Sanguine Bass

Enthusiasts have long clamoured for a Bax symphony cycle under the baton of the composer’s doughtiest champion, but even they could hardly have imagined that it would appear in one fell swoop – and from the same company that has already given us a sumptuous, if admittedly uneven, series under Bryden Thomson. Hats off, then, to the BBC Manchester Music Department (and executive producer Brian Pidgeon, in particular, for pushing the project through) and to Chandos for its foresight, courage and sheer enterprise.

“The stone that’s buried: what the fruit is for.” So goes the title track from Plum, Widowspeak’s forthcoming fifth album. The line serves as an apt analogy for the record itself: the self-aware sweetness that the band employs to deliver the seed of a harder, sharper idea. Singer Molly Hamilton coats wry observations in a voice as honeyed as the sun-ripened fruit, and Widowspeak have always made a bitter pill much easier to swallow. From its opening strum, there’s a palpable warmth and familiarity to the music even as it hints at darker truths below the surface, questions about inherent worth. What value and meaning do we assign ourselves, our time, and how do we spend it?

Shore-to-shore etheric dub techno bliss by Italian pioneer Gigi Masin and Detroit’s Rod Modell of DeepChord, beautifully consolidating their respective aesthetics on two durational trips.
For many listeners of a sanguine disposition, ‘Red Hair Girl At Lighthouse Beach’ is a marriage made in ambient heaven. The two pieces find them at a certain position in their career arcs where both are particularly porous to collaborative energies, and are now understandably brought together by Silentes’ 13 series. With Gigi beaming from the shores of the Venetian lagoon, and Modell transmitting from the lakes of Michigan, they arrive at a sympathetic union of floating choral castles in the sky buoyed by systolic subbass thrum and bathed in moonlight…