James Rushford - Turzets

Two new works from the ever-active Australian composer, recorded while in residence at the La Becque art centre in Switzerland last year. The A comprises one 16 minute long form piece built around piano, a musique concrete approach to disruptive electronics and manipulated vocal snippets, which makes a lot of sense of Wire's description of Rushford as a "haunted Jacobean ASMR". If that sounds funny/faintly ridiculous, then it's also kinda on the money, the competing disjunctions of elegiac piano tones and fractured electronics both eerie and alluring in equal measure. On the flip we get a ten track suite entitled Quire i through X that doubles down hard on the haunted aesthetic, manipulating various repeated sounds and motifs into a disorientating series of movements, some more musical than others, held together in their own uncanny valley. It concludes with the almost-beautiful 'Quire X', a stuttering medieval-futurist drone that could well soundtrack the space cathedrals of the future. You know, the kinda thing you might have heard in Dune if its makers weren't such cowards.