Today brings another very welcome musical return, with Szun Waves announcing a new album, Earth Patterns, due on The Leaf Label on August 19. The band – producer Luke Abbott, saxophonist Jack Wyllie and drummer Laurence Pike – have today released a taster of what we can expect, and it is mightily impressive.
Both the title and language of New Universe suggest a return to basics, and the music – rooted in the key of C as much ‘universe’-themed music seems to be – has stark, creation-like beginnings. As it evolves the music grows in strength, reaching a full blooded apex before subsiding a little, its growth made all the more powerful when experienced with Dom Harwood’s video, with its Martian parallels.
Watch and enjoy – on this evidence the new album, with additional production from James Holden and David Pye, promises to be something special:
by Ben Hogwood. Picture of Gold Panda by Laura Lewis
Here is some news to cheer up a Tuesday – the very welcome return of Gold Panda.
Its title is deceptive, and makes perfect sense when you get a sense of what the producer, aka Derwin Schlecker, has been through. “I made this when my daughter was two years old and I felt knackered and I’d turned 41”, he says. “The samples just came together and sounded like “I’ve felt better…” and at the same time I was looking at my anti-depressants feeling tired and just thought ‘ha, that’s right!’”
Describing the track, Derwin says, “I mess with chopping up samples until I get an interesting loop so I never set out to write a track; I’m led by the samples and then go from there. Funnily enough, my life now is actually way better than it was 10 years ago and I’m a bit healthier and I probably actually do feel better in general (apart from when I had that brain haemorrhage last year).”
With everything now in perspective, it proves easy to appreciate the summer haziness and hypnotic grooves applied to the track – which you can enjoy right here!
The Unfolding is out now on City Slang, and comes highly recommended! You can listen and purchase on the Bandcamp link below:
Dive is the second album from Dutch producer and drummer Joris Feiertag for Sonar Kollektiv. It finds him concentrating more on synth-based grooves than the upbeat, vocal-led tracks of previous album Time To Recover.
What’s the music like?
Once again Feiertag hits the sweet spot between poolside listening and a more immersive experience. His instrumentals are beautifully layered, especially the heat soaked Cala, with its urgent beats and liquid keyboard lines, and then Descend, also employing the chopped up approach with some nicely twisted percussion.
Opener Living In Slow is a clever piece of work, speeding up the vocals but squashing some of the beats to make a glitchy, sultry groove that works really well. It also has some of the urgency that courses through a track like Nocturnality, a quicker groove with flitting melodic figures that really gets going. Deep house with an edge.
Feiertag also writes fluid techno in the Detroit style with How U Do It, which is generally good save for a spoken word vocal that will be too crude for some tastes.
Doesitallwork?
Yes. Feiertag’s approach has a good deal of light and shade, and is really well constructed. This is music that sounds excellent on big speakers and headphones.
Is it recommended?
It is – a fine sequel and a sign that on the whole Feiertag is growing as an artist.
Brahms Piano Concerto no.1 in D minor Op.13 (1854-8) Schubert Overture to Rosamunde D797 (1820) David Matthews Symphony no.10 Op.157 (2020-21) [World premiere]
Stephen Hough (piano, below), BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / Jac van Steen (above)
MediaCity UK, Salford Quays Friday 20 May 2022, 3pm
Written by Richard Whitehouse
A substantial programme was the order of the day for this afternoon’s studio concert from the BBC Philharmonic with Jac van Steen, given at the orchestra’s regular base in MediaCityUK and that featured a first performance anywhere for the Tenth Symphony by David Matthews.
Whereas his previous symphony was written for relatively modest dimensions, the Tenth marks a return to larger forces: triple woodwind (with doublings), four horns, three each of trumpets and trombones, tuba and four percussionists alongside timpani, celesta, piano, harp, and strings. It also finds Matthews (above) retackling the one-movement format that dominated his earlier symphonies, allied to a subtle process of developing variation such as ensures unity across a varied and eventful discourse. Not least when that massive opening chord sets out a long-range tonal and harmonic trajectory for this work overall, and to which a pensive (offstage) cor anglais solo then intensifying string fugato provide both continuation and contrast by anticipating the types of expression and motion as variously come to the fore.
Distinctive in themselves yet drawn into a tensile and cohesive entity, the constituent sections take in a wistful intermezzo then an agile scherzo on the way to a central culmination whose increasingly explosive energy likely marks a point of greatest engagement with that opening chord. The music duly heads into a slower episode of sustained emotional raptness, elements heard earlier gradually being recalled through an unforced while never discursive process of reprise towards a coda whose ending seems the more conclusive for its poised equivocation. An absorbing and often gripping exploration of symphonic tenets such as Matthews has long pursued, persuasively realized by the BBCPO and van Steen – whose support of the composer – having already recorded the Second, Sixth and Eighth Symphonies – hardly needs restating.
Before the interval, Stephen Hough (above) was soloist in Brahms’s First Piano Concerto – a piece he has given many times (not least a memorable reading at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the early 1990s, Andrew Davis also giving a seismic account of the Symphony by the late Hugh Wood). There was emotional breadth aplenty in the initial Maestoso, but also latest energy as came to the fore in a combative development and tempestuous coda. Nor was the symphonic aspect underplayed in what is still the most monumental opening movement of any concerto.
If the central Adagio lacked a degree of repose in its orchestral introduction, Hough’s take on its almost confessional solo passages brought the required inwardness, with the course of this movement towards its agitated peak or enfolding serenity at its close never in doubt. Nor was that of the closing rondo, especially a central episode whose string fugato was deftly rendered then the piano’s gentle response enticingly conveyed. After the cadenza, horns and woodwind emerged as if leaving a benediction prior to the triumph that coursed through those final bars.
Throughout this performance, van Steen was an alert and responsive accompanist – then put the BBC Philharmonic through its paces with an animated account of Schubert’s Rosamunde (a.k.a. Die Zauberharfe), which made for an engaging if unlikely entrée into the Matthews.
Last week saw the return of German super-trio Moderat, releasing their first album since a hiatus that began in 2017. More D4ta (a clever anagram) marked the creative renaissance of a group made up of Modeselektor (Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary) and Apparat (Sascha Ring)
It is without doubt the equal of the band’s previous work, with a wide variety of beats and styles, but we have selected a cut from the middle of the album suitable for a Saturday. Neon Rats is a journey right to the middle of the dancefloor. Enjoy!
To listen to the whole of More D4ta, click on the Bandcamp link below:
Arcana.fm 