKANO ⌾

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Taking its name from the French for metamorphosis or moulting, 'Mue' by Paris-based, Fukuoka-born pianist and composer Koki Nakano feels transformational. Compared to 'Port de Bras', the previous single released for his upcoming album Oceanic Feeling, 'Mue' is much more intimate, less expansive. Nakano's piano playing is light but intense, spelling out a heavy, fluttering ostinato — like a dramatic version of the daytime riding theme from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The track canters along until its final third, when a skirl of electronics needles in from the side, flailing fiercely atop the piano as if the air itself had been set alight. The composer certainly has a knack for combining his classical background with experimental elements to create chimeric sounds like this one, an effortless overlay of synthetic on organic.

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• 🔔 'Mue' is taken from Oceanic Feeling, out 13th May via No Format! You can pre-order it on Koki Nakano's Bandcamp.
• 🔔 There's also a video for 'Mue'. Filmed at the Paris Hôtel de Ville, it features the combined expertise of choreographers, Nicolas Huchard, Nick Coutsier, and Christian Yav.

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[PREMIERE] MARCUS HERNE — FORMS

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"I have always been fascinated by evolution," says UK-based composer Marcus Herne, and it certainly shows. 'Forms' is a track that begins as practically nothing — whispering wind with glimmers of sound like dappled light — and evolves into something momentous.

What starts as ambient haze, this fragile, pastoral scene with shimmering synthetic birdsong (almost) gradually grows into something more complex and nuanced. A twinkle of piano here, a croon of cello there; analogue synths tumble in from the distance, falling like angular rain, a hail of colorful, textured static. Finally 'Forms' gallops into life.

It's an apt title, as each formless element entering into earshot is sculpted into something recognisable — that rainy synth, for example, rolls into a galloping frenzy of melody. It also refers to the interplay of organic and artificial sounds, something that Herne is eager to blur the lines between: "My sound lives somewhere in the expanded middle," he says.

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• 🔔 'Forms' is taken from Marcus Herne's Forms EP, which is out today. Listen to it over on Spotify.

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WATARU SATO — FADING SPACES

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Taking cues from Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds — and studying under Lubomyr Melnyk — ‘Fading Spaces’ by pianist Wataru Sato is inextricably gentle. It begins with meandering touches of the keys, the spaces between poised like unformed thoughts, before a voidsome chasm opens up into the heroic ostinato at the heart of ‘Fading Spaces’.

This spiralling melody is the form to the track’s introductory formlessness, and is marvellous in its ambivalence — it reaches to optimism, but remains a hair’s breadth from it, almost descends to despair, but lifts off before it falters. There are options here, different pathways as if nothing is finite.

With an exploratory volta in the middle that sees bright variations tumble out from Sato’s fingers, a fervent flash of possibility, the piece purposefully, heavily returns to where it began, a vista of decisions ahead.

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• 🔔 ‘Fading Spaces’ is taken from Sato’s Spaces EP, out now on fledging label 1magine (part of the Disk Union family). You may purchase and/or stream it from a variety of places.

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THEO ALEXANDER — BRIGHT-EYED HUNGER

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Wild and skittering, the melodies weaving into each other in London composer Theo Alexander’s ‘Bright-eyed Hunger’ at first appear nursery rhyme in nature. They skip and dance in a sort of random uniformity, naturalistic but synthetic. Piano glides in, cool and glassy, counteracting the frenzied woodwinds; gradually this set of jovial intricacies becomes a cohesive whole.

Beneath it all, beneath the dappled light on leaves and insects tumbling in the air, an unknown something looms large — the “hunger” to the otherwise “bright-eyed” sentiment of the song — organic and growling, a carnivorous spirit shuddering inside the body of a double bass (played by George Cremaschi). As light and playful as Alexander makes this track seem on the surface, underneath it is positively snarling.

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• 🔔 'Bright-eyed Hunger' is the first track taken from Theo Alexander's upcoming Sunbathing Through A Glass Screen, out 21st May on Canadian label Arts & Crafts. You can pre-order it on limited edition 12" vinyl on Bandcamp now.

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KUMI TAKAHARA — TIDE

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⌾ LISTEN TO TIDE BY KUMI TAKAHARA ⌾

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In ‘Tide’ Tokyo violinist and composer Kumi Takahara creates a thick soundtrack to a marine sunset. Violins glisten in playful counterpoint, piling in layers that crescendo in a tumult of colour, orchestral and expansive: clouds sprayed across the sky in kinetic whisps, tinted by evening light.

Columns of sound rumble below, a sombre and subterranean like something unthought of weighing on your mind; on the surface, one violin soars into the air, and later another. And as well as the strings, Takahara's voice lilts throughout adding yet more humanity to a piece of music already powerfully human.

Featuring production from aus. (Yasuhiko Fukuzono, founder of flau records), ‘Tide’ is held in place and time with the sound of waves, natural bookends, starting tranquil and ending in a shiver of dusk and leftover emotions — shreds of gleaming unknown sound, the afterglow of the giddy fugue that shines brilliantly at the centre of this composite epic of a song.

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• 🔔 'Tide' is taken from Kumi Takahara's debut album See-Through, recorded between 2016 and 2020 in the bathroom of Takahara's Tokyo apartment. released 24th February on Tokyo-based label flau records. It's available in CD format and/or digitally via Bandcamp.

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KLINGER — HORST

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Taken from Klinger’s Persona project, which sees the composer creating a series of musical portraits, this one looks at Horst — 76-year-old proprietor of Crazy Horst, a once lively pub in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district. Used to closing up shop for just one day a year prior to 2020, the pandemic has hit hard.

Accordingly Klinger’s piano paints a touching vignette, the music weighed down in the middle by heavy notes of slow, stifling despair. But there is a sense of continuity, which lies in a certain bounce to the notes, an almost galloping, heartbeat-esque rhythm, as the piece ends with hope hanging like a haze in the air.

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• 🔔 Check out Klinger’s Persona project here, and watch the video featuring ‘Horst’ himself here.

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FRANKIE REYES — ALMA DE LA PALMA

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Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker — perhaps beter known for his label Gifted & Blessed and making house music as GB — has a string of musicmaking aliases. One of these is Frankie Reyes, the name behind the wonderful 'Alma De La Palma' — a fuzzed-out dappling of emotive notes 'n' chords for a sort of supercharged classical-minimalist lounge music.

With its soft and muted textures, the bold stretches of delay further heightening its languorous glimmering feel, the scattering of sweeping notes, 'Alma De La Palma' feels as though you're looking down and something through water. The rippling surface skews the scene; a hint of warped beachside heat, too hot to move, sparkles around the edges.

The notes themselves, a distant disoriented tumble of longing, pull classical music through the portal of time, leaving the wooden depth and angularity of the piano behind and exchanging it for the magic of circuitry. And in the minor chords and descending notes of Frankie Reyes piece, there is something reminiscent of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 aka 'Moonlight Sonata'; a sense of being tethered to something vital that, once close at hand, has moved on and away.

Here we have a sort of contemporary vision of the Beethoven standard. It was called "a nocturnal scene, in which a mournful ghostly voice sounds from the distance" by the composer's student (and composer in his own right) Carl Czerny. While Frankie Reyes' piece may not be "mournful", there is a lamenting feel that shapes it as similar in tone.

Less highly regarded, but no less atmospheric, the Castle Theme from 1990 SNES game Super Mario World — complete with the soft somersaulting of synthesised keys — is something else that 'Alma De La Palma' is aesthetically akin to. The Frankie Reyes track bubbles with this same, now retro, subdued and synthetic sound, and twinned with its classical, if not romantic flair, this is a song that captivates not just with its intoxicated effects, but also with its heartfelt composition.

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• 🔔 'Alma De La Palma' is taken from Frankie Reyes' forthcoming album Originalitos, set for release via Stones Throw Records on 23rd October. You can pre-order the album and listen to 'Alma De La Palma' over and over again on Reyes' Bandcamp.

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LIGETI QUARTET — S'ISCRAVAMENTU (COMPOSED BY CHRISTIAN MASON)

⌾ LISTEN TO LIGETI QUARTET, S'ISCRAVAMENTU (COMPOSED BY CHRISTIAN MASON) ⌾

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The gales of sound in 'S'iscravamentu', conjured up by UK's very own Ligeti Quartet, are deep glowing squalls that dive into the dramatic scenery of Sardinia, its jutting outcrops, jagged coastline, carpets of macchia, ultramarine seas.

Concocted by English composer Christian Mason, the piece recreates the sea shanty-esque registers of Sardinia's own tenores — polyphonic folk singing that, uniquely for Europe, is actually a form of overtone (throat) singing. As such, Ligeti Quartet's treatment of Mason's reworking of this UNESCO-recognised folk music is necessarily rich and variegated.

Thick harmonies hang heavy in the air, and the scratch and staccato of the strings is resolutely tangible, but quieter moments see the instruments become thin, veils of sound lost in their own rapture of unnerving silent howls. The physicality of the instruments — their wood, the strings, the hands that play them — is such that you could imagine literally picking up and handling this music. It's that spirit of solidity that really reflects the resonant, guttural songs at the root of this composition.

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• 🔔 'S'Iscravamentu' is taken from Ligeti Quartet's debut album Songbooks, Vol. 1, marking their 10th year of playing as a quartet. It contains two vocal-inspired projects — one following the Sardinian cantu a tenòre tradition, the other Tuvan throat singing — composed for strings by Christian Mason. It also features one song originally by Nunavut singer and composer, Tanya Tagaq.

  Scheduled for release on 9th October via UK label nonclassical, you can pre-order Songbooks, Vol. 1 from Bandcamp now, or peruse the album tracklist below at your leisure.

  Ligeti Quartet — Songbooks, Vol. 1 tracklist
  1. Sai Ma (Racing Horses)
  Tuvan Songbook
  2. Dyngylday (Good-for-nothing)
  3. Eki Attar (The Best Steeds)
  4. Kuda Yry (Wedding Song)
  5. Ezir-Kara (‘Black Eagle’)
  Sardinian Songbook
  6. S'iscravamentu (Deposition of Christ)
  7. Ballate a Ballu Tundu (Dance a Circle Dance)
  8. Satiras (Satire)
  9. Muttos (Motets)
  10. Sivunittinni (The Future Ones) by Tanya Tagaq

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AKB — SAKTMODET

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Though it's possible to be fooled into thinking that AKB is a thinly veiled tribute to J-pop megagroup AKB48, it simply spells out the initials of Swedish musicmaker Anna-Karin Berglund. Names aside, her track 'Saktmodet' (loosely translating to "gentleness") is a gloriously organic, living-and-breathing piece of ambient music.

The song is a crooning collection of woodwinds, and the crash of resonant, lightly phasing piano (reminscent, in texture at least, of 'Canticle' by English band These New Puritans). It came to life while working on her 2020 album. Marianergraven, which was more focused on "mechanically profound sounds and sound worlds."

"This song," Berglund tells yes/no via email, "was a respite to work more with traditional instruments like piano and clarinet."

'Saktmodet' is an illustration of hot and cold: sharp, icy sounds ping out, and there's the accidental rustling and whispering of breath, all cushioned by rich, warm sounds of the clarinet and the fading, post-percussive glow of piano chords. More than temperatures, however, more than indoors and outdoors, it's the vital, close-at-hand feeling of the instruments that give this slice of ambience a real sense of human effort and emotion.

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• 🔔 'Saktmodet' arrives via Swedish label Lamour Records, originally featured as a bonus 7" bundled in with AKB's limited edition Marianergraven. You can listen to the track on Spotify, if you like.
• 🔔 If you want to hear more from AKB, it's possible to stream and download Marianergraven from Lamour Records' Bandcamp.

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🐣 EMMIT FENN — FEATHERS

The cyclical nature of this, the mid-level arpeggio of the left hand, the gentle piano paints a picture of cool melancholy, chilly and lonely, the melody expressing a certain amount of distress in its ascending refrain, its title 'Feathers' suggesting a fragility that is certainly effused from this brief piece of music, allusions to hesitation and hang-ups in its subtle slices of tempo rubato, all of it light, never heavy or strong, a floating atmosphere like feathers fallen from a bird now flitting in the air, the broken beauty of that vague loss visible in the song's delicate nature.

Created by California-located pianist and composer Emmit Fenn, 'Feathers' is very filmic. It conjures images of stark angular buildings on a night sky, no nature but cold clouds and the birds who fly under them from rooftop to rooftop, dropping feathers like snow across the anonymous cityscape. There is the feeling of being alone here, of looking out across a sea of souls and being distant to every single one of them, the baroque changes to minor chords and its fluttering trills reflecting a sense of teetering despair, calm and soft but inwardly harbouring a streaming cycle of doubts and worries.

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• 🔔 Recently Emmit Fenn released his Prologue EP via TH3RD BRAIN. You can listen to it on SoundCloud if you want.

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🐣 AUGUST ROSENBAUM — NEBULA

The sense of space, the resounding sense of vast expanse, the music here frames a snapshot of infinity, the conjuration of something gargantuan. Before its delicate guitars and dustyroom ancient pianos – vital human instruments, organic and tactile, the strings of the guitar pealing rounded and faint glimmer in the gloom of space, the gentle pluckings made intense in the hold-your-breath quiet of the track – before all that, August Rosenbaum crafts orchestral awakening sets the scene: majesty, and awe in the scale and glow of that majesty. The piano that follows gloops drily with melancholy, a lament under the eaves of wonder and fear, clanging with reverb that seems to call out, cello aches wooden and earthly, bass thumps subtle like heartbeat in your ears.

And a plaintive song, an analogue melody pings out with microdelay, plinking and blinking in tempo rubato, an alien sense at odds with the anthropoid regularity of sound blanketing the canvas, its dendro-life physical and easily manifested beneath this new noise, this unidentifiable sound, non-physical, abstract, void-born. It plays out a future romanza amidst the strewn neoclassicism vibrating through space. The music dissolves and rematerialises a whole new beast, shining beacons javelin through an ominous arpeggio, a brass growl, an ascension of strings, an introduction of the proverbial bigger picture. 'Nebula' paints loneliness, a sense of being small, an intergalactic search for more-than-this—and it paints discovery, the response to our calls, the giant unknowable to our minute but powerful and personal curiosity.

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• 🔔 'Nebula' is the first track to demonstrate August Rosenbaum's upcoming album Vista, due for release via Copenhagen record label Tambourhinoceros on 24th November. You can download the track from Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The unnerving video for the track was directed by Andreas Emenius and made in collaboration with Prxjects, "a culture laboratory initiated by Mercedes-Benz."

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