Category: Contemporary
Susanna Wallumrød: Who by Fire
Released in 2011 on the ECM record label, If Grief Could Wait is a remarkable cross-genre recording featuring indie pop and jazz Norwegian singer Susanna Wallumrød, Swiss Baroque harp player Giovanna Pessi, Italian nyckelharpa (the Swedish keyed fiddle) player Marco Ambrosini and Swiss-based viola de gamba player Jane…
Nils Petter Molvaer: Presence
Presence is a beautiful track from Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer’s 2002 recording NP3. While the video clip was superbly crafted, I can’t dissociate the track from the album’s cover featuring life-size figures on a beach staring at the horizon. The cover is a photograph…
Jon Hopkins: Monsters theme
Monsters is a 2010 British independent science fiction film written and directed by Gareth Edwards with a wonderful soundtrack by Jon Hopkins. The film chronicles the journey of an American journalist and her fellow citizen from alien-infected and quarantined Mexico to the American border. Filmed…
Sam Jackson: The Gramophone
Sam Jackson is a Dublin based pianist, but when I heard “The Gramophone” for the first time on the radio, I mistook it for what could have been a track from an early recording from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sam Jackson’s music is of the same calibre.…
Gerry Diver: Music for Tape Loop
Multi-instrumentalist Gerry Diver based the Speech Project on several interviews of Irish musicians and singers such as Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damian Dempsey, Martin Hayes and Danny Meehan. It also features archival recordings of Galway accordion player Joe Cooley. The various musical pitches of the musicians’…
John Cage: In a landscape
Referring to classical Indian thought and influenced by Gita Sarabhai, the Indian musician he was tutoring in the mid-1940s, John Cage formulated the idea that the purpose of music was to “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. Written…
About Spellbinding Music
Why is it that a particular piece of music, a tune or a song will move us in such a way that it will stop us in our tracks, send shivers up our spine or give us goose bumps? Spiritual or secular musical traditions such…