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PRICE:
$31.50$26.78
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
The Centre Is Everywhere
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
HVALUR 038LP HVALUR 038LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
2/4/2022

The Centre Is Everywhere is the Manchester Collective's first album. They created it in rather extraordinary circumstances, at a time when we were all slowly sinking into the banal dystopia of a pandemic-stricken world. Their lives, it felt, had slowed to a crawl. Normally the group are fueled by their audiences, but touring was off the menu. So, they made this record. In such an uncertain time, the group wanted to play music that they loved. They ended up with a set of work written over a 120-year period -- weightless and transcendent new music alongside Schoenberg's anguished fin de siècle storytelling. Edmund Finnis's work in particular (the titular "The Centre Is Everywhere") is important to them. He's a friend and a colleague of the groups, and it's been a profound experience for them to live with this piece, to tour it, and to make the first ever recording. Somehow in the writing of it, Edmund seems to have prefigured the lack of certainty that has been one of the defining characteristics of this period. His music spins freely through time and space, wraithlike and beautiful. Whilst recording both "Company" by Philip Glass and "Transfigured Night" by Arnold Schoenberg, the group found themselves drawn to a pervading sense of wildness and nature. The hypnotic rise and fall of the rhythms and textures in Glass's quartet (presented here in an arrangement for string orchestra) feel quite separate to industrial, man-made structures and forms. Like Edmund's work, these short movements feel out of time and cyclical, like eternally repeating tides or moon-phases. Schoenberg's masterpiece for string sextet opens on a moonlit forest scene, two lovers venturing through a bare, cold grove. The group tried to create a recording that paints the violent contrasts of this piece as vividly as possible, from the claustrophobic confessions that open the work through to the gleaming sound world of the second half. As the piece closes, the group's wooden, earthbound instruments seem to have been transmuted by the glamor and glow of Schoenberg's music. Clear vinyl.