you won't make it back

Ryan Latimer: Gorilla And Orange Sun (from anthem)

Michael Wolters: Adler

Victoria Benito (b. 1993, Madrid) is a young interdisciplinary composer whose work draws upon experimental, pop, classical and electronic sounds as well as film and visuals. Her work revolves around everydayness and reflects on her experience of the un-romantic and mundane aspects of life. As a performer, she plays synthesisers and MIDI keyboards and uses her voice to create eccentric, whimsical and dreamy sound worlds.

Victoria Benito: Dry And Austere

The main idea of this piece is contrast. Contrast between the sky, the metal and the soil. The electronics create harmonisations of the gamba material, creating parallel lines using different intervals. The result is an idea of an augmented instrument, in which certain parameters of the the gamba performance influence the homophonic
expansions of the electronics material – Jimena Maldonado (2022)

Jimena Maldonado: Remnants

Sample track from Janus by Melinda Maxwell, out on Birmingham Record Company in September 2023.

Hecate Triptych Part 3

Trace (2021) for music box and voice. Performed by Joseph Kudirka.
Recorded in Berlin (DE) in October 2022.

Maya Verlaak (b.1990) is a Belgian composer. She describes her creative process as a ‘scrutinising compositional position’ in which the work is guided by the unique context of each piece. Sharing her creative process is important to her so she develops new notation systems to communicate her concepts. Her compositions are written in such a way that the performers have insight into the compositional process. The music is intended to create space for critical thought; space for the individual listeners and performers to scrutinise the work.

Trace by Maya Verlaak

Four Sections of Music Unequally Divided is an exhibition of Seán Clancy’s hypnotic explorations into non-prescriptive compositional structures and musical material. The influences of visual artist Sol LeWitt in his reduction of forms to their bare essence and composer James Tenney in his sheer joy of the plasticity of sound are never far from this piece. The release comprises a single uninterrupted 44-minute span of music in which athletic piano playing meets analogue synthesizers and deconstructed gamelan.

Seán Clancy was born in Dublin in 1984. His music deals with translation, examining minimal compositional strategies over extended periods of time, and devised collaboration. His music has been described by The Irish Times as “spare and hypnotic”, by The New York Times as “beautifully simple yet elusive” and by The Quietus as “an affecting reminder of minimalism’s capacity to feel deeply personal and purposeful”.

Clancy has been commissioned and performed by many ensembles and artists from around the world, working closely several times with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Quatuor Bozzini, Crash Ensemble, Plus Minus Ensemble, Contempo Quartet, Fidelio Trio, Ensemble Krock and Workers Union Ensemble. He also performs frequently in a duo with Andy Ingamells.

He has appeared at festivals such as the Commonwealth Games, New Music Dublin Festival, New York MATA Festival, Beijing Modern Music Festival and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. His work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (UK), Dublin Digital Radio (Ireland), RTÉ Lyric FM (Ireland), WFMT Chicago (USA), and WNYC (USA), amongst others. He is an Assistant Professor Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin and is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland.

Four Sections Of Music Unequally Divided (extract)

Forty-Five Minutes of Music on the Subject of Football celebrates the historic victory of the 1994 Irish Football team with continuous pulses and a series of looped patterns rising and falling in moments of gradual transition or sudden difference. It also celebrates our diminishing ability to stay focused on a singular activity for more than two minutes. 

On 18 June 1994, Ireland played Italy in a game of football in the Giants stadium, New York to a crowd of over 75,000 people. Many, many more watched on television. This was Ireland’s first match and only victory in the 1994 World Cup. Ray Houghton scored the only goal of the game around eleven and a half minutes whilst Irish players Terry Phelan, Tommy Coyne and Denis Irwin were all given yellow cards at various points. Apart from these sporadic events, nothing else of note took place and the second half was completely devoid of physical drama.

“The music moves from even metres with unchanging patterns, to irregular metres with intense bursts of energy … Clancy’s composition might just be a work of football through to the final whistle.” – Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Journal of Music

Dublin-born composer Seán Clancy’s music has been described as ‘equal part sacred, seductive and superficial’ (Tempo), and as ‘exploring the tensions between found and original material, narrative and rupture, elite and vernacular values, and between innovation and intervention’ (Journal of Music). His work deals with examining minimal amounts of material over extended periods of time, and most recently he has been exploring this process by performing on synthesisers, often collaborating with other soloists and ensembles.

Ensemble Krock is a Swedish collective of musicians and composers formed in 2005. They specialise in contemporary music for electric guitars, but also present new arrangements of old and forgotten works. They collaborate frequently with national and international composers in an experimental way, performing anything from solo repertoire to chamber music with dancers, singers, other ensembles, visual artists and opera.

Original release: 7 August 2015
Re-release: 25 October 2019

Order here: https://www.nmcrec.co.uk/birmingham-record-company/forty-five-minutes-music-subject-football

Forty-Five Minutes of Music on the Subject of Football (excerpt)

Egidija Medekšaitė – Textile 1 (excerpt)

Following hot on the heels of his critically-acclaimed 2018 NMC album Elsewhereness, Joe Cutler’s new release focusses on dynamic live recordings of four works for large forces written over a two-decade period. At the heart of this release is the very recent saxophone concerto Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii, a BBC Commission premiered in 2019, and written for Trish Clowes with the BBC Concert Orchestra.   

Trish Clowes has been described in The Guardian as “one of the most agile and original jugglers of improv and adventurous composition to have appeared in the UK in recent times”, and Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii is the result of close collaboration between Cutler and Clowes, with the piece exploiting sections of ‘directed improvisation’. The work itself is a meditation on David Mitchell’s story ‘Somni-451’ from the novel Cloud Atlas, set in an East Asian dystopian empire in the near future. Cutler’s work has often been described as ‘post-genre’ and this powerful compositional statement references a diverse range of influences ranging from Morton Feldman to Ben Webster, or Brian Eno to Tōru Takemitsu, but refracted through the composer’s unique and idiosyncratic lens.

Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii (excerpt)

Two performers each take a roll of tape and simultaneously wrap it around both of their bodies. They pause to catch their breath, then try to break free from the tape. The title Tape Piece evokes 20th Century avant-garde electronic music produced using magnetic audio tape. But this performance playfully recasts those complex rhythms and sounds using entirely physical means, as two performers use ordinary household tape to create an ever-changing choreographic musical work that fully integrates movement and sound. Their dance creates purely acoustic sounds that are beautiful and compelling, yet could quite easily be replicated by the audience at home, encouraging mindfulness of everyday beauty in the listener.

“Tape Piece achieved something meaningful for both ears and eyes as these two composers rolled around the floor, ripping sellotape off each other’s (clothed) bodies. The falsetto squeals of the sellotape launched fragmentary melodies into the air. The piece was witty and fun.” – Philip Clark, Frieze

“The unusual composition method left the audience stunned, giving each sound its own life and soul, a gripping physicality and energy.” – Nonclassical

Tape Piece has been performed around the world, from Florida, Arizona, Ohio and California in the United States, to London, Dublin, Paris, Bruges and Berlin in Europe. It has been performed by leading contemporary music ensembles of the new generation such as soundinitiative, On Structure, Mocrep, Bastard Assignments, Kirkos, and An Assembly. This limited-edition cassette release was recorded directly onto magnetic tape and duplicated using analogue reproduction techniques, completely bypassing digital technology.

Maya Verlaak is a Belgian composer-performer whose artistic process focuses on critique as a necessary catalyst for realising new work, an investigative compositional outlook in which nothing is taken for granted. Andy Ingamells is an interdisciplinary artist who develops unusual methods of composition that blur the line between composer and performer, presenting a musical practice that does not privilege the sounding result, but sees it as one amongst many different and equal possibilities.

Tape Piece (excerpt)

Alex Paxton: Prayer with Strings and Joan Rivers

Two performers each take a roll of tape and simultaneously wrap it around both of their bodies. They pause to catch their breath, then try to break free from the tape. The title Tape Piece evokes 20th Century avant-garde electronic music produced using magnetic audio tape. But this performance playfully recasts those complex rhythms and sounds using entirely physical means, as two performers use ordinary household tape to create an ever-changing choreographic musical work that fully integrates movement and sound. Their dance creates purely acoustic sounds that are beautiful and compelling, yet could quite easily be replicated by the audience at home, encouraging mindfulness of everyday beauty in the listener. Tape Piece has been performed around the world, from Florida, Arizona, Ohio and California in the United States, to London, Dublin, Paris, Bruges and Berlin in Europe. It has been performed by leading contemporary music ensembles of the new generation such as soundinitiative, On Structure, Mocrep, Bastard Assignments, Kirkos, and An Assembly. This version was recorded directly onto magnetic tape and duplicated using analogue reproduction techniques, completely bypassing digital technology. It was release on limited-edition cassette in 2020.

Tape Piece

Birmingham Record Company is a record label that presents eclectic and exciting new releases by artists who challenge, innovate and transform ideas of music today. The label celebrates off-beat work that sits between genres. As well as 12-minute micro-operas and Country-and-Western piano quintets, listeners are just as likely to find music structured around famous football matches, recordings of 1920s mechanical dancehall organs, and story-telling in yoga position.

Birmingham Record Company

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