Back catalogue: Modern Classical

Review: David Shire has one hell of a back catalogue. Active within music since the 1960s, and specifically theatre and film soundtracks in the 1970s, while many of the biggest names behind movie scores have a tendency to explore the same avenues, and therefore wind up creating tunes for relatively similar flicks, in this case that's not really true. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (the original, of course), All The President's Men, and parts of Saturday Night Fever give some idea as to the breadth of his mastery.
The Conversation slips right in there in terms of period and genre, but is, of course, a very different classic to a movie about a New York subway train getting hijacked or social tensions in Brooklyn at the height of the disco era. While largely focused on piano solos, we also get late night dance floor jazz, tense drone, and moody avant-garde, just in case the on-screen action wasn't brooding enough already.

Review: Howard Shore is the renowned film composer known for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit soundtracks and now he releases a new album capturing three concerts he performed in Spring 2023 at the Maison de Radio France. Two concerts feature the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Ludwig Wicki and Bastien Stil, while the third highlights Shore's experimental works. The performances include soloists such as Olivier Doise and Raphaelle Moreau. Shore, a pioneer in contemporary film music, believes film music offers composers unique freedom for personal expression and backs that up with his work here.

Review: This limited-edition Lord of the Rings vinyl is thee version to have for fans nostalgic for the amazing movie series. Featuring 19 newly recorded tracks by the renowned City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, it captures the magic of the legendary trilogy. From sweeping battle scores to the gentle melodies of the Shire, this exclusive release brings Howard Shore's iconic soundtrack to life with stunning clarity. The orchestral arrangements perfectly encapsulate the emotional depth and grandeur of the films, making it an immersive experience for both casual listeners and dedicated fans. Housed in a beautifully designed package, this vinyl is more than just a collector's itemiit's a journey back into Tolkien's enchanting world.

Review: For the first time ever, this new silver vinyl release combines the iconic music from all the three Hobbit films into a comprehensive collection all masterfully performed by The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Howard Shore's award-winning compositions for this as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy have captivated audiences worldwide, often accompanied by live film screenings. The meticulous attention to detail in bringing Tolkien's world to life through music is legendary, incorporating diverse musical styles and instruments to evoke the rich landscapes and characters of Middle-earth. From 'Song Of The Lonely Mountain' to 'Protector Of The Common Folk', this journey through cinematic composing is truly extraordinary.

Review: If you're unfamiliar with Yugoslavia-era Croatian animated children's entertainment than where have you been? And, please, allow us some introductions. Produced for 11 years, between 1967 and 1978, Professor Balthazar was a kids show about a benevolent genius scientist (the titular star) who helps those around him overcome various problems, often through the use of invention, using a magical machine to come up with innovative designs to solve any issue. While there is certainly subtext to read into - TV has always been a bastion of propaganda, not least behind the Iron Curtain of yore - trying to pinpoint the location or origin here isn't easy, if you don't already know. No character speaks a discernible language, making this resolutely universal storytelling. Similarly, the soundtrack, by Balkan master Tomislav Simovic, is relentlessly shapeshifting and expressive, and impossible not to fall in love with, no matter where you grew up.

Review: Tomislav Simovic was among the most significant musical masters to emerge in post-World War II Yugoslavia. The Croatian artist was a member of several jazz bands over the years, is considered a pioneer of southern European electronic music, a highly respected musical theorist, commentator, and all-round visionary. During his lifetime, he would score 300 films, many of which are lost to the sands of time, and those that did survived, or were recreated by new artists, are considered examples of soundtrack as art. Few answer that call better than this previously unreleased collection of 18 short animated films from the Zagreb school, which positioned itself as an artistic institution concerned with presenting philosophical world views and changing the course of animated history. Simovic's work, even without the visuals, conveys this brilliantly, with a mixture of whimsy, comedy, contemporary songwriting, and grand arrangements.

Review: Jimmy Lacy's first missive as Sip, a highly limited cassette put out by Chicagoan "small press" specialists Eye Vybe Records, captured him performing synthesiser soundscapes live on a local radio station. Since then, he has put out a debut studio album - the synth-wave, new-age and Radiophonic Workshop-influenced Leos Naturals - and a collaborative cassette. Here he makes his vinyl bow with another distinctive collection of synth-rooted recordings, Leos Ultras. Like much of his previous work, it seems to exist at the intersection between Stereolab, 1970s new age synthesiser recordings, lo-fi Balearica, experimental movie soundtracks and the vintage synth-powered cheeriness of Plone. It's an enticing, entertaining and pleasingly pure proposition whose occasional nods to jazz surprise and delight in equal measure.

Review: Mustapha Skandrani is a luminary of Algerian music who crafted a unique fusion of Arabo-Andalusian and European styles. His 1965 solo piano album Istikhbars and Improvisations was recorded in Paris and reimagines traditional Algerian istikhbars, which are vocal pieces rooted in Islamic Arabo-Andalusian culture, on a quintessentially European piano. While some purists criticised this approach, Skandrani highlighted the shared European elements within Arabo-Andalusian traditions and demonstrated the Mediterranean as a bridge, not a divide. Alternating between modal istikhbars and piano improvisations, his precise touch evokes comparisons to Bach's Goldberg Variations while retaining strong Arabic/Maghreb influences.

Review: Polish composer Aleksandra Slyz is back with a second album, a first on Warm Winters, that sees her "finding connections between acoustic and synthetic sounds, creating rich drone structures, slowly but intensely pulsing and resonating within the surrounding space and within each listener." The physicality of the instruments used in the record also defines its sound, from the way fingers press down on bows to the air pressure of each sax note. Across three pieces, it makes for an emotionally impactful record in which you can almost see the musician at work as you listen, such is the palpable playing style.

Review: Snarky Puppy are much celebrated five-time Grammy Award winners whose ever-popular album Sylva no gets a special reissue. This re-release comes on nice heavyweight double vinyl and as well as including the six original cuts, it also takes in two alternate takes of 'The Curtain' and 'The Clearing.' Although it was originally released by Impulse! Records, this new version comes via GroundUP Music who have cut it from the original masters. It makes for a superb revisiting of a classic jazz album with the added bonus of a couple of different perspectives.

Review: Son Lux grew from Ryan Lott's solo project into a fully-fledged band with Ian Chang and Rafiq Bhatia, and their star has steadily ascended from indie hip-hop territory to creating this Oscar-nominated soundtrack for one of the most talked-about films of the past year. It's a sure sign Son Lux are in the premier league now, and following the release of the soundtrack comes the official score, presented across four extended suites taking up whole sides of vinyl. This limited gatefold black and white pressing of the album gives the striking sonics the release they deserve.

Review: An ambitious, thought-provoking collaboration that merges radical improvisation with meticulous songcraft. Inspired by Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos painting, the album interrogates modern anxieties through a fusion of classical composition and lyrical introspection. Mark Springer, known for his spontaneous, real-time piano compositions, crafts haunting pieces performed by the Sacconi Quartet, while Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant 's unmistakable vocals lend a poetic depth to the work. Recorded across multiple locations in 2023istrings in Surrey and Tetbury, piano in Brussels and vocals in Londonithe album benefits from its layered, almost collage-like construction. This fragmentation mirrors the project's thematic preoccupations: the disjointed state of contemporary society, the corruption of truth and the divisiveness of social media. Tennant's lyrics, shaped by Goya's grotesque and satirical visions, meditate on deception, power and the erosion of collective trust. The interplay between Springer's expressive piano and the Sacconi Quartet's controlled precision is key to the album's success. Tracks move fluidly between moments of stark beauty and eerie unease. Tennant's vocal performances are restrained yet evocative, delivering lines that echo both personal reflection and broader cultural critique. The arrangements are elegant yet unsettling, reinforcing the album's central tension between order and chaos. Sleep of Reason is not an easy listen, nor does it aim to be. It is an intellectual and emotional work, one that rewards deep engagement. In blending classical refinement with pop craftsmanship, Springer and Tennant have created an album that is an eloquent response to a world teetering between enlightenment and darkness.

Review: The original score for the horror film of the same name - your latest in the enduring "cabin in the woods" subgenre - Knock At The Cabin sonically accompanies the story of a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand they make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. 18 suspense-laden originals composed by the Icelandic musician Herdis Stefansdottir appear, building off of the composer's prior work on indie films such as The Sun Is Also a Star, The Hate U Give, Runaways and Evil Eye. Coming to gatefold 180 gram black & red split coloured vinyl LP, with an insert.

Review: How far can a single artist take a time-honoured musical trope: the piano solo? Josiah Steinbrick attempts to answer the question not in words, but in ivories, with his newest album For Anyone That Knows You, a bewitching hybrid compositional project that puts the chordophonal instrument centre-stage. Allegedly, the album was recorded not for smoothness or posterity but to emphasise the piano as an object, as well as the person playing it and the moment in which it resounds. On top of that, its ten original compositions - cathartic and ecstatic - are backed up by covers of songs from Peruvian, Creole, and Malian traditions, as well as the much-sought saxophone backings of one Sam Gendel.

Review: The vinyl edition of the erst CD album The Love It Took Took Leave You by Colin Stetson is now upon us. The esteemed saxophonist and multi-reedist marks his first full-length solo recording since 2017 here, delivering an album drawn on the experience of love lost, and yet zest for life regained. Written some years before its release - yet always lurking in the background, waiting for recognition apropos the right moment - The Love It Took To Leave You was recorded over the course of a week in early 2023 at The Darling Foundry, a 144-year-old former metalworks facility in Montreal, now transformed into a contemporary art complex, with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel. With an arsenal of saxes and clarinets, Stetson builds a heartbroken yet integral tapestry of emotions, his saxophonic welt-geist riffing upon whirling, looping maelstroms of breath, chamber reverb and unerring focus.

Review: Canadian saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist and frequent collaborator of Arcade Fire, Bon Iver and most recently post-metal juggernauts Cult Of Luna; Colin Stetson isn't your standard film composer, nor is 2018's cerebral psychological family horror Hereditary your standard frightfest. Stetson's droning brass and avant-garde compositions may add layers of mercurial dread to filmmaker Ari Aster's bleak visuals but when isolated, the pieces take on entirely new life of caustic, crawling atmospherics which swell to nauseating degrees before spiralling into frenzies of twisted modern classical imbued jazz, complete with bursts of warped brass and psychotic strings coalescing into truly hellish soundscapes.

Review: International Anthem continues to serve up inspired debuts from some of the more intriguing members of Chicago's jazz and experimental music communities. The latest comes from multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser Macie Stewart, who has delivered what's being dubbed "a companion piece for moving through life". At the heart of the album is Stewart's use of both piano and 'prepared piano' (a technique where various items such as coins and pieces of felt are attached to the instrument's strings). These picturesque and occasionally melancholic musical motifs come wrapped in atmospheric field recordings and sensitive string quartet arrangements. The results are rarely less than memorable, mesmerising and magnificent.

Review: Macie Stewart's debut on International Anthem finds the multi-instrumentalist and composer, in her own words, writing a "love letter to the moments we spend in-between," all while returning to her first instrument, the piano. Through prepared piano, field recordings and string quartets, she creates a cinematic, transient world that reflects her musical journey. Featuring collaborations with artists like Lia Kohl and Whitney Johnson, the album weaves a sound collage of memory and movement that is inspired by her travels. When the Distance is Blue muses on themes of change, longing and the beauty found in the unknown.

Review: Shame On Dry Land (Syndabocken) is an award-winning Swedish movie that picked up the Guldbagge prize for best feature film soundtrack in 2024. That soundtrack has been written and produced by sometime Studio Barnhus associate and mythical young artist Baba Stiltz. It arrives on vinyl for the first time here and is a dense affair with plenty of esoteric stylings as you would expect of a man with a famously hard-to-pin-down sound. It goes from heavy and dark to airy and Mediterranean and needs to be heard nice and loud for the best effect.

Review: You don't need to know that Craobh Haven was made during a one week residency at a tiny cabin in a remote Scottish village of the same name. One play through of the latest stunner to land on the ever-excellent ambient institution SWIMS and it'll feel like you were there in person. A witness to the creation of this strangely natural-feeling, highly technically-crafted, six tracker. Everything about the work by London-based musician and visual artist Loz Keystone and Glaswegian synth explore and jazz trumpeter Christos Stylianides feels in the right place. Its warm and fuzzy but vast and windswept. It's avant garde and abstract, but rounded and complete. It's incredibly inviting and slowly hypnotic. Distant samples of inaudible chatter and looped melodic refrains. Distorted walls of noise masking the patient power of aching brass. You get the point.

Review: Japanese ambient owes a great debt to Masahiro Sugaya, whose work has been re-assessed and taken on all the more importance in recent years. The now cult musician and composer released his The Long Living Things album in 1988 for the performing arts company he belonged to, Pappa Tarahumara. Though it was overlooked for many years, it is now in sharp focus and gets a deserving reissue on vinyl for the first time ever by P-Vine which he also belonged to, and has long been overlooked by all but a few enthusiastic music lovers. One track from it was Grammy-nominated and rich of the record is minimalistic, with soft interwoven sequences that keep you afloat amongst the warming pads.

Review: A new chapter in the 'zen music for disturbed souls' series, Erik K. Skodvin adds to his legacy as alter-ego Svarte Greiner with another stunning EP that has plenty of layers to dive into, albeit on the surface seems constructed in an ultra-minimalistic way. Understanding the nuances takes a little background reading, but before that let's talk sounds - reverse out fragments of cello, electric-acoustic improvisation, sparse, dark, almost bleak and certainly a little but eerie. If that sounds intriguing enough, the process behind it should seal the deal. 'Devolving Trust' is actually a live recording, captured in the depths o the Schneider Brewery, Berlin. A setting the producer himself describes as "wet and hollow" with "long reverb", it's aural effect defines the music that's here. 'Devolve' then takes those tones and rethinks, retouches and reorganises them with similar gravitas.

Review: Classical and film composition legend John Williams, at the time of writing, is currently still in Tokyo; it was only two months ago, in February 2024, that Williams returned to Japan for two special concerts, held in Matsumoto and Tokyo respectively, to perform select pieces from his esteemed film score repertoire. Performed alongside conductor Seiji Ozawa - and this being his debut with the world famous Saito Kinen Orchestra - the second of these concerts is now available to purchase on vinyl here thanks to Deutsche Grammophon, complementing his prior concert albums The Berlin Concert and John Williams in Vienna.

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.