Composed 2018
Recorded 2024 by Oleh Mstudio

Three Movements for String Quartet

String Quartet No. 2 - 'Aporia'

Piece for piano and string orchestra in Rondo form, reflecting jazz and popular styles.

Nocturnal Wisdom

Dreaming Of Sleep

A pluralistic/contemporary piece, here sequenced on logic with overdubbed tenor saxophone and clarinet, played by Oscar Ives-Owen.

Manifesting Machines (Sequenced Version)

On the Fly

Trombone - Matthew Ludford-King
Cello - Edward Kempton

Study For Trombone And Cello

The Beauty of Snow

A duet for piano and cello (December 2017) performed by myself and Edward Kempton.

Duet for Piano and Cello

The original impetus for this piece lies with an interest in the musical features and qualities found in sounds that themselves lie outside of a musical context; those that occur accidentally, or incidentally without any musical intention behind them. Due to this interest, my goal was to create a sample-based piece. Using samples from such a source, the musical elements of the piece would be determined by the qualities of this source, and the musical trajectory of the source would be extrapolated over a longer time range to form the structure of a full-length piece.
The sound source used was the 19-second long sound produced when connecting to dial-up internet, which was first used commercially in 1992, before losing ground to broadband since the mid-2000s. The sound has significance in the history of internet technology. Alexis Madrigal provides some technical context and an account of the experience of hearing it: “the sounds weren’t a sign that data was being transferred: they were the data being transferred. This noise was the analogue being bridged by the digital”. Concerning the musicality of the sound, “...the patterns of the beats and noise meant something. The sound would move me, my head nodding to the beeps that followed the initial connection. You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were they computers or me and my version of the world?”.

I found this source particularly engaging to work with as saw it as evocative of a number of extra- musical themes, as well as relatable to aesthetics in other established genres of music. I found the historical context of the sound interesting, in that hearing the sound was a regular occurrence for many people during a certain time period, but it has since disappeared from everyone’s daily experience due to the redundancy of this technology. The sound can be found on Brendan Chillcut’s website The Museum of Endangered Sounds, whose intention is to archive both intentional and incidental sounds, which are like “technoaural nostalgia whippets” (Madrigal, 2012) for those who grew up in a certain time. Just as music is a soundtrack to an era, so are the sounds of our technologies.

Absorptions

dial-up/wind-up

Piano - Alex Rutland
Violin - Harry Brownfield
Viola - Maddy Clarke
Cello - Edward Kempton

Piano Quartet Movement I (2017)

London based Composer 
Master's Graduate of the University of Surrey.

Alex Rutland

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks