Category Archives: On record

Switched On – The Heliocentrics: Infinity of Now (Madlib Invazion)

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reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

The Heliocentrics are musical chameleons in the best sense. The UK-based duo of Malcolm Catto and Jake Ferguson speak an international language, often flavouring their music with funk, deep jazz, psychedelia or hip hop – but never really settling for long enough to pin them down. Their refreshingly open and boundary-free approach to music has already led to highly rewarding collaborations with Mulatu Astatke, Lloyd Miller, Orlando Julius and Melvin Van Peebles, all completed since debut album Out There was released in 2007.

While there will no doubt be more working in tandem, Infinity Of Now is The Heliocentrics’ first album for three years, released on celebrated producer Madlib’s label.

What’s the music like?

In a word, brilliant. Infinity Of Now is The Heliocentrics going back to their first principles, with a richly rewarding melting pot of instrumental and vocal winners, bringing a good deal of funk into an already colourful mix. This is the sort of music the group can make instinctively but they do it so well that there could never be any accusations of musical laziness. Put simply, the pair have just the right instincts to make our heads nod, our feet move and our horizons widen a little.

To take examples, the descriptive Elephant Walk uses loping bass and braying saxophone to describe its subject, satisfying both casual listeners and those who like their funk with a bit more experimentation. There are parallels to ensemble jazz groups such as Sun Ra but also 1970s detective theme tunes, all stirred in to the stew.

The single Burning Wooden Ship is equally fine, a bright flame alight with a vivid rhythm track, while by contrast the bluesy Hanging By A Thread is led by cool organ and rasping saxophone. 99% Revolution is a great vocal track with which to start, establishing the album’s lively groove, while Light In The Dark has a lovely grainy breakbeat supporting dreamy vocals and a more exotic musical language. Its Eastern flavours could easily have rendered this as music from the 1970s yet it still sounds forward thinking.

Does it all work?

Yes. The only regret is that there are not more than eight tracks, such is the richness of Catto and Ferguson’s invention. What remains is highly concentrated and musically stimulating, and repeated listening to the album brings out more of its colour and ideas. The only regret is that the vocalists appear not to be mentioned anywhere.

Is it recommended?

Without question. The Heliocentrics have always been musical stimulators, and Infinity Of Now adds another link in that particular chain. It finds them on fine form, displaying equal parts funk, invention, experimentation and a dash of humour. More power to their funky elbows!

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Switched On – Emika: Klavirni Temna (Emika Records)

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reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Emika made her first volume of piano recordings available five years ago. The approach was straightforward, the aim of Klavirni to record instinctive and intimate thoughts on the piano and release them to a music-buying public, who greatly appreciated the headspace they provided. From the first collection, Dilo 7 remains Emika’s biggest track on Spotify, with more than 15 million streams.

Since then she has written a first symphony (Melanfonie) and added to a  flourishing output of electronic music. Yet the piano remains her most private form of expression, and five years on, she revisits it on record.

On Klavirni Temna we find an artist whose life has changed a great deal, with motherhood and relocation to a self-sustaining studio outside of Berlin just two of the biggest life changes. However she continues to find solace and inspiration from solo sessions at the keyboard.

What’s the music like?

Klavirni was released before peaceful piano playlists became a thing. With its sequel, the danger was that Emika would be making music that might be seen as derivative.

She cleverly sidesteps that possibility by delivering deeply felt thoughts on the piano that go through electronic studio trickery before reaching the listener, the purity of the sound effectively destroyed by extraneous glitches and pitch wobbles. In spite of this treatment they still reach the parts other solo piano records don’t, calming the mind with their direct musical language.

Once again Emika’s medium of communication is ‘Dilo’, the Czech word for ‘moment’, giving her the freedom to emulate fellow compatriots Dvořák, Janáček and Suk in writing sketches and character pieces for the piano.

There are passing similarities in figuration between Emika’s work and the shorter pieces of Erik Satie, the Preludes of Chopin, or the Metamorphosis works of Philip Glass, but ultimately her personality shines through. Most of the pieces are around three minutes, each acting as a concentrated musical postcard.

Dilo 21 begins at an easy walking pace but is deeply expressive, thanks in part to a vibrato applied to the piano sound. Its block chords have a gorgeous mottled sound, as though we were listening to someone playing the piano in the room next door.

This is a level of intimacy maintained throughout Klavirni Temna, where private thoughts are communicated directly to the listener. Dilo 22 flickers in the half-light like a resilient candle, finding greater brightness by shifting effortlessly into the major key halfway through. Dilo 23 is more propulsive, showing energy can still be found in this stripped back form of music.

On occasion the aural perspective shifts. Dilo 29 is airborne, with a touchingly sad melody of childlike simplicity. Dilo 26 shares that feeling of suspension in the sky, its higher arpeggios complementing an arching melody from the piano’s left hand. Most striking of all is Dilo 31, where the bottom literally falls out of the piano. As the piece progresses the pitch steadily drops, like a wind-up toy running out of power, until it sinks to the ground, helpless.

As the collection progresses the studio involvement intensifies. Penultimate piece Dilo 33 feels more physical but muffled too, the wall between listener and performer thicker than previously – a feeling reinforced by the flickering figures of Dilo 34, beautiful but otherworldly. These figures are eaten up, the destruction wrought by the studio now complete, leaving behind only static noise.

Does it all work?

Yes. It is a lot harder than you might think to write simple structures for piano that also carry emotional meaning, but Emika achieves that feat throughout Klavirni Temna. The electronic manipulations are both clever and sensitive, refracting the sound through improbable prisms but never distorting them to the point where it becomes illegible.
It helps to hear the physical process of playing the piano, too, the human elements brought to the fore.

Is it recommended?

Wholeheartedly. If you’re in need of time for contemplation, away from the relentless demands of technology, put this on. It really does calm and isolate the mind.

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Switched On – Three Rivers Project: Confluence (Lewis Recordings)

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reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Three Rivers Project is an intriguing collaboration between DJ Yoda and his regular production partner Mark Ross, who records with Roland Faber as Go Atoms. They are named as guests on five of the tracks on debut album Confluence, which as Yoda admits is unlike anything he has worked on before.

The trio describe Confluence as a ‘soundtrack to an imaginary movie, combining the best elements of made-for-VHS electronica, 80s synth/cold wave, against the clock electro house, and the influence of John Carpenter, Jean Michel Jarre and DJ Hell.’ The introductory paragraph on Bandcamp goes on to speak of the album as ‘a classic in future/retro sounds and the accessibility of strange new worlds’. All of which points very heavily indeed towards the influence of cult 1980s throwback hit Stranger Things, the Netflix series notable for its brilliant analogue soundtrack and attention to recent historical detail of electronic music.

What’s the music like?

If you know Yoda as the source of some original, witty and tuneful hip hop, the sound of Confluence will come as a surprise – in a good way.

There is no doubt that the music for Stranger Things has played a big part in the formation of the album, but thankfully Confluence is more than a derivative imitation. The three protagonists are too inventive for that.

As a result we get a richly descriptive album that flows well and is very descriptive, with several tracks of standout musical beauty. Dawn Eclipse provides a wide open sonic panorama from the start, beautifully expansive and more than a bit mysterious. The broad canvas segues into next number Confluence A – Water Leaves, where big reverberant drums cut to a watery backdrop.

The Stranger Things parallels become more apparent as the album progresses. Osmosis could be an offcut from Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygène, while Dark Neon – which also features Go Atoms – has all the hallmarks of an extraterrestrial 1980s soundtrack, with burbling analogue synths and the weird contours of a main theme. So too does Colony, which pumps more energy into its beats, and Conurbation, a faster and nicely aligned imitation of early techno.

Wolfram accentuates the oddness, the sound of a moaning creature blended into some of Yoda’s typical scratching sounds, while Out Of The Blue is a pure drone.

These different elements provide the essential light and shade of Confluence, which ends with a cavernous beat applied to the resolution of Confluence C – Waters Reach.

Does it all work?

Yes, largely. The concept behind Three Waters Project may be almost wholly based on music from the recent past, but it is well executed and structured. With Yoda already a man of many styles, it follows that with Go Atoms he should be able to blend types of writing which are new to them – and sure enough they do so skillfully.

Is it recommended?

Yes. Confluence sounds great on headphones, and is ironically at its most effective when the drones come out and the atmospheric tracks are in play. Yet even the moments where pastiche is most obvious are full of good, strange, instrumental things.

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On record: Elizabeth Watts, BBC Symphony Orchestra / Martyn Brabbins – Vaughan Williams: A Pastoral Symphony & Symphony no.4

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Elizabeth Watts (soprano)*, David Butt Philip (tenor)**, BBC Symphony Chorus & Orchestra / Martyn Brabbins

Vaughan Williams
A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony no.3)* (1921)
Symphony no.4 in F minor** (1931-4)
Saraband, ‘Helen’ (1913-4)

Hyperion CDA68280 [80’57”]
English text included
Producer Andrew Keener
Engineer Simon Eadon

Recorded 26 & 27 November (Symphonies), 2 December 2018 (Helen), Watford Colosseum, UK

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra continue their cycle of the symphonies by Vaughan Williams with the Third and Fourth, two ostensibly very different pieces whose equally equivocal reception at their premieres now seems testament to their expressive reach.

What’s the music like?

No longer the relative rarity it once was, A Pastoral Symphony remains the most elusive of this cycle – its arcadian rapture shot-through with imagery of war and transience.

Brabbins sets a well-nigh ideal tempo for the opening movement, its deceptively passive interplay of landscape and evocation informed by eddying agitation made more explicit in its successor – whose distanced solos for horn and (offstage) trumpet afford concrete recollections of VW’s wartime experience, made the more poignant by being sensed on the edge of consciousness. For all its greater physicality, the third movement is no conventional scherzo in its eliding between moods with an agility finely conveyed here through Brabbins’s judicious pacing – not least that eerily flitting coda which forms an unerring transition to the finale. Its remote outer sections enhanced by Elizabeth Watts‘s yearning vocalise, this unfolds as a necessary culmination; the composer bringing to the fore emotions earlier half-glimpsed on the way to a powerfully wrought climax, leaving in its wake a catharsis more potent for its intangibility.

From here to the seismic eruption of the Fourth Symphony is to set forth on a very different journey, one of absolute expression in combat with force of circumstance. Brabbins keeps a firm yet flexible grip on the initial Allegro, its violent opening balanced by the fugitive calm into which it withdraws. He then finds the right ‘walking’ tempo for the Andante, this sombre if never featureless landscape underpinned by angular harmonic progressions that twice break out in ominous outbursts prior to the flute’s lamenting soliloquy towards its close. Perhaps the Scherzo’s outer sections could have evinced greater sardonic humour, though the overbearing pomposity of its trio is as finely judged as is the pulsating transition into the finale. Brabbins duly brings out its martial swagger and if tension during the earlier stages could be even more acute, the ghostly throwback at its centre yields a wan rapture and how persuasively he draws the thematic elements together in the epilogo fugato for a stretto of mounting tension whose denouement is a return to the work’s fateful opening gesture and a four-letter clinching chord.

As makeweight, Saraband ‘Helen’ proves an enticing discovery. Left unfinished towards the outbreak of the First World War, this setting of lines from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus may be off-balance in its utilizing tenor and chorus for what surely needed to become a larger entity, though both David Butt Philip and the BBC Symphony Chorus acquit themselves ably, while Brabbins secures playing of real elegance and finesse in orchestral writing that inadvertently yields what emerged as the main theme of Serenade to Music almost a quarter-century later.

Does it all work?

Almost entirely. Those who have acquired the earlier releases in this series (A Sea Symphony and A London Symphony) will be aware of the qualities which Brabbins brings to VW, and so it proves here with what is among the finest recent accounts of the Pastoral. Others have evinced a more visceral response in the Fourth, but there is no lack of impact – allied to a methodical sense of purpose that pays dividends in those densely contrapuntal passages over which the composer laboured before ultimately getting them right.

Is it recommended?

Indeed. Sound has the sense of perspective but also immediacy necessary in this music, with Robert Matthew-Walker once again contributing a detailed and informative note. Hopefully the next instalment, featuring the Fifth (and Sixth?) Symphony, will not be long in coming.

For further information on this release, visit the Hyperion website, or the BBC Symphony Orchestra. You can also read Arcana’s interview with the conductor here

On record – Sinfonia of London / John Wilson – Escales: French Orchestral Works (Chandos)

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Escales – French Orchestral Works

Chabrier España (1883)
Duruflé Trois Danses (1932)
Saint-Saëns Le Rouet d’Omphale Op.31 (1871)
Debussy Prélude a l’apres-midi d’un faune (1891-94)
Ibert Escales (1922)
Massenet Meditation from Thaïs (1894)
Ravel Rapsodie espagnole (1907-08)

Adam Walker (Debussy), Andrew Haveron (Massenet), Sinfonia of London / John Wilson

Chandos CHAN 5252 [78’19”]

Producer Brian Pidgeon
Engineer Ralph Couzens

Recorded 6-7 September 2019 (Trois Danses nos.1 & 3), 16-18 January 2019 (other works), Church of St. Augustine, Kilburn, London

Written by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

The Sinfonia of London, an orchestra from the 20th century given a new lease of life by conductor John Wilson, makes its second release for Chandos.

In fact we could term it as a series of Sinfonia of London buses, for you wait two decades and then two come along at once! The orchestra’s renaissance began with a stunning account of Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp last year, but now they turn their attention to France, and an imaginatively chosen program celebrating the elusive but immediately recognisable French orchestral sound.

What’s the music like?

A complete pleasure. Although irresistibly French, the music in the collection does remind us of the close bond between France and Spain, thanks to classics of the repertoire from Chabrier and Ravel and a relative rarity from Ibert.

Chabrier‘s España begins the collection and it is an absolute delight, a feel good piece given even more of a lift in this brilliant account. Wilson’s instincts for the stage come to the fore immediately, the bouncy rhythms and cheeky asides proving irresistible when presented with this much colour and warmth.

At the other end Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole is no less characterful. The atmospheric Prélude à la nuit ghosts in from silence, Wilson delighting in the orchestral textures and Ravel’s masterly sense of line. The persuasive rhythms of the Feria are expertly judged, the silky strings giving way as the music surges forward with terrific momentum.

Between these two gateposts are works of colour and élan. It is so good to see the inclusion of relative rarities in Duruflé’s Trois Danses, one of only two completed orchestral works in his output, and Ibert’s underrated Escales (Ports of Call) which gives the collection its name. The Duruflé sparkles in Wilson’s hands, violins caressing the longer melodies of the Divertissement, first dance of the three. Much of the composer’s relatively small output is for organ, which he effectively uses as his orchestra, but a persuasive Danse lente and thrilling Tambourin give us further proof of his prowess with large forces, harnessing the influence of Dukas. The latter features a particularly enticing saxophone solo, the recording indulging the colour and scope of Duruflé’s writing.

The Ibert, meanwhile, is a treat. Just over a minute into Escales‘ first movement, Palermo, there is what can only be described as a murmuration of violins, the music fluttering upwards in a bold sweep. Meanwhile Wilson secures a terrific drive to the description of the third ‘port’, Valencia, which ends with a flourish.

Before Escales comes a fresh faced account of Debussy’s Prélude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, the piece that effectively changed the face of music on the eve of the 20th century. Wilson and his charges capture the sense of newness, but also the enchanting and harmonies, with seductive playing from flautist Adam Walker. By contrast the Méditation from Thaïs, Massenet’s most famous orchestral excerpt, is more conventional. It could have felt misplaced here in terms of mood and musical language, but orchestra leader Andrew Haveron invests it with plenty of affection and never overdoes the romantically inclined melodies.

The packed release also finds room for a symphonic poem by Saint-Saëns. Le Rouet d’Omphale (The Spinning Wheel of Omphale) is a relatively early work and a great example of the composer’s melodic flair and ability for musical programming in thrall to Liszt. Wilson has its measure fully, pacing the music’s build ideally in arguably the finest modern recording since Charles Dutoit’s classic account with the Philharmonia in 1980.

Does it all work?

Yes. This is a brilliantly played and really well-chosen program, suiting both the curious listener and the familiar Francophile. What comes through most of all is the sheer enthusiasm and flair of the players, galvanized by Wilson in accounts that are both instinctive and incredibly well prepared.

From the opening notes of España it is immediately clear how this collection is going to go, and with the changes in mood suitably well planned and ordered – save arguably the Massenet – it is a listening experience you will want to return to often.

Is it recommended?

Wholeheartedly. This is music making as it should be, celebrating great orchestral music packed full of good tunes, instrumental colour and the ability to paint vivid pictures of its subjects. Wilson and his charges should be congratulated for an achievement which will surely land them with a glut of awards in the next few months – and only heightens the anticipation for their third release on Chandos, later this month, when they will return to Korngold for the Violin Concerto and String Sextet. In the meantime, make the most of this wonderful set of French fancies!

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You can listen to clips from this disc and purchase a copy at the Chandos website here