Category Archives: Anniversary

In appreciation: Martin Wheeler, aka Vector Lovers

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by Ben Hogwood

In the last few days we have heard the very sad news of the death of electronic musician Martin Wheeler at the age of 70. Perhaps best known under his alias of Vector Lovers, Martin was a prodigiously talented musician who made some of his very best albums for the Glasgow-based label Soma Records.

One of these, IPhonica, was completed in 2013 on an iPhone, using just a pair of Sennheiser HD-25 headphones and Blip Interactive’s first Nanostudio app. I was fortunate to review it for DMC World

I also had the pleasure of reviewing two of Wheeler’s very best albums under his Vector Lovers pseudonym. The first, Capsule For One, was released in 2005, and featured the coldly beautiful City Lights From A Train, an example of his ability to capture the weird feeling of detachment often felt in a busy city. Here are my thoughts for musicOMH on a rather special album

Next up, two years later, was Afterglow, where Wheeler successfully blended his descriptive sound as a hybrid, moving from instrumentals to vocals such as Crash Premonition, an unexpectedly emotive song with the author as vocalist. My review is here, with both key excerpts available to listen to below:

Capsule for One was re-released in 2022, with remixes by Wheeler himself. You can explore it at the Bandcamp link below:

Published post no.3,026 – Wednesday 23 September 2026

On this day – the birth of Gustav Holst, and forthcoming release of ‘Sita’

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by Ben Hogwood

On this day in 1874, composer Gustav Holst was born. Holst is of course widely celebrated for his dazzling and colourful orchestral suite The Planets, a favourite among many 20th century music collections (including my own!). However that piece – brilliant though it is – has overshadowed some of Holst’s radical compositions that combine Western and Eastern musical thinking, the latter shaped by his travels.

One of Holst’s landmark pieces, the opera Sita, has not even seen the light of day in recorded form…until now. For Sita is about to see its first release on the enterprising EM Records label, who take up the story in the following press release:

“It…almost beggars belief that Sita, Holst’s operatic masterpiece and the largest-scale work he ever composed, had not been published, recorded or even performed until 2024.

All that changed when a German opera company ⁠— ⁠the Saarländisches Staatstheater ⁠— ⁠undertook the mammoth task of transcribing and setting the manuscript and staging the work; and we at EM Records are absolutely delighted and proud to announce the World Première recording of this magnificent and captivating work, made in collaboration with the Staatstheater.

Sita took Holst seven years to compose, from 1899 to 1906, and is a substantial three-act opera based on the Hindu epic The Ramayana, telling the dramatic story of Sita’s abduction by the Demon King Ravana and the heroic efforts of Rama and his brother Lakshman to defeat the demon army and rescue her. While showing influences of Wagner and even, at times, Verdi and Mahler, it nevertheless has distinctively Holstian fingerprints, with tantalising foreshadowings of The Planets. It is a deeply moving and thrilling opera of immense beauty, poignancy and tenderness.

The new double-disc set from EM Records is issued with a separate 120-page book including full libretto, essays, composer profile and artist biographies, presented in both English and German.”

More details (and a review) will follow on Arcana in due course!

Published post no.3,023 – Monday 21 September 2026

On this day in 1910 – the premiere of Mahler’s Symphony no.8

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by Ben Hogwood. Photo of Mahler by Moritz Nähr, courtesy of Wikipedia

On this day in 1910, the premiere of Mahler’s Symphony no.8 took place. Arcana has two personal pieces about this symphony by John Earls – the first about wondering when he might complete his Mahler symphony cycle, coming out of COVID-19 – and the second when he finally did, a memorable day in 2022

There are a good number of performances of the symphony online, but Arcana has selected this big hitting performance under the direction of Marc Albrecht, live from Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw:

Published post no.3,315 – Saturday 12 September 2026

On this day – remembering 9/11

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by Ben Hogwood

I wanted to post a short memorial to the awful events of 11 September 2001.

I was working for a New York-based company at the time, whose offices were in Manhattan, and will never forget the shock experienced on that day. As music can so often say what words don’t, here is a piece for reflection, as I think of all those colleagues affected:

On this day in 1856 – the death of Robert Schumann

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by Ben Hogwood. Picture by Johann Anton Völlner, Hamburg, courtesy of Wikipedia

On this day, 170 years ago, the composer Robert Schumann died in Bonn at the age of just 46.

For a while it was fashionable to criticise him on account of his musical quality, and especially orchestration – and indeed Mahler re-orchestrated all four of his numbered symphonies. Yet time has shown him to have much greater substance, with Schumann’s influence on composers such as György Kurtág revealed more explicitly in recent years. One piece the Hungarian composer treasures in particular is the late Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tale Narrations) Op.132, for clarinet, viola and piano:

One of the composer’s greatest champions is cellist Steven Isserlis, who can be seen playing the glorious Adagio and Allegro in A flat major Op.70 with Connie Shih:

Published post no.2,962 – Wednesday 29 July 2026