New Music Biennial review – sitars, thorax-quaking bass and vibrators

The Guardian

2 days ago

'Growling through the trombone is a new one for me,' admitted one musician between performances of Ailís Ní Ríain's work Holocene. Bradford Cathedral echoed with squawks, rattles and primordial grumbling as the combined forces of Onyx Brass and Hammonds Band conjured Ní Ríain's vivid soundscape of life on Earth 11,000 years ago (imagine prehistoric megafauna getting the Jaws treatment). But those lower brass growls weren't the score's most daring feature. That honour goes to the four percussionists who teased waves of soft rustling from cymbals with small battery-operated vibrators.
All in a day's work at the New Music Biennial – now in its fifth iteration and hosted this year in Bradford, UK City of Culture 2025, before the same lineup of 20 short pieces decamps to London's Southbank Centre in July. Most weren't strictly world premieres (nor is the Biennial strictly biennial) but as a free showcase of activity across the UK music scene, there's nothing quite like it. Folk, jazz and electronic artists appear alongside classical ensembles – though such labels mean little when most of the featured music crosses such boundaries as standard.
Composer and violinist Ellie Wilson's haunting Moth x Human, for instance, turned data about night-time moth activity into a beguiling synthesised fabric ('the moths are collaborating') with which her small acoustic ensemble duetted in The Loading Bay, an unused warehouse and building site converted into two intimate performance venues and an art gallery. Xenia Pestova Bennett's Glow was a shimmering, spooky set of movements for magnetic resonator piano and Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble, woven through with spine-tingling recorded narration about weird light phenomena in Danish, Welsh and Turkish. Sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun's Into the Night – bringing together five Indian classical musicians with the BBC Concert Orchestra – was his latest thrilling example of cross-cultural collaboration, the orchestra amplifying and harmonising the two raags on which the Indian classical musicians improvised, nods and smiles passing between them. Less persuasive (despite a fearless performance by the Carice Singers and conductor George Parris) was Daniel Kidane's fiendishly difficult N'dehou, a rambling, pointillistic tapestry of syllables inspired by a Cameroonian single-note bamboo flute.
In a longstanding feature of the New Music Biennial, each work is played twice, sandwiching a short interview. 'What's the difference between the piece we just heard and commercial dance music?' asked the presenter between performances of Alex Groves' Dance Suite in a small subterranean nightclub. 'I don't think there is one,' grinned Groves. And it's true that the grimy, thorax-quaking bass, looped vocal melodies and rhythmic prestidigitation of Zubin Kanga's virtuosic performance – on laptop, keyboard and Midi-controlling Roli Seaboard – were obviously at home in the space in a way most of the audience were not. The huge, unnamed difference, however, was the invitation to listen closely and admire how Dance Suite functioned as a 'set of baroque dances for the 21st century' (hardly a conventional description of most electronic dance music): a reminder of the radical impact of how we talk about music – any music – on what we end up hearing.
At the Southbank Centre 4-6 July.