Burgess

This new recording for Signum Records includes silvery vibraphone with live looping, a quasi rock n roll documentary exploring censorship and a musical picture of the subtle shifts in our changing Seasons.

LOOSENING is a double album of five works by award winning composer GRAHAM FITKIN. Each one has the string quartet at its core but every work includes its own additional soloist. The string quartet is a really homogenous group, steeped in history and tradition, in which timbrally similar instruments create a well-honed sound through trusted communication and shared purpose. Each work has clearly defined roles for the two protagonists – quartet and solist. Each piece allows for two perspectives, two distinct approaches to the material and yet each protagonist is affected by the other. Approaches often evolve through the works, perhaps the quartet splits their honed homogeneity to focus more on individual constituents or conversely maybe they subsume the incomer into their group creating a larger group. An album of world premiere recordings: Four of the five works have never been recorded before, and the fifth is a new arrangement (also never recorded). DISTIL won the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Chamber Works in 2015.

“Percussionist extraordinaire Joby Burgess” returns with his fifth album on Signum Records, “A Percussionist’s Songbook” – a collection of specially commissioned ‘songs without words’ from John Metcalfe, Tunde Jegede, Dario Marianelli, Yazz Ahmed, Graham Fitkin, Dobrinka Tabakova and Gabriel Prokofiev. Scored for an arsenal of pitched percussion and electronics the songbook is inspired by texts ranging from the poetry of Robert Graves and Birago Diop to novels by Michael Ondaatje and Isaac Asimov; American philosopher Michael Sandel, songwriter Peter Gabriel, United Nation population growth statistics and Saudi Arabian folk tales.

As the 2020 lockdown commenced in Britain, Tim Burgess found an effective way to entertain a nation in isolation. Every night, Twitter gathered at #TimsTwitterListeningParty to play appointed albums while the artists and collaborators shared anecdotes from making those records. Apart from generating calls for the Charlatans frontman to be knighted for services to keeping spirits up, the virtual gatherings spotlighted his bottomless enthusiasm and curiosity for music. Also emerging during the COVID-19 outbreak, his fifth solo album is another vivid reflection of that personality: exuberant, adventurous pop that, even in its darkest corners, is warm-souled and melodic. Largely written by Burgess in pre-lockdown solitude in Norfolk, the album freewheels through chamber pop, drone rock, piano balladry, and psych, finding lyrical inspiration everywhere from America’s West Coast (“Lucky Creatures”) to an escalator in a London drugstore (“The Mall”).

This new recording for Signum Records includes ambient electronics fused with mellow vibraphone, explosive cinematic drumming and the delicate muted sounds of 1960’s New York.

Composer and novelist, Anthony Burgess, was a unique creative artist whose dual mastery of music and literature resulted in a career strewn with an output of remarkable diversity. Burgess came into contact with the Aighetta Guitar Quartet while living in Monte Carlo in 1986, and the sublime arrangements and original works in this recording were all composed for this ensemble. The three guitar quartets range from the well-crafted First Quartet intended as a homage to Ravel, while the Second and Third Quartets explore virtuoso technique alongside adventurous and at times haunting harmonies and polytonality.