Flux
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Quinta, Mark Bowden, Kate Whitley, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Gavin Higgins
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: NMC
Magazine Review Date: 07/2017
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 56
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: NMCD232

Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Airs No Oceans Keep |
Mark Bowden, Composer
Fidelio Trio Mark Bowden, Composer |
The Madness Industry |
Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Composer
Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Composer Onyx Brass |
Atomic Café |
Gavin Higgins, Composer
Gavin Higgins, Composer Paul Hoskins, Conductor Rambert Orchestra |
Themistocles is Captured |
Quinta, Composer
Quinta, Composer |
Duo |
Kate Whitley, Composer
Asher Zaccardelli, Viola Eloise-Fleur Thom, Violin Kate Whitley, Composer |
Author: Pwyll ap Siôn
First up is Gavin Higgins’s Atomic Café, whose bright, pop-art-style title is in fact a reference to a satirical film from the 1980s on how to survive a nuclear attack. The idea of opening a piece on a single pitch has been turned into a modernist mannerism by many spectral composers but Higgins’s purposeful long-held opening D is poised for action. It soon shatters into a series of semitonal particles before finally exploding into a devilish doomsday dance.
Atomic Café’s connection with physical movement is obvious but Mark Bowden’s Airs No Oceans Keep is more difficult to intuit. Played with power and precision by the Fidelio Trio, it can’t seem to decide whether it wants to float on a sea of sweet consonance or plunge headlong into a dissonant vortex. Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s The Madness Industry, for brass quintet, takes its cue from a book that tries to define psychopathic tendencies. The result is a comically disturbing work full of dark one-liners, gags and punchlines.
On the other end of the scale is Kate Whitley’s delicately floating Duo for violin and viola, which brilliantly captures the dichotomy between stasis and movement in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture Wrestlers. But the most original and distinctive voice is heard on Quinta’s Themistocles is Captured, whose post-minimal soundscape is held in flux by delicately pulsing rhythms on magnetic resonator piano and electronically manipulated violin. Another NMC treat.
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