Nazar
Demilitarize                          
Hyperdub Records
★★★★★

BELGIUM-BORN Angolan producer and composer Nazar’s debut album, Guerilla, released in 2020, for the Hyperdub label was a fusion of rough-hewn EDM and field recordings from the Angolan civil war. The new album was written at a time of new romance but at the same time Nazar had a serious Covid illness complication.

Faced with his own mortality he was motivated to rethink formulas, as he says: “I didn’t seek to capture sounds from real places, rather to make it almost metaphysical like creating sci-fi, with classic cyberpunk influences.”

The end results more than live up to expectation. Opening up with Core, a surreal fragmented collage. Next up the standout track Anticipate, with Nazar’s dreamlike off-centre submerged semi-sung vocals, seemingly lost in distant fog, and the music fragile, full of radical African inspired electronic rhythms, sharp as knives. Chords flutter and leave, melody seemingly hidden then bursting through clouds of dust.

Peter Gregson
Peter Gregson
Decca Records
★★★★★

PETER GREGSON is one of the UK’s leading cellists and fast becoming a composer of importance. His recent performance at London’s Southbank Centre Concrete Voids series wowed the audience, with his ability to be dedicated to experimental, radical, melodic, emotionally charged works. He has released six solo albums since 2010 including three for Deutsche Grammophon.

This debut album for Decca was recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Wiltshire. The nine-song set is a collection of songs without words, a nod to the Romantic era.

The album opens up with Sphere, a brooding brass-like synth textures leads into subtle tonal charm from cello, melting into a panoramic cluster celebration. The single Vision further demonstrates Gregson’s mastery of synth dynamism and filmic ambition. 

Concluding with Rise, distant arpeggio electric guitars morph into deep rich textured dreamlands, the player seemingly lost on a distant bleak planet with a sonic to match.

Mesias Maiguashca
Cello in My life
Buh Records
★★★★★  

ECUADORIAN composer Mesias Maiguashca’s new album is a triumph of radical thinking and bold sonic adventures over the past 40 years. A collaboration with German cellist Gaby Schumacher, it opens with an intimate, pensive work called Ubungen, written in 1973. 

A dialogue between cello and synthesiser, performed by Schumacher with Maiguashca joining on synths and processing. Dark forces emerge from bursting pulse refrains. Harmonic scales pushed to the limit.

Next up, Lindgren, a slow haunting work for cello and magnetic tape. Seemingly a radio transmission into deep space and time. El Oro features flutes and crafted random tribal words and whispered dynamics. The Spirit Catcher is an evocative piece inspired by the writings of American anthropologist and writer Carlos Castaneda. 

Unvermindert Weiter is a duet for cello and accordion and the closing Por el Yasuni, from 2015, a poignant commentary on the protests to protect Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park, featuring violin drones, cello and shifting textures.