modern composition
Track: Roedelius & Story show us the beauty of four hands working in empathy on the nuanced piano duet, ‘Ba’
PEOPLE can often bandy about terms such as legendary and scion with a carefree laziness; but, when it comes to German electronic and ambient music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius, now into his eighth decade with us, those epithets are both wholly apt and richly deserved. And with something around the 90-album mark in his catalogue since …
Track: Vanessa Wagner presents the first ever acoustic interpretation of the Enos’ ‘Celeste’, with an album following in March for InFiné
BRETON pianist Vanessa Wagner, who began her long romance with the piano aged 7 and who, earlier in her career, released albums tackling the works of Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Scriabine and Mozart, came to something of a crossroads in her musical development in 2016; that year she recorded a collaborative album with Leaf Records’ Mexican electronicist …
News: Erland Cooper releases his chorally collaborative ‘Egilsay’ EP: see a making-of film and find out more about his debuting silent movie score performance
MAGISTERIAL Orcadian composer Erland Cooper has released his second choral collaboration with the Shards ensemble, an EP focussing on one of Orkney’s northern islands, Egilsay, featuring four tracks of and about the island with a population of 14. Here at Backseat Mafia we featured a track, the moving, almost holy “Glimro”, at the beginning of …
News: Hannah Peel announces a new work, ‘The Unfolding’, with Paraorchestra and Charles Hazlewood, out in April; see a teaser
ARTIST extraordinaire Hannah Peel, fresh from her reimagining and recasting of Delia Derbyshire’s library music work, Fir Wave, and her folksier collaboration with Philippe Cohen Solal, Mike Lindsay and others, Outsider, has announced details of a major new work, The Unfolding, in collaboration with the award-winning, premier British conductor Charles Hazlewood and his Paraorchestra; expect, from the …
EP review: Shida Shahabi – ‘Alvaret (Original Soundtrack)’: Stockholm composer soundtracks a short film of domestic tragedy with drone warmth and acuity
WE LAST encountered that Stockholm-based talent Shida Shahabi in these pages just over a year ago, when she released the soundtrack EP for Jennifer Rainsford’s subtle sci-fi short Lake On Fire; and rather a lovely thing it proved, seeing Shida step away from the piano with which she recorded her 130701 debut Shifts in favour …
See: The amazing short film about child refugees accompanying Hania Rani & Dobrawa Czocher’s autumnal duet, ‘Malasana’
INNER SYMPHONIES is the album that lifelong friends composer, pianist and singer Hania Rani and composer and cellist Dobrawa Czocher released in October for classical music imprint without parallel Deutsche Grammophon. Recorded together in their native Poland, this collaboration follows 2015’s Biala Flaga, but is their first album of original work; Hania and Dobrawa are …
News: Roedelius and Tim Story will enter into a four-handed piano conversation for Erased Tapes in January; hear ‘Spirit Clock’
A GENUINE, gilt-edged musical legend, German electronic and ambient music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius, now into his eighth decade with us, is to enter into a two-way piano conversation with American composer and friend of 40 years Tim Story for Erased Tapes in January. The 11-track album, entitled 4 Hands, allows the pair to explore an …
News: Hugar announce a new album, ‘Rift’, for January; come explore the delicate, glacial pulsing of ‘volt’
HUGAR, the Icelandic modern compositional duo of childhood friends Bergur Þórisson and Pétur Jónsson, who we last examined in these pages in regard to their arthouse film soundtrack The Vasulka Effect (read about that, here), are set to return in the first, budding days of 2022 with an album entitled Rift: an album written with …
Album review: Poppy Ackroyd – ‘Pause’: solo piano pastoralism excellently captures a life lived this past year
WITH four albums proper, so to speak, under her belt – Escapement and Feathers from further back last decade, and a brace for what’s now One Little Independent in 2017, an acoustic mini-album, Sketches and the full-length Resolve – we really haven’t heard nearly enough from Poppy Ackroyd in recent times; but then what with …
News: Erland Cooper unveils a new collaborative EP with vocal ensemble Shards, ‘Egilsay’; hear a first track, the stunning ‘Glimro’
ORCADIAN genius Erland Cooper has today revealed that his next musical project will be a collaboration with the vocal ensemble Shards, on an EP again an evocation and a love letter to his home archipelago. It’s to be a digital release of four tracks entitled Egilsay, and follows thus in the conceptual footsteps of his …