Five spellbinding and spacious works shaped by the quiet focus of lockdown, the album is a window into Lonsdale’s musical mind. The common thread of references to windows, skies, and horizons, reflects the mood of those months, Lonsdale explains: ‘Windows were our only point of contact with the outside world; skies and clouds were what I could see from them; horizons represented the unreachable—our freedom. The music is shaped by a pervasive uncertainty about the future.’

Each piece explores the threshold between tone and noise, hovering between harmonic, airy, rustling, spectral and noisy textures. Like skies that consist of air (noise) and particles which come together to form the illusion of clouds as though distinct and tangible bodies. Similarly, drones figure here like horizons, Lonsdale says, ‘drones are fundamental in all of the pieces. Especially in the way they interact with the more foregrounded material, sometimes in consonant and sometimes dissonant relationships to it.

Thinking about windows, all the music explores the layering of compositional elements and about what happens when these elements drop away to reveal what is going on in the background or when they surge forward to cover up something that was previously foregrounded. Another feature they have in common is an almost complete lack of silence. The waxing and waning happens within the layers of sound itself. White noise almost takes the place of silence here.

SIDE A

Staring Through Empty Windows
for organ and seven string instruments (2021)
Rothko Collective
[10:30]

Clear and Stormy Horizons
for piano trio (2021)
Paddington Trio
[4:50]

Thin Clouds
for flute ensemble and percussion (2021)
Guildhall Piccolo Ensemble
[7:40]

SIDE B

Breathing Skies and The Distant Bells of Fulfilment
for six voices and tape, 2021
Exaudi Vocal Ensemble & James Weeks (conductor)
[6:27]

Murky Windows and Cloudy Horizons
for bass clarinet and four-channel audio (2020)
Heather Roche (bass clarinet)
[16:34]

PERFORMERS

Track 1: 
Leon Human (violin 1), Anna Brown (violin 2), Dominic Stokes (viola 1), Jay Boyd (viola 2), Sandy Scott-Brown (cello 1), Aris Sabetai (cello 2), Evangeline Tang (double bass), Tilly Mattich (Organ)

Track 2:
Paddington Trio, Tuulia Hero (violin), Patrick Moriarty (cello), Stephanie Tang (piano)

Track 3:
Tamsin Reed, Lucy Walsh, Jess McNulty, Stratford Ryan, Justyna Szynkarczyk, Emilija Jonusaite, Katie Furlong, Samantha Rowe, Pauline Delamotte (piccolos), Imogen Davey (bass flute), Eden Lonsdale (percussion)

Track 4:
EXAUDI: Juliet Fraser (soprano), Lucy Goddard (mezzo), Tom Williams (countertenor), David de Winter (tenor), Simon Whiteley (bass), Jimmy Holliday (bass), James Weeks (conductor)

Track 5:
Heather Roche (bass clarinet)

CREDITS

All music by Eden Lonsdale

Recorded by Eden Lonsdale

Mastered by Nicholas Moroz & Patrick Hegarty

Cover photograph by Eden Lonsdale

Design by Nicholas Moroz

Created with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation

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