Tomorrow sees the release of a highly anticipated new album from Peruvian DJ and producer Sofia Kourtesis. Arcana has been getting to know Madres, and can confirm the anticipation is definitely worthwhile – as you will read in a review soon. For now, here is one of the album’s standout tracks, the sultry Si Te Portas Bonito, a summer beauty. Listen and enjoy!
You can listen to clips from Madres, and explore purchase options, at Sofia’s Bandcamp page:
Published post no.1,990 – Thursday 26 October 2023
Here is a striking track from the team of Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) and his collaborator, saxophonist, producer and composer Jerzy Maczyński. The two are to release their Tune IN album on Yeyeh at the start of December under the banner Universal Harmonies & Frequencies, and if this single Multidimensional Transformation is anything to go by, it is going to be quite a melting pot of beats and ideas. The signs are good!
This is an album about change and the lasting effects it can have on people. Its title bears the name of a beloved hotel in Croatia visited by American harpist Mary Lattimore, and closing for renovation. She takes this as a stimulus for six pieces that explore the theme of change and how nothing can ever be the same again.
The musical material has its roots in improvisation but Lattimore honed the album over two years, both in a solo capacity and in the company of a host of collaborators. To that end she was joined by The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, Meg Baird, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, Ray Montgomery, Samara Lubelski and Walt McClements.
What’sthemusiclike?
Beautiful. It is worth studying some of the stories behind Lattimore’s work, for it reveals something of her sense of humour as well as a softer side to her thinking. And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me – featuring Baird and Clements – is about a moment where she got to meet Big Bird with her mum, and he gave her ‘an incredible hug with this scratchy yellow wings’. The resultant track has a similar effect!
Arrivederci, with Tolhurst, is an intensely calming experience – written by Lattimore when she was at a low ebb after being let go from a project. It is styled as a round, a repetitive chord sequence where the harpist adds more and more melodic substance. Blender In A Blender goes on a compelling journey with Montgomery, becoming gradually more distorted and separated from a traditional harp sound and harnessing considerable power.
Lattimore’s titles are always eye-openers – so to speak – and Music For Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow gets music to match in the form of wonky, wobbly lines that falter over a much steadier base. It is as though one hand is faltering, the other an immovable object. There is a different kind of pitch variation in Horses, Glossy On The Hill, the idea of bells jangling together made by the clashing of semitones and microtones on the harp, before the instrument swirls in a gorgeous torrent of sound.
Yesterday’s Parties is a highly effective coda, the vocals of Goswell and Lubelski swooning as the harp plays delicate lines.
Does it all work?
It does. Lattimore’s imagination with the harp is key, producing some extraordinary sounds from the instrument in her manipulations and with studio trickery without ever becoming gimmicky or taking things too far. The underlying power in the music is also most impressive, as the likes of Arrivederci illustrate.
Is it recommended?
Wholeheartedly. This is music of beauty and inner resolve, and a powerfully moving album – arguably Mary Lattimore’s best yet.
The Available Light is the second album from Josh Hill under his pseudonym The Hillside Project. The title represents a response by Hill to a difficult period in his life, the composer saying, “It was both surprising and incredibly reassuring to find the music I was creating was not morose or dark, but some of the happiest, dynamic, light-filled music I’ve ever made. I didn’t really have a choice about it.”
What he terms as ‘a musical jigsaw’ is scored for piano, synths, percussion and string quintet, with the expert guidance of arranger Sam J. Gale.
What’sthemusiclike?
The title is indeed an accurate reflection of the music within, the dappled textures rather beautifully arranged. Often the effect is akin to that of sitting in a large, airy room with the curtains billowing due to the breeze outside. While the room itself is quite dim, outside is ablaze with promise and bright sunshine, and that continued light seeps in to where the listener is.
Hill uses a ‘felted’ piano, which is to say he uses a felt on his upright piano. This ought to dampen the textures but in fact he plays with more power, bringing a distinctive brightness to the resultant sound. The strings act as an effective counterpoint, creating a glacial coolness with the vibraphone for Silvers and Shards. The piano itself generates a good deal of momentum, too, in rushes of positivity like Adamantine Lustre.
On occasion the influence of film composers such as Thomas Newman or groups such as Radiohead can be discerned, but Hill keeps his own distinctive forms of expression, balancing the strings and piano beautifully. The violin leads a particularly beautiful stream of consciousness on the title track, while Sparkler Dims enjoys an exploration of consonant discords that come when the piano is slightly out of tune.
The arrangements have a sensitively sourced beauty. Dizygotic II uses a rich texture of five cello parts, warming the cockles, while by contrast Dizygotic I has a touching violin solo. Skirmish draws the listener in through its soft intonations, the piano initially resembling a distant bell before the momentum gathers. Finally A Closing provides a moving postlude.
Does it all work?
It does indeed. Hill has that rare ability of being able to use what sounds like simple musical language to lasting effect, lifting his work well above the average. Closer examination reveals that there is a lot more going on than appears to be the case on surface level, with melodic figures dancing this way the that. The Available Light was written in the space of three days, which explains its fresh and instinctive feel.
Is it recommended?
Yes indeed. Josh Hill provides a musical glimpse of spring, even as the leaves fall in the storm-ridden northern hemisphere.
Mimi Doulton (soprano), Thando Mjandana (tenor), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Vimbayi Kaziboni
Kidane Primitive Blaze (2022) Birtwistle Today Too (2004) Birtwistle …when falling asleep (2018) Kendall Tuxedo: Between Carnival and Lent (2022) Kidane Cradle Song (2023) [BCMG Sound Investment commission: World premiere] Anderson Mitternachtslied (2020) [UK premiere] Anderson THUS (2023) [World premiere of final extended version]
Elgar Concert Hall, University of Birmingham Wednesday 18 October 2023
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
A varied programme greeted attendees at tonight’s concert from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (to be repeated in Bristol on October 29th), consisting largely of vocal pieces and directed with precise assurance by the highly regarded (justifiably so) Vimbayi Kaziboni.
Equally well regarded at present, Daniel Kidane (recently signed to Schott) was represented by two works – of which Primitive Blaze made for an effective curtain-raiser with its array of interlocking rhythmic patterns whose elaboration brought greater emphasis on a linear continuity in its wake. Both the electric guitar and tenor saxophone were prominent within this ensemble – the latter instrument emerging at the forefront in the final stages, when its plangent tones signified a closure as decisive formally as it sounded decidedly equivocal.
Next came settings by Harrison Birtwistle. To a text by the 18th-century Japanese poet Tanko (translated by Joel Hoffman), Today Too found tenor, flute and guitar evoking a twilit scene whose ominous elements are subsumed into an aura of shimmering, even sensuous stillness.
Rehearsal considerations necessitated exclusion of the David Harsent setting From Vanitas (hopefully not in Bristol) but not of …when falling asleep – Birtwistle’s last completed work, which intersperses lines by Rilke (translated by Jochen Voigt) with those by Swinburne in a sequence the more affecting for its understatement. Mimi Doulton brought a keen eloquence to the sung component, though Thando Mjandana seemed a little tentative with those spoken in parallel, and quite why the final lines of his contribution had been excluded was unclear.
Doulton returned for Between Carnival and Lent – one of Hannah Kendall’s ongoing Tuxedo series drawing on the art-print of that name by Jean-Michel Basquiat; abrupt juxtaposition of keening melisma with spoken polemic rather tending to cancel out each other as it proceeded.
Mjandana duly came into his own with the premiere of Cradle Song, Kidane’s setting of verse from the poem by Blake, though an evident desire to avoid the winsomeness associated with ‘innocence’ led to a highly rhetorical vocal line surely at odds with the semantics of this text.
The evening closed with two settings by Julian Anderson, both from his song-cycle In statu nascendi and drawing on a linguistic variety of verse in the context of an ensemble similar in line-up while not in usage to that of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Nietzsche (in the original German) was the basis for Mitternachtslied, familiar lines here exuding an anguished elation wholly different from that encountered in Mahler or Delius. Longfellow at his most visionary was the starting-point for THUS, building gradually from speculative beginnings towards a climactic section whose visceral impact felt less a setting than an intuitive riposte to its text. This premiere of the ‘final extended version’ drew a forceful though slightly self-conscious response from Doulton, in what seems the likely culmination of the song-cycle in question.
It certainly brought to a striking close a programme whose relative short measure was more than outweighed by its variety or its intrinsic interest. Hopefully those who hear it in Bristol will be equally responsive to its enticements as those who were present at Elgar Concert Hall.
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