The Primordial Pieces (2024)

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About The Primordial Pieces | Album Credits

About The Primordial Pieces

Release date: 9th August 2024 (Library of Nothing Records)

An album of five instrumental works by Leo Chadburn, focussed on the naked, elemental components of music: a long tone, a static chord, a rising scale.

Despite the material's transparency, the music seems poised on the edge of sensuousness, in these close-up recordings of piano, violins and synthesizer drones.

Opening track The Reflecting Pool is built from dramatic, rippling arpeggios; Camouflage explores a single harmony through turbulent reiterations. De La Salle (Violins) and Map of the World present sustained chords that teem with overtones, and an austere melody shimmers in a heat-haze of resonances on final track A Secret.

This music is based on sketches dating from the turn of the millennium (c.1999-2001), which have been revisited, reworked and re-recorded for this release. These "early works" contain the essence of Leo's music as it was to unfold in the subsequent 25 years, drawing inspiration from the forms and aesthetics of visual art, and prefiguring the structural clarity and boldness of his more recent and well-known explorations of voice and text.

Album Credits

Performers:

Ben Smith - piano
Angharad Davies, Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono and Amalia Young - violins
Leo Chadburn - synths (Roland Juno-6 and Vermona Mono Lancet)

Production Credits:

Produced by Leo Chadburn
Mastered by Newton Armstrong
Engineered by James Russell

Recording of The Primordial Pieces was completed with the generous financial assistance of the Vaughan Williams Foundation.