Infinity Chamber

The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning was the Word and that the Word was sound. But what if it was music? What if God, in contemplating the creation of Creation, sang being into being? If so, it might have sounded something like the Sacred Songs of Valentin Silvestrov. In this seventh ECM album devoted to the Ukrainian composer’s music, we thusly encounter a sense of space unique to the Russian liturgy: the more the voices unify in movement, the more they lift from one another like temporary tattoos, leaving behind mirror images that wash away with baptism into infinite oneness with the Holy Spirit. Sin as sun. Firmament as fundament.

The latest album by Atom String Quartet - "Universum", is a natural consequence of the band's activities, and at the same time a completely new approach to composing. Each musician mastered great form and composed a full-scale, multi-part string quartet. These works are autonomous entities and tell different stories, precisely showing the individual character of each composer. "Atomizations" by Dawid Lubowicz talk about the vastness of the universe, are a reflection on the infinity of events, a story about a road that always surprises and never ends. "Varsovia" - Mateusz Smoczyński is a musical record of the heroism of Warsaw and the pain of its inhabitants, interwoven with images of the bustling metropolis of the times. present; "Bolero" by Michał Zaborski tells about dance, passion and love, while "Atlas of Butterflies" by Krzysztof Lenczowski is a musical illustration of a children's book with drawings and descriptions of butterflies. Stylistically and formally, the songs are close to classical music, i.e. to the natural environment of a string quartet, but they do not lack elements characteristic of Atom String Quartet, such as improvisation or new performance techniques.

Tindersticks are a band whose music is defined by a mood as much as a style, and if anyone is looking for proof to that theory, 2021's Distractions will do nicely. The lush, expansively orchestrated sound of 2019's No Treasure but Hope was a stellar example of prime Tindersticks, a sprawling canvas composed from an infinity of small details. Distractions, on the other hand, is nearly as powerful while sounding atypically spare, created from what for this group is the bare minimum of elements but still achieving the cool, majestic tone of their most famous work. Tindersticks leader Stuart Staples has said Distractions isn't a lockdown album, but that the isolation imposed on its production by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 reinforced a creative choice that was already in place, and this music clearly took creative advantage of the limits that outside circumstances imposed on the musicians.