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Distant Voices, New Worlds review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month
Inspired by the South Downs near Brighton, this selection box of new work from contemporary composers is English to its core – and yet defies tradition
Ed Hughes’s epic Sky Rhythms uses a 1937 diary entry from the Mass Observation Archive, with a twitchy orchestral accompaniment that’s pitched somewhere between Michael Nyman and Henry Cow. Another Thompson composition, a solo rumination on a pentatonic scale performed by flautist Rowland Sutherland, was written in honour of Nelson Mandela but in this context it sounds like an extended Vaughan Williams cadenza. Violinist Sarah Neufeld, cellist Rebecca Foon and double bassist Richard Reed Parry, three leading lights in Montreal’s indie and experimental scene, collaborate on First Sounds(Envision Records) a series of shivery, atmospheric, echo-drenched neogothic miniatures.
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