British composers don’t get very far these days if they live in an ivory tower. Any music ensemble seeking public funding needs an outreach programme, needs to connect. The same is true of the commissioned composers. With Tansy Davies, contemporary street life pulses through particularly strongly. You can easily imagine her going clubbing; not the case, say, with Thomas Adès, though at 40 he’s only three years her senior.
Adès visited club music like a tourist in part of his score Asyla. But Davies, you feel, is completely at home underground with hallucinogenic lights and hard-driven rhythms. Yet she’s also a composer who shapes her notes with the adventurous timbres and clarity of contemporary music’s avant-garde. As a young teenager she played in rock bands. As an older teenager she discovered Boulez and Ligeti. Formal composition training followed. What emerged was music that breaks down categories. Abrasive and abrupt, it’s both classical and non-classical, infused with funk and alternative rock, and it fills this exuberant new CD.
Neon, the first track, establishes several characteristics. Lopsided rhythms careen and crash. The sound world is dirty, the music “distressed”. We visit the same world at a slower pace in inside out 2, a piece with the erratic progress and fascination of a wonky machine. Another piece, Grind Show (electric), conjures up Goya. Defying its pretty name, the Azalea Ensemble, conducted by Christopher Austin, recreates these faintly disturbing landscape pieces with lurid precision and grit.
Not everything fits this mould. Greenhouses features the vibrato-free soprano of Anna Snow, sharing the field with double bass, flute and percussion in a touching setting of words by an American peace activist killed in Gaza. Angular, spare, but human, Troubairitz, for soprano and drum (Damien Harron), imagines a 21st-century version of medieval music, using texts by women troubadours. Salt Box gives us more “distressed” sounds, aided by electronics, trails of melody and gestures fragmenting to the point of collapse.
Five remixes wrap up proceedings, with Mira Calix’s remix of Greenhouses taking the crown. But it’s still Tansy Davies’s show.
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Nonclassical