Category Archives: News

New music – Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan: Industrial Growth (Castles in Space)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s press release.

Industrial Growth is the new long player by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. First emerging in 2020, Gordon Chapman-Fox‘s WRNTDP project explores the modernist utopian aesthetic of the UK’s post-war new town development programme through timeless retro-futurist electronic music. Encompassing the programme’s progressive optimism and the dystopian echoes of its failure, the project has since explored a compelling range of connected ideas and resonances across a prolific body of work.

Expanding on the ambient excursions of earlier material, Industrial Growth augments WRNTDP’s scintillating soundworld with profuse volumes of distortion and dissonance, across arguably the project’s darkest LP to date. With sleek, engrossing synthesis, Kraftwerkian odysseys, proto-kosmische and uncanny atmospheres, the album dramatically confronts the spectre of societal decline. A stark, unflinching evolution for the project, it retains the civic mystique of WRNTDP’s best work while adding an increasingly uncompromising spirit.

“My music has been getting heavier and heavier over the years”, says Chapman-Fox. “As my music often reflects my feelings on the outside world, this is very much a visceral response to our current times. There’s always been a darkness to my work, but this felt like the time to unleash it all”.

A captivating record filled with murk and menace, Industrial Growth hints at hidden undercurrents and insidious forces, as Chapman-Fox reveals: “The ‘growth’ of the title isn’t about economics, this is something far more organic, eating away at our society.”

With the brutal, glowering sturm und drang of album opener This Machine, there’s the immediate sense of a gauntlet being thrown down. The discordant dread, jackhammer rhythms and searing white noise of this opening make for a monumental statement of intent. The track segues beautifully into The Wire, a passage which evokes the cyclical reprises of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, with Chapman-Fox reiterating and reshaping abiding musical themes and ideas.

A pervasive gloom hangs across the tracks Warrington Bank Quay and Heavy Industry, yet there’s still a sparkling beauty to be found at the heart of this music; an irrefutable sense of motion, dynamics, the use of light and shade. Chapman-Fox describes ‘Heavy Industry’ as a “rare moment of light” in all this. Evoking John Carpenter composing an iconic soundtrack theme for a lost public information film, it’s a stirring, resplendent highlight.

The album progresses fearlessly, from the eerie machine music of ‘Parkside’ to the hypnotizing industrial kosmische of Post Industrial Policy – like Chris & Cosey collaborating with Klaus Schulze – and into the melancholic dark ambient mist of Astmoor. Closing with the sublime, noise-contorted havoc of Industrial Unrest, Chapman-Fox ends an immense, foreboding album with one of his most discordant tracks to date. It’s a thrilling climax to an intransigent, hard-hitting work that bravely and cathartically contends with the adversities and injustices of our contemporary moment.

The majority of the album is part of a suite that was commissioned by Roadburn Festival for their 2024 edition in Tilburg, Netherlands. The studio version has been in gestation since then, with tracks being further honed on a tour of the UK.

The album is complimented on Bandcamp by a bonus remix of the lead track This Machine by TVAM. “I’ve worked with Joe from TVAM in the past. We grew up in the same area, and he’s an absolute joy”, says Chapman-Fox.

Designed by Chapman-Fox, the artwork is complemented by Michael Cooke, whose illustrations have appeared on the WRNTDP albums Districts, Roads, Open Space and Your Community Hub. Michael grew up in Runcorn and much of the artwork is based on his first-hand experience of living in the town.

Published post no.3,025 – Tuesday 22 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

New music – Actress: Radical Frame (Ninja Tune)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the album’s Bandcamp page.

Darren Cunningham, the man behind Actress, has a compelling musical presence – one that makes his new album Radical Frame an essential listen. Returning to a more spiritual, deeper house music in the form of early Matthew Herbert, Cunningham has made an album of intriguing contrasts, short snippets juxtaposed with sprawling, piano-led house epics.

The text accompanying the album goes deeper: “The idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”- Fred Moten

When we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it.

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition.

Radical Frame arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on Live By You (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston).

Overchord, the centre of the album, is paired with its precursor Live By You. It arrives alongside a video by Anna van der Velde, featuring Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making, contained but not constrained.

Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.”

Make sure you immerse yourself in this one! Radical Frame is out now on Ninja Tune.

Published post no.3,021 – Saturday 19 September 2026

New music – Takeshi Nisimoto & Hiroshi Watanabe: Curving Time (Lo Recordings)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with the majority of text from the album’s Bandcamp page.

Curving Time is what happens when two musicians spend over a decade circling the same question from opposite directions, and finally sit down to answer it together.

Takeshi Nishimoto and Hiroshi Watanabe have individually spent more than twenty years exploring the emotional reach of instrumental music – one through guitar, sarod, and acoustic composition, the other through synthesizers and electronic production. This, their first collaborative release, unites these parallel journeys revealing a musical language where neither electronics nor acoustic instruments take center stage.

It is a sinuous, luminous album which is wholly its own, full of clarity and space where celestial shards illuminate and delight, lingering long after the last note dies away, with each player becoming equal voices in a deeply atmospheric conversation that feels both inevitable and entirely new.

The first track to be made available from the album, Empty Park, is an easy listen, the clarity of the guitar lines coming through against a background of soft reverb. The lines have a languid quality, the music improvised in its own sweet time.

Takeshi Nishimoto is a Japanese guitarist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator whose work spans contemporary classical, ambient, electronic, and cross-cultural music. Classically trained at the University of Southern California, he has developed a distinctive musical voice shaped by European classical traditions, North Indian classical music, jazz, and minimalist composition. He has collaborated with artists including John Tejada, Burnt Friedman, Robert Lippok, and Mike Shannon.

Hiroshi Watanabe is a Tokyo-born electronic music producer and DJ renowned for his deeply emotional, melodic techno and ambient soundscapes. After studying synthesizers at Berklee College of Music and navigating the New York underground, he returned to Japan to forge a distinct sonic identity, with releases under various aliases via Kompakt, Derrick May’s Transmat Records, and more recently InFiné.

Curving Time will be released on Friday 6 November on Lo Recordings.

Published post no.3,020 – Friday 18 September 2026

News – CBSO launch new season…including the 1,000th performance of the CBSO Chorus!

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the press release. Pictures (c) Andrew Fox and Hannah Blake-Feathers (bottom)

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s 2026-27 concert season launches today, with a family of incredible musicians, choirs and youth ensembles, making music that matters to the people of Birmingham, the West Midlands and beyond. The season’s opening concert marks a special milestone for the CBSO Chorus, which will celebrate its landmark 1,000th performance this evening.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) season launch follows the success of ‘CBSO in the City’– an ambitious and ground-breaking city-wide music festival, which saw Birmingham’s orchestra deliver over 20 free performances in five days across the city. The event, as with the new season, reaffirms the CBSO’s commitment to engage with the broadest possible audience – and the ensemble’s pride to be Birmingham’s orchestra on the local and international stage.

New season highlights include the CBSO’s return to Coventry Cathedral in November for Britten’s War Requiem, a full cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies, new commissions, and a wide‑ranging programme embracing film, popular music and cross‑genre collaborations.

CBSO: Beatle Mania. Conductor: Stuart Morley.

Fresh perspectives

The CBSO embraces new energy in this upcoming season with brand-new additions to the orchestra’s creative team. Ilan Volkov makes his debut as Principal Guest Conductor with Bruckner’s 7th Symphony, Messiaen’s Turangalila and a Shakespeare-inspired programme. The orchestra also welcomes its first Composer in Residence, GRAMMY-nominated composer Anna Clyne, who presents the world premiere of her new viola concerto ‘Resonant Forms’ with Lawrence Power, plus performance and recording projects.

New Collaborative Artists pianist Alice Sara Ott, saxophonist Jess Gillam and composer‑producer Rushil Ranjan, will also make their mark. The 2026-27 season will feature major concerto and chamber performances from Alice Sara Ott, solo concerts, presenting and education projects with Jess Gillam and a collaboration with Rushil Ranjan’s Orchestral Qawwali Project, a unique blend of Sufi poetry, Indian Classical dance and symphony orchestra.

Marking history

Kazuki Yamada (above with CBSO CEO Emma Stenning and Director of Artistic Planning Cath Arlidge) and the CBSO mark 200 years since Beethoven’s death in the 2026-27 season with a cycle of all nine of the German composer’s symphonies in 2027, as well as performances of his Violin Concerto and chamber music.

The orchestra also makes its return to Coventry Cathedral for Remembrance Day with a performance of Britten’s War Requiem which marks both the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death and 64 years since the CBSO gave the world premiere of the piece at the Cathedral in 1962. The 11 November performance will be followed by a European tour.

The upcoming season will also delight film fanatics with concerts celebrating 50 years of Star Wars and 75 Years of Bollywood as well as tributes to legendary film composers John Williams and Quincy Jones. 

Pop fans won’t be left behind either. On 27 February, the CBSO presents its tribute to guitar legends with music by Black Sabbath, Muse, Jimi Hendrix, Guns N Roses, Queen, David Bowie and more before turning truly Scandinavian with Symphonic Abba on 22 April.

Family favourites and festive fun

Across the season, the CBSO’s Family and Notelets concerts aim to spark a lifelong connection with music. For under‑6s, Notelets interactive performances give children a space to sing, dance and discover orchestral instruments for the very first time. For older children, the orchestra’s Halloween Spooktacular invites ghosts and ghouls aged 6 and over to don their spookiest costumes for a night of Halloween-themed music at Symphony Hall on 25 October.

Christmas at Symphony Hall starts on 5 December with three festive masterpieces by Benjamin Britten, presented in collaboration with choral charity Ex Cathedra, before Kazuki Yamada takes the podium to lead the orchestra in three interpretations of The Nutcracker. Christmas pop favourites from ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’ to ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ are on the menu for the CBSO Christmas Party on 17 December, then the spotlight turns on the orchestra’s vocal groups for Choral Christmas on 18 December. 

Emma Stenning, CBSO Chief Executive, comments: “When I look at this season, I see an orchestra that knows who and what it’s for. It’s not for a particular kind of audience, or a particular kind of music. It’s for Birmingham and for the Midlands, and it’s in demand across the world.  It’s for the die-hard orchestral fans, and for anyone who has never been and thinks it is not for them. It’s for the people who have been coming for decades and for the six-year-old who picks up a triangle at the end of a Notelets concert and cannot put it down.”

Kazuki Yamada, CBSO Music Director, comments: “With every season, the relationship between the orchestra and I deepens and strengthens. I am delighted to continue our Mahler cycle, as well as exploring all of Beethoven’s symphonies across this season. I am also looking forward to bringing the orchestra back to Coventry Cathedral for a landmark performance of Britten’s poignant and powerful War Requiem, as well as bringing joyous festive music to Symphony Hall this Christmas. We look forward to welcoming diverse audiences from Birmingham and beyond – everyone is welcome.”

The CBSO would also like to thank the many guest musicians, soloists and ensembles that will join them for the 2026–27 season. For full details, visit the CBSO website.

Published post no.3,018 – Wednesday 15 September 2026