Godspeed You! Black Emperor
«G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!», de Godspeed You! Black Emperor. La trayectoria de la banda canadiense Godspeed You! Black Emperor dura ya casi treinta años en el tiempo, pero no es muy extensa discográficamente hablando (aunque ha sido fructífera en proyectos paralelos: desde Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra a…
Clara Peya
“Perifèria”, by Clara Peya. Eleven albums to her name in thirteen years… the Spanish pianist and composer Clara Peya (Palafrugell, 1986), the current leading representative of one of the currents of Spanish musical minimalism, has a torrential need to express herself. Song albums, concept albums, instrumental albums… The complete commentary…
Caroline Shaw
“Narrow Sea”, by Caroline Shaw. The American composer Caroline Shaw (Greenville, North Carolina, 1982) was in 2013, at the age of thirty, the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, for her a cappella piece Partita for eight voices. My full review of her new album, Narrow Sea, can…
Wim Mertens
“That Which is Not”, by Wim Mertens. The Belgian composer, pianist and countertenor is now sixty-five years old and, at the end of 2019, he will celebrate forty years since the recording of his first album, For Amusement Only (Les Disques du Crépuscule, 1982), recorded with Gust De Meyer under…
Yann Tiersen
“All”, by Yann Tiersen. The French composer and pianist has been living for some time now in a place located precisely “out of time”: the island of Ouessant, twenty kilometres off the mainland coast of the French region of Brittany, a rock with an adverse climate and scarcely inhabited (barely…
Timespine
“Urban Season”, by Timespine. The Portuguese trio Timespine was founded in 2013 by three musicians from different backgrounds: Adriana Sá (zither and electronics), John Klima (electric bass) and Tó Trips (dobro and percussion), and debuted with an album of the same name. Five years later, fully established in Portugal as…
Hauschka
“A Different Forest”, by Hauschka. Until the mid-1990s, Volker Bertelmann (Kreuztal, 1966) played keyboards in a German hip-hop group called God’s Favourite Dog. The new century brought him to us as an experimental piano composer – familiar with the Cagean technique of prepared piano – called Hauschka – a tribute…
Pascal Dusapin
“À Quia • Aufgang…”, de Pascal Dusapin. One of the great French composers between the 20th and 21st centuries, Dusapin (Nancy, 1955) belongs to that generation that discovered jazz and the Doors before classical music. But when, at the age of 18, he heard Edgar Varese’s Arcana, his life was…
Jörg Widmann
“Arche”, by Jörg Widmann. The Elbe Philharmonic, Hamburg’s spectacular concert hall designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, was inaugurated in January 2017. One of the venue’s several inaugural concerts was commissioned to composer Jörg Widmann (Munich, 1973), who created an oratorio inspired by what, for Widmann,…
Alberto Posadas
“Erinnerungsspuren”, by Alberto Posadas. The composer Alberto Posadas (Valladolid, 1967), winner of the 2011 National Music Prize for composition, is one of the few Spanish composers at the forefront of European composition. A student of Francisco Guerrero, he is a structurally rigorous, very “mathematical” and “architectural” composer. The album now…
Lubomyr Melnyk
“Fallen Trees”, by Lubomyr Melnyk. The Canadian pianist and composer (although of Ukrainian origin and born in Munich in 1948) Lubomyr Melnyk is known for his piano technique of “continuous music”, which he achieves with extremely fast notes and the use of the pedal to generate overtones and resonances. He…
Tyshawn Sorey
“Pillars”, by Tyshawn Sorey. Black American composer Tyshawn Sorey (Newark, 1980) has outdone himself. Known as a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, his classical and jazz training also make him a solid improvisational composer, and this ambitious work (a four-hour triptych for octet) marks a major step forward in his creation. Based on…