One more look in the rear-view mirror before 2021 disappears completely… After the multi-course blowout of choosing 25 recordings of the year, this is more of a digestif, if you will. A few events and developments that gave me cause for celebration: one each for pop, classical, TV, media and film. Bon ‘Voyage’: the return…
Category: contemporary
Spirit levels: ‘Unsettling Landscapes’, St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington
How appropriate that on this occasion, during the walks between the car and St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, the chill in the coastal air was icy enough to penetrate my fleece, and the wind strong enough to bend the bare branches of the trees further in, over our heads. St Barbe has an admirable…
Album release: Georgia Train, ‘Needles & Pinches’
Here is a singer-songwriter confessional that blasts new energy into the genre. Violently resistant to any cliché, the entire album walks a tightrope between the accessible and avant-garde: unflinching, uncompromising and ultimately unforgettable. Georgia Train has already built up a rich back catalogue. I first heard her music as one half of duo Bitter Ruin…
Two of US: Lucas Meachem & Irina Meachem, ‘Shall We Gather’
This is a big, bold, beautiful beast of an album: a concept recital that uses song to grapple with belonging, community and how those noble aims align with what it means to be American. Let me say at the outset that this is a bravura performance by both singer and pianist. This may be a…
Portal remains: Wyndow, ‘Wyndow’
Even when dealing with highly original, individual talents, sometimes musicians collaborate and produce something so complete that – not only do you wonder how they never found each other before – it also sounds like they’ve already been working together for years. This is the case with the self-titled debut album by Wyndow, whose core…
Lieder among wo/men: Carolyn Sampson, Roderick Williams & Joseph Middleton in concert
At this year’s Leeds Lieder festival, I finally got to see – for the first time – a form of classical recital I’d been thinking, and even occasionally writing, about for some time: one that behaved like a rock concert. Fitting, then, that we were surprised, amused, shaken up and energised. But was it a…
Lost in music: Daniel Bachman, ‘Axacan’
This is an extraordinary piece of work: a new suite of tracks from an artist previously new to me, which had me pressing my headphones to my ears on repeat plays, hungry for every morsel of sonic detail, and enveloping me in a shifting atmosphere of both delight and dread. Absolute required listening. * Daniel…
Set free?
A couple of evenings before writing this, I had the privilege of attending the first art song recital with a live audience at London’s Wigmore Hall since it re-opened to socially-distanced audiences in line with the UK’s current ‘roadmap’ for ending lockdown. The concert was an all-Schubert progamme, performed by soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist…
Pastoral, personal, political: Sieben before, during and beyond lockdown
Matt Howden is a Sheffield-based singer, songwriter, composer, violinist, looping/sequencing technology expert, and teacher/practitioner of sound design and production. An independent, unstoppable musical force who somehow finds enough room under the radar to soar, he is always unpredictable, always reliable. One might have thought the restrictions imposed by the pandemic would slow him down a…
Director’s cuts: John Carpenter, ‘Lost Themes III: Alive After Death’
‘Imaginary soundtrack music’ – creating a suite of pieces or score for a film that doesn’t exist – is not a new idea. In fact, it could almost be a genre in itself, and it’s hard to pin down its beginnings. Perhaps its seeds are in the vaults of library music (now the subject of…
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