The Primordial Pieces (2024)

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About The Primordial Pieces | Album Credits | Press Quotes

About The Primordial Pieces

Release date: 9th August 2024 (Library of Nothing Records)

An album of five instrumental works by Leo Chadburn, focussed on the naked, elemental components of music: a long tone, a static chord, a rising scale.

Despite the material's transparency, the music seems poised on the edge of sensuousness, in these close-up recordings of piano, violins and synthesizer drones.

Opening track The Reflecting Pool is built from dramatic, rippling arpeggios; Camouflage explores a single harmony through turbulent reiterations. De La Salle (Violins) and Map of the World present sustained chords that teem with overtones, and an austere melody shimmers in a heat-haze of resonances on final track A Secret.

This music is based on sketches dating from the turn of the millennium (c.1999-2001), which have been revisited, reworked and re-recorded for this release. These "early works" contain the essence of Leo's music as it was to unfold in the subsequent 25 years, drawing inspiration from the forms and aesthetics of visual art, and prefiguring the structural clarity and boldness of his more recent and well-known explorations of voice and text.

Album Credits

Performers:

Ben Smith - piano
Angharad Davies, Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono and Amalia Young - violins
Leo Chadburn - synths (Roland Juno-6 and Vermona Mono Lancet)

Production Credits:

Produced by Leo Chadburn
Mastered by Newton Armstrong
Engineered by James Russell

Recording of The Primordial Pieces was completed with the generous financial assistance of the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

Press for The Primordial Pieces

...“The Reflecting Pool,” featuring Ben Smith on piano, is nothing but a set of rising glissandi set against Chadburn’s low, droning synthesizer. It’s a densely, knottily chromatic progression that shifts slightly with every repetition; I find myself attempting to track the changes—an impossible task—with every pass, retracing the glissando’s slippery path as the notes dissolve in real time. “Map of the World” and “De La Salle (Violins)” smear a violin quartet into a blurry form that makes me think of the texture and lumiosity of rippled glass; “Camouflage,” for solo piano, rolls like a dust bunny, a pinkish cloud of next-to-nothing. It’s gorgeous. Finally, “A Secret” reprises the format of “The Reflecting Pool”: rising piano figures—slow and drowsy this time, languid as a post-nap stretch and yawn—shadowed, barely, by the faintest trace of synthesizer. The whole thing’s stunning, with a rare purity of focus and intent—not so much minimal music, perhaps, as mineral music, glinting like quartz and mica...
—Philip Sherburne, Futurism Restated, 10 September 2024

...British composer Leo Chadburn trawled through musical sketches he made more than 25 years ago to revise and develop the pieces found on his latest album, a stunning minimalist showcase where the most skeletal material feels gorgeously expansive. Pianist Ben Smith tackles three of the five works—with the composer adding subtle synth accents on two of them—beginning with “The Reflecting Pool,” a series of patiently and elegantly intoned arpeggios whose sustain is underlined by electronic halos. It's one of several pieces here that seem to levitate almost motionless, quietly enveloping the listener with decaying overtones that seem to reveal more action than the rolling lines from which they emerged. “Camouflage” goes through endless shifts in phrasing and accents while retaining the same harmonic contour—as if watching the infinite sparkle on the surface of a a placid sea—while the closing piece “A Secret” is an ascending scalar line “Map of the World” is a knockout string quartet in which a single chord is sustained for 10 glorious minutes of sensuous harmony, with variation coming primarily from shifting bow pressure or arco speed, casting a mesmerizingly beautiful ambience that could sustain for eternity. While certain listeners might complain that nothing happens, I only wish the reverie didn't end so soon. “De La Salle (Violins)” employs a similar tact with greater aggression and volume, with the bows in constant motion to produce an eerily still yet pregnant atmosphere, effectively charged by terse single line variants. Technically, not too much happens, but it's among the most exciting things I've heard all year...
—Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily's Best Contemporary Classical, August 2024

...Chadburn uses very little in the way of material, but it is employed to craft expansive compositions... The Primordial Pieces is compelling throughout, and one of my favorite releases of 2024...
—Christian Carey, Christian Carey, November 2024

...On The Primordial Pieces, Leo Chadburn explores the depth of simplicity... And while much of the album is quiet, Chadburn's music is never still. Turbulent oscillations churn underneath floating tones, bringing them back down to Earth and giving a sense of depth to the otherwise blissful music...
—Vanessa Ague, The Quietus, 12 August 2024

British composer Leo Chadburn's latest album springs into action by way of an arpeggiated piano flourish that's pure Liberace, leaving you wondering where he can reasonably go next. In Chadburn's music, though, nothing is ever quite as it seems. He used to trade under the name Simon Bookish, creating pop music that sounded as though it had been pulverised from the inside—and Leo Chadburn's own music behaves similarly. Each of these five pieces—variously scored for piano, synthesiser and four violins—puts an unfamiliar spin on a harmonic or melodic hook that you might think sounds wearily familiar. Then, through repetition and/or gradually rotating musical material on its axis, more is revealed than was at first apparent.
—Philip Clark, Prospect Magazine's The Culture, September 2024