London-born musician Shiva Feshareki has all the time blended two seemingly contradictory worlds. She is finest recognized for creating improvisatory, sampledelic soundscapes utilizing DJ gear: Stanton turntables, a Roland House Echo, the real-time sampling capabilities of a Korg Kaoss Pad, a theremin which spins on a turntable to create uncommon digital pulses. However she’s additionally a skilled composer with a doctorate from the Royal Faculty of Music, and has lengthy championed avant garde works by likeminded ladies resembling Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Leslie García.
This album straddles each of Feshareki’s worlds. The principle occasion is Nonetheless Level, a 40-minute concerto for double orchestra and turntables that was written – extremely – in 1948 by a 23-year-old Daphne Oram, a decade earlier than she based the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Feshareki spent years exploring Oram’s archive in an effort to reimagine Nonetheless Level with fellow composer James Bulley earlier than performing it on the 2018 Proms, and that is an eventful realisation. The primary motion seems like a grand, ominous movie rating, laced with excessive modernism; the second is a dystopian collage of 78rpm turntable sounds, discordant results and air raid sirens. The ultimate motion is the sound of a nation rising from the ravages of warfare – shabby, end-of-empire grandeur and postwar uncertainty, all put via the dub chamber.
Much more spectacular is Aetherworld, a 20-minute epic that Feshareki composed for final yr’s Proms. Right here she makes use of the doomy, closely handled voices of the BBC Singers to generate a slowly mutating collection of harmonic drones and resonances, complemented by Package Downes’s organ and her personal turntable manipulations, taking part in distorted snatches of a choral Renaissance piece by the French composer Josquin des Prez. It's a completely immersive work, full of microscopic sonic particulars and totally different timbres that rewards shut listening on headphones.
Additionally out this month
Climate Techniques I: A Exhausting Rain (Islandia Music) is a two-CD set from percussionist and professor Steven Schick that's not solely an ideal compilation of percussion music but additionally a superb primer to Twentieth-century modernism, from Stockhausen’s Zyklus to Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark, from Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate to Charles Wuorinen’s Janissary Music. The most recent album by veteran composer Carl Stone, Wat Dong Moon Lek (Unseen Worlds), takes tiny snippets of current data (Thai balladeers, 80s popsters Boy Meets Woman, free-jazz, high-fructose pop), slices them into tiny fragments on the music processing software program Max and reassembles them into splendidly disorientating, burbling and fairly addictive sound collages. Tuba participant Martin Taxt’s album Second Room (Couch) is a collection of low-pitched horn drones, temple bells, organs and electronically handled sounds – better of all is the ultimate observe, which seems like a bit of free improvisation performed in ultra-slow-motion.
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