Various Artists – Album Roundup

You’ll hear a lot of familiar echoes in The Executioner’s Lover, but I can more or less promise that you haven’t heard anything quite like it. It opens with a song, ‘Half Life’, that is mainly arranged for ‘orchestral instruments’, but which also incorporates a rock rhythm section, which comes and goes at strategic moments; the song is a melodramatic number, which while it is not a ballad, has a narrative feel to it, like a piece from musical theatre or light opera. This is more or less the course followed by the album as a whole, but within those approximate bounds there is a huge diversity …

Jez Carr, Simon Little & Mike Haughton – Foreground Music, Vol. I (jazz)

All that Simon Little, who seems to be the member of this trio with principal responsibility for promoting Foreground Music, Vol. I, has to say about this music on his Bandcamp page is that ‘[i]n November 2012, three musicians came together to play freely improvised music and recorded everything.’ Freedom, it should be noted, is a big place, and a statement like that gives little clue as to what the results might sound like. What are the parameters within which the musicians improvised? Is the music consonant, dissonant, tonal, atonal, serial, aleatory, or some combination of these and other approaches? Is it metrical, arrhythmic, calm, frantic or what? Do the musicians concern themselves principally with pitch, timbre, texture, dynamics …