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DCD34355-CD
£19.99
Look how brightly offers a portrait of Alex Mills’ music from the past decade: ten works, many closely linked to moments of change, loss, ritual and renewal, together telling what feels like an intimate, personal story – almost, as Nico Muhly writes in the booklet, a sequence of musical diary entries. Across pieces for strings, voice, piano, percussion and tape, including three specially written for contralto Jess Dandy, familiar materials are quietly transformed: patterns fracture and reform, stasis gives way to movement, and moments of unguarded lyricism emerge unexpectedly. Those encountering Mills for the first time will find a compelling introduction to a composer whose music asks not for interpretation, but for attentive, inward listening – music that is ‘not meditative, but a meditation’.
'Presence and absence present just one of several paradoxes in Mills’s richly ambiguous musical language. Unity and separation lie at the heart of Strings Attached for violin and piano, where both instruments’ lines combine, converge and splinter, creating a dynamic sense of ebb and flow, stasis and movement, permanence and transience. A similar approach underpins Fragment for string quartet and Dirges for the Living for violin and cello, whose opening unisons yield in the former a series of wailing, keening gestures and in the latter more pointillistic textures.
A further dimension is provided through the addition of a female voice in one of the album’s highlights, the two-movement BARDO, which engages with another paradox: death and rebirth. Contralto Jess Dandy’s floating melodic shapes and haunting timbres bind the piano quartet’s fragile lines, with the music almost reduced to a standstill by the end.'
'Central to Mills’s body of work is a preoccupation with unison and fragmentation: musical lines that move together, unravel, fall apart, transform, and reintegrate. Drawing on influences as diverse as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, trauma studies, psychological theories, and grieving rituals, Mills likens these musical processes to the cyclical and bittersweet nature of human experience — how we continually break down, transform, and regather ourselves as we negotiate the many different parts of who we are.'
Collections: All Releases, Chamber, Contemporary, New Releases
Category: Alex Mills, Chamber, Chroma, Contemporary, Ensemble, Jessica Dandy
