NEW MUSIC: LEAH KARDOS – FEATHER HAMMER
Something awkwardly minimally ambient, driven from a piano base. A debut album from Leah Kardos, an Australian living in Bedford, UK.
She’s kindly done Ted’s Top Ten Quiz:
1. Weatherall or Oakenfold? Weatherall
2. Real Instruments or Synthesisers? I love synths, but I’m shit at driving them so I’ll say real instruments.
3. Dance or classical? Can’t I have both? I want both.
4. Coffee or wine? Wine.
5. Chopin or Cage? Chopin.
6. Death or Disco? Give me death, drawn in the style of Junko Mizuno
7. Lecturing or composing? Composing, always.
8. Bedford or Brisbane? Neither!
9. 808 or 303? 808
10. G’day or Hello? I can’t say g’day in this country without feeling like a tit.
And so to the music. This is ambient coming at it not from the dub and dance sources of The Orb but the more austere, aescetic end of classical chinstrokers John Cage and John Tavener. There’s also something about the scale of this music. Like some of Tavener’s Orthodox chant pieces and especially The Protecting Veil they either need to be heard very small and personal or at an enormous and public scale like the Albert Hall. But there’s less the sense of being small in the face of a Deity, rather small in a pained and personal suffering way. There’s no point in me reviewing all the tracks because it’s about the sensations they evoke as a whole. But there’s a good review here. Best track DFACE.
Blurb: Feather Hammer is a collection of short pieces that explore the composerʼs relationship with the piano, her first instrument, as a source of familiarity, expressing warmth, pain, repetitive stress injuries, muscle memory, and a way
to communicate with the outside world. The music crosses genre boundaries between contemporary classical, folktronica and ambient styles, and has been constructed from acoustic and prepared piano sounds and location
recordings, making special use of the unique strummed, plucked, ambient and percussive tones of the instrument.
Leah Kardos is an Australian composer and producer working in Bedford, England. Her past projects include film scores, chamber work commissions, collaborations with bands and a trip-hop tribute to David Bowie. Feather Hammer is the first album project that she has released under her own name as the sole composer, performer and producer. The album bears the marks of Leahʼs diverse influences; from the tiny, intimate, percussive beauty of Bjorkʼs Vespertine to the prepared piano works of John Cage, via the sampling and cut-up work of Amon Tobin, the cyclic minimalism of Glass and Riley, the disjointed grooves of Graham Fitkin and the expansive ambient textures of Brian Eno.
A live premiere of the work has been developed in collaboration with video artist Matthew Greasley and will be staged on the 25th of November 2011 at The Wilmington Arms in London; the Ligeti Quartet and improviser and drone artist Sam Grinsell will present support performances.
1hr radio show from Resonance 104.4fm where Leah explains the album and plays tracks
ACID TED 