Back catalogue: Modern Classical

Review: It's fair to say Placelessness is the work of an Australian experimental supergroup. Oren Ambarchi has been a towering figure of hyper-minimalism since the mid-80s, most notably creating tense and elongated stretches of recordings and performance using guitar tone. Robbie Avenaim is an accomplished experimental drummer, and Chris Abrahams heads up The Necks. That's a very condensed biography for three incredibly accomplished musicians who finally make good on years of live collaborations and criss-crossed pathways to deliver a stunning album which brings their respective qualities into sharp relief, somehow fuller than their solo efforts without losing the vital subtlety and patience which has guided them to greatness.

Review: Violinist Augustin Hadelich's American Road Trip is an attempt to explore the musical landscape of his adoptive homeland with pianist Orion Weiss. The duo performs works by American composers spanning the 19th to 21st centuries and in doing so blends diverse influences such as European Romanticism, revivalist hymns, blues, jazz, and bluegrass. The album features pieces by Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Ives, John Adams, Amy Beach, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and others, all of whom highlight the rich tapestry of American music. Hadelich, who moved to the U.S. at 19 and became a citizen in 2014, combines American passion with European nuance in his acclaimed performances.

Review: It's been a long time since Halo: Combat Evolved revolutionised the word of first-person shooter video games. Graphically superior to anything that had come before it, the franchise also benefits from a spectacularly gripping storyline in which humans are outgunned and out-teched by a ruthless and uncompromising alliance of superiorly equipped alien races united as The Covenant. The titular Halo adds a kind of Prometheus air of uncertainty, as nobody really knows what it does until attempts to activate the galaxy-destroying weapon reveal something worse than death - a parasitic breed called the Flood. If all that was enough to blow everyone away in 2001, 2004 brought us to a whole new level of immersion in this future scape. Just like its predecessor, a big part of the impact was the visionary score by gaming soundtrack masters Martin O'Donnell and Michael Savatori. Now here it is in all its Gregorian chanting glory.

Review: In the right circles,, Martin O'Donnell and Michael Savatori are living legends. Working with the iconic US video game company Bungie Inc, the pair put their names on the map - or maybe maps? - by creating soundtracks to a number of high profile titles, either as a duo or individually. O'Donnell is arguably the better known, or at least has the bigger online persona, but both composers deserve plenty of credit. Halo: Combat Evolved was the first title in what is now a huge and genre-defining first person shooter franchise, and the score reflects the emergence of video game music as an integral part of the on-screen action. O'Donnell and Savatori's efforts to ensure instrumentation dramatically changed with events in the game, which is by nature relatively non-linear, was a revelation. While their efforts to separate these into individual suites foresaw the rise of playable stories as films in their own right.

Review: Laced Records and Halo Studios partner up to bring the epic soundtracks of the original Halo trilogy to vinyl for the first time, remastering and revamping 83 original scores from Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3. the music that defined a franchise is thus ethered in perpetuity. Weaving orchestral elements, prog rock, drum corps marches, and heavy metal, Halo presents a perfect bottling of angst and militancy; owing to its popularity with a certain teen gamer cohort, Halo 2's score especially made history as the first video game OST to chart on the Billboard 200. Now, each soundtrack is presented in its own sleeve with custom artwork, and comes in a collector's box adorned with a debossed Halo logo and silver laminate finish.

Review: The full 83 track suite from the original Halo trilogy of video games is here, bringing you an exemplary score befitting of one of the most acclaimed Arcadian future combat shooter game series in the world. Now you can figuratively "don" your very own sonic Spartan supersoldier suit, as the game's trademark musical motifs - mystical Gregorian choral chants, missionary orchestral movements, gloried verging-on-prog upswells and downturns - are laid in pristine electronica-augmented fashion, by composers Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori and C Paul Johnson. The midpoint of the record marks a highlight, where the Halo 2 soundtrack heard a long list of A-list musician collaborators, marking a heavy metal and nu-metal sojourn.

Review: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead is an album that is now 20 years old and so gets a special anniversary release to mark the occasion. It comes in limited quantities via Music on Vinyl on crystal clear vinyl. All of the indie giants' best known moments are tackled by O'Riley in fine style as he brings new drama and melancholy to tracks like 'Everything In Its Right Place' and 'Subterranean Homesick Alien.' These remain largely fairly faithful to the original arrangements but ebb and flow in new ways because of being played don piano and will appeal to fans of Radiohead as well as those who might not have liked the originals.

Review: Fourth volume of Library Music miniatures by Daniel O'Sullivan (Ulver, aethenor, This is Not This Heat, etc.) for VHF, this time commissioned by the legendary German Music Library, Sonoton. Another sampling of O'Sullivan's versatility and brilliance as a composer, performer and sound designer, the focus on The Pastoral Machine is more "electronic" compared to the three previous albums O'Sullivan recorded for KPM (also issued on LP by VHF), with simpler arrangements and a focus on gentle and emotive synthesised soundworlds. Even without as many full ensemble arrangements, there's still a wealth of diversity - 'Empathogen' opens the record with latticed arpeggiating sequences recalling Japanese "environmental music" or Persian Surgery-era Terry Riley, 'Fruit Of Stream Entry' burbles with gentle ripples evoking the album's title, while 'The Silversmith Of Space' mines a simple chord sequence evoking Eno's 70s classic short instrumentals. Recalling futurist new-age pop in the vein of Enya or Virginia Astley, the record comes housed in a jacket and heavy euro-style inner featuring collages by O'Sullivan, soon to be the subject of an art book published by Timeless Editions in mid-2024.

Review: Bordeaux-based producer Franck Zaragoza aka. Ocoeur has always drawn on the natural world as a basis for his sprawling ambient compositions, and his latest album Breath is no exception. Over just six immersive pieces that intend to evoke the gratitude for simply being alive, Zaragoza this time evokes an impressionistic mountainscape, though still combines this romantic image with digital sonic pepperings and minimalist glitch textures throughout.

Review: Mike Oldfield's 1999 release ambitiously charts the evolution of music across 2,000 years, blending classical, choral, and electronic elements into a single, seamless piece divided into 12 sections. Tracks like 'Peace on Earth' and the title track showcase Oldfield's ability to craft evocative, multi-layered compositions. Moving from Peruvian-inspired melodies to medieval and modern influences, the album demonstrates his talent for musical storytelling. While its vast scope could have been unwieldy, Oldfield's mastery of over 30 instruments ensures the album remains a compelling and unique addition to his remarkable body of work, offering moments of grandeur and reflection.

Review: For the first time on vinyl, through Karl Records, comes a limited edition and furtive Yoko Ono retrospective, in conjunction with the over-100-strong, Sweden-headquartered ensemble and community network The Great Learning Orchestra. These unlikely recordings were made at the time of the musician and performance artist Ono's 1964 multimedia collection Grapefruit, a cornerstone of what would later become known as "conceptual art". Grapefruit itself is a large artist's book, with a large vellum spine and browned parchment paper; it contains a series of "event scores" that outline, rather than permit the performances of, many different performance art pieces. The effect is apocryphal and ominous, as though the real performance of these instructive works may have accursed or deleterious effects. "Like a musical score, Event Scores can be realized by artists other than the original creator and are open to variation and interpretation"; and yet, Ono's book is a one of one, having never been reproduced or thus made collectable. Pre-dating John Cage by about a decade, the "event scores" described therein have now been performed by The Great Learning Orchestra, where hardly any of the performances / pieces have ever been captured sonically or laid to disc. This record changes all that, realising Ono's bewildering text instructions as tremulous suites, made up of clattering material hits and harrowing string instrumental assaults.

Review: Riz Ortolani's soundtrack to the 1969 Giallo thriller Cosi Dolce... Cosi Perversa is well sought-after but now pops up as a limited edition reissue. The legendary composer famously scored over 200 films and crafted a suspenseful and evocative work here that enhances the film's themes of deception and seduction. Directed by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the film remains a standout of Italian Giallo cinema and is immediately recognisable for its haunting main theme 'Why?' by J. Vincent Edwards. The soundtrack has been fully remastered from the original master tapes here - and naturally, it sounds superb.

Review: Sit back, relax, stick on Albert Alan Owen's new album Chorales and allow yourself to sink into a deeply spiritual and emotional record that is both minimal and intimate. A meditation of piano that is coated in vinyl crackle, and manages to captivate you from front to back with its sheer melodic beauty. Owen's ability to turn you in on your inner self is second to none. As you get lost in deep thoughts you will not want to come back to the real world. Our suggestion? Don't. Simply put it on again from the start.

Review: Ambient music is all about immersion and you'll be hard-pressed to find anything more immersive than this. New York and Iceland-based composer Masaya Ozaki was born in Niigata, Japan and focuses on "the idea of space as a transient entity," which means his work is imbued with astonishing subtlety and beautifully quiet artistry that really draws you and rewards close attention. Mizukara is his fourth such outing and one that melds field recordings, electro-acoustic sounds and lush synth textures into something that is melancholic and utterly absorbing from front to back. Says the artist, ''this album is a reflection of my current life in Iceland. Where does the self begin and where does it end?' Tune in to find out.

Review: In a collaboration for the ages, we hear German kosmische musician Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster, Harmonia) team up with Japanese flutist Yuko Matsuzaki and Berlin Philharmonic analog musician sound engineer Onnen Bock for a nacreous improv blast. Spanning soft, pearly electronica and neoclassical, Moon Garden comprises five works, incorporating techniques and fragments of songs already released. A mythical aura unfurls through synth koto and organic harmonics; 'In The Forest Of Syrinx' establishes a singing bowled, new age aesthetic, segueing into the purely vocal threnody 'Sapphire Jellyfish'. Bridging electronic washes, piano and female vocals, this is a borderless soundscape of exciting proportions.

Review: Twilight of the Gods features one of many evocative soundtracks from Hans Zimmer, Omer Benyamin and Steven Doar. Between them, they bring a sweeping cinematic scope to an epic narrative with their usual sense of masterful scoring. Zimmer and his collaborators blend orchestral intensity with atmospheric depth here to enhance the mythic tone of the story. From haunting melodies to powerful crescendos, this soundtrack captures the emotional gravity and grandeur of the gods' twilight moments and each track layers intricate instrumentation that pulls listeners into a vivid, immersive world that echoes the film's themes of fate, power and destiny.