Category Archives: On record

On Record – Shirley Collins: Archangel Hill (Domino)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

At the age of 87, one of Britain’s national musical treasures continues her 21st century renaissance. Folk music queen Shirley Collins lost the use of her voice to the condition of dysphonia for 37 years, haunted by the end of her marriage to Ashley Hutchings.

In the last eight years her recovery has been crowned by the release of two fine albums for the Domino label – Lodestar and Heart’s Ease – and renewed interest in her writing. She has literally rediscovered her voice – and Archangel Hill continues that convalescence as a love letter to her home county of Sussex.

What’s the music like?

This is folk music as it is meant to function – simple yet deeply moving, music that tells the story of a deep-rooted tradition. Collins is a reverent custodian of the music she has chosen here, and even the new compositions sound as if they have been around for a long time.

As a vocalist, she is in her best shape ever. Collins’ voice is like a beautifully aged tree, proud to show its age and revealing all the different layers of a life which, while difficult, can still be said to have been well-lived.

Along the way she pays tribute to her late sister Dolly, with a profound rendition of Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear and Lost In A Wood. Her storytelling is peerless, able to shade the pictures exquisitely as she moves from the outward looking The Captain With The Whiskers to the relative darkness of Oakham Poachers.

Along the way she has sterling support from her regular troupe of musical collaborators, who have the chance to come into their own for the sparky instrumentals June Apple and Swaggering Boney. Offering a contrast to these are some moments of deeply strange and enchanting music, such as those found in High And Away, a new song telling the story of Collins’ meeting with Arkansas singer Almeda Riddle.

Does it all work?

It does. Collins sings with great instinct and subtle power, bringing her message across with great clarity. The cover picture, a painting of the local landmark Archangel Hill – otherwise known as Caburn – is the icing on the cake.

Is it recommended?

Yes, wholeheartedly. Shirley Collins is an artist we should treasure, one who holds the key to some incredibly important British musical traditions. The glint she still has in her eye would suggest that even now she has more to give.

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You can listen to clips from Archangel Hill and explore purchase options on the Domino website

In appreciation: Kaija Saariaho

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Yesterday we learned the very sad news of the death of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho at the age of 70. Saariaho blossomed as a unique voice in 20th and 21st-century classical music, her music notable for its picturesque qualities and colourful, often exotic instrumentation.

Thankfully a good deal of her work has been recorded by the ever-enterprising Ondine Records, who put this playlist together in celebration of her 70th birthday earlier in the year:

Meanwhile you can watch Vista, one of Saariaho’s most striking recent orchestral works, in the performance below with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Susanna Mälkki

Switched On – Wata Igarashi – Agartha (Kompakt)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

Wata Igarashi makes his Kompakt debut with this multi-dimensional album, the latest chapter in a career that has seen him release for The Bunker NY, Delsin, Midgar and Time To Express, as well as his own WIP net label.

Here he is for a full-blown concept album release, around the mythical secret kingdom of Agartha. In his own words, “Named for the mythical secret kingdom, understood as a complex maze of underground tunnels, perhaps designed by Martians who colonised the Earth tens of thousands of years ago, it’s a similarly mystical, perhaps even cosmic trip – but this time, exploring an inner, deeply personal cosmos.”

On his journey, Igarashi creates scenes from an imaginary film based on the kingdom, teeming with musical incident.

What’s the music like?

Deeply mysterious from the start. Igarashi sets the mood with a thick cloud of ambience, that folds gradually over the music and sets a mood of disquiet through its use of microtones. This unsettled outlook continues when the beats arrive on Searching, but with Subterranean Life it feels as though the explorer has arrived at their destination and are beginning a journey of discovery.

The music becomes more fragmented and improvised, exploring more dimensions with metallic snippets of percussion, but then the mood changes with Ceremony Of The Dead, whose urgency increases as the melodic layers build. This track was originally written as part of a Sony 360 Reality Audio spatial sound concert, and it sounds great on headphones especially when a fresh vocal loop crosses over with Igarashi’s beats. The mood raises still further with Floating Against Time, a beatless number doffing its cap to Steve Reich, while at the same time showing Igarashi’s ability to cross-pollenate a number of different melodic lines with beautiful results. Abyss II runs with similar material, adding electronic sharpness.

Another scene change plunges us into the experimental climate of Burning, where musical activity and syncopation is rife, busy riffs trading off against each other. Agartha itself is the most descriptive scene, Igarashi painting pictures at a slower tempo even with the brush of a hi hat or the crescendo of a drone. This ushers in Darkness, but not the expected downward turn of mood – rather a cosmic interplay from swooping lines on the treble synth over an exquisite held chord. The mood settles towards the end, segueing nicely into Eternally, where the cosmic mood prevails but in much calmer waters.

Does it all work?

It does – though Agartha is definitely best experienced in one listen, so you get the twists, turns and mood changes of the whole journey.

Is it recommended?

It is. This is music of dense textures and intense colours, rewarding the listener who is prepared to revisit on several occasions. That way the secrets of Agartha can be fully unlocked.

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Switched On – The Black Dog: The Grey Album (Dust Science Recordings)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

For The Grey Album, The Black Dog have gone back to basics. Inspired by electronic bands such as Depeche Mode and The Human League in their early years, they went back to much older ways of working, with one keyboard per person and a strict limit imposed on the use of the computers.

These were the confines for an album that continues a rich stream of creativity for the Sheffield trio. Proud of their heritage, they are continuing to explore music and architecture simultaneously – and this latest opus taps into both art forms for its inspiration.

What’s the music like?

As its title implied, this is often an album of sombre colour – but there is also an impressive grandeur to the soundscapes The Black Dog conjure up.

That much is immediately evident from the stark outlines and imposing structure of Ghosts Of Decay, with steely synthesizer sounds reminiscent of the band’s city mates Cabaret Voltaire. As the beats arrive so too does an extra urgency, and the bumpy terrain of Let’s All Make Brutalism draws parallels with the trio’s love of 1980s architecture.

The faster tracks on this album are very impressive. Harder Times puts its pedal to the metal with an excellent, low slung groove, while the cleverly named (We Never Needed This) Fascist Groove Thang is excellent. Thee Difference Ov Girls drives forward with great purpose, as does the superb This Is Phil Talking and I Dare You. The last two are peppered with excellent riffs and generate great momentum – before the album subsides into the attractive coda, Borstal Communications sounding like the throb of steelpans.

Does it all work?

It does. The Black Dog are past masters at gauging the structure of an album and do so again here, moving effortlessly between mood and tempo and peaking with a couple of certified bangers.

Is it recommended?

Yes, enthusiastically – The Grey Album is a fine addition to The Black Dog discography, and confirmation that they are very much at the top of their game.

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On Record: The Tippett Quartet – Steve Elcock: Chamber Music Volume Two: String Quartets

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Steve Elcock
String Quartets – The Girl from Marseille, Op. 17 (2010); The Cage of Opprobrium, Op. 22 (2014); Night after Night, Op. 27 (2017); The Aftermath of Longing, Op. 36 (2021)

Tippett Quartet [John Mills & Jeremy Isaac (violins), Lydia Lowndes-Northcott (viola), Božidar Vukotić (cello)]

Toccata Classics TOCC0688 [80’31”]

Producer Michael Ponder Engineer Adaq Khan

Recorded 6-8 October 2022, Studio TQHQ, Ruislip, London

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Toccata Classics continues its survey of Steve Elcock (b1957) – arguably its most important ongoing project – with this collection of his four (to date) string quartets, performed by the enterprising Tippett Quartet and reaffirming his stature among composers of his generation.

What’s the music like?

Elcock is not the first composer to eschew numbering his quartets (Daniel Jones, for instance, differentiated his eight by date), with The Girl from Marseille preceded by at least four such works (one of these refashioned into his Eighth Symphony). Coming after weighty pieces as the Second and Third Symphonies (the latter on TOCC0400), these eight diverse variations in search of a theme – its identity in the title – find his music at its most playful and entertaining, though the fractious final variation pointedly invokes the brutal origins of its source material.

It was the location of this work’s first performance that provided ‘inspiration’ for The Cage of Opprobrium, namely a 16th-century metal pillory used to incarcerate women found walking unaccompanied after dark. Its five continuous sections graphically evoke the imagined victim through alternate slow and fast sections – building towards a violent culmination (its alluding to a famous quartet less striking than the way in which this music is transformed into Elcock’s own), before subsiding into a postlude where mourning is informed by emotional exhaustion.

Emerging in a relatively long gap between Elcock’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (TOCC0445 and TOCC0616), Night after Night takes its cue from the poem in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel. The first of its six continuous sections, entitled ‘Somniloquy’, evokes those unbidden thoughts of a chronic insomniac then returns between episodes of a more volatile nature. Its climax comes in the aggressive final ‘Incubus’ (later extended into an autonomous orchestral piece), which elides between sleep and wakefulness without hope of reconciliation.

Elcock’s most recent quartet, The Aftermath of Longing is likewise in six continuous sections but is very different in mood. It is also the most inherently abstract of these works, moving fitfully between varying degrees of emotional ambivalence to a penultimate episode whose releasing of the pent-up intensity results only in a desolate recollection of the initial music. Something of its character can be sensed in the composer’s subsequent symphonies, notably the Ninth that is his largest such work to date and may well prove to be his most impressive.

Does it all work?

Indeed, it does and not least because Elcock has put his formative years of playing the violin to profitable use with his idiomatic and resourceful writing for strings. For all their technical demands, nothing is left to chance in these quartets which are evidently building into a cycle scarcely less involving than that of the symphonies. Suffice to add the Tippett Quartet, which premiered Night after Night, proves an assured and persuasive exponent while the running order, of 2-1-4-3, makes for a programme well worth experiencing as a continuous sequence.

Is it recommended?

Very much so. Sound is vivid and detailed, if a little confined in more tumultuous passages, while the composer’s notes are informative without prejudicing the response of each listener. Hopefully these quartets will be taken up by other suitably equipped and inquiring ensembles.

Listen & Buy

For buying options, and to listen to clips from the album, visit the Toccata Classics website. Click on the names for more on composer Steve Elcock and the Tippett Quartet