Out today is “Fetus,” the second single from Oxford, UK-based electronic composer Sebastian Reynolds‘ from his new album Canary, out September 29th via PinDrop. Reynolds describes “Fetus” as “a modern classical dreamscape for a disrupted mindstate.”
Where the claustrophobic leadoff single “Cascade” confronts the horrors of terrorism (while still managing to be dance-y), “Fetus” creates a hallucinatory sense of spaciousness that recalls film composers Hans Zimmer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and experimental cellist Oliver Coates.
Reynolds explains: “Our son was born asleep on 24th July 2020, and I composed ‘Fetus’ as a tribute to Noah and is shared with love and empathy for all those affected by tragedies such as this.”
“Fetus” combines haunting piano, chiming Thai Gong Circle, a heart-stopping cello performance from Stornoway’s Jonathan Ouin, and vocal samples from Cornish singer Sarah Tresidder.
Inspired by Susumu Yokota, Luigi Nono, Olivier Messiaen, Stockhausen, and Thom Yorke, Canary‘s soundscapes visit upon traumas like the stillbirth of a child, the death of one’s parents and survival after a bomb attack, as well as themes like the fragmentation of our collective cognition, the awakening of machine intelligence and Pali Buddhist notions of consciousness.
As always, Reynolds remains intent on preserving a sense of meaning in his hybrid of programmed and organic sounds.
Born to a computer-engineer mom who worked for Research Machines, Sebastian Reynolds grew up “surrounded by dusty, strange machines that played games from cassettes.” Naturally, he was drawn to electronic production before he ever picked up a “real” instrument. But when he started kicking around in bands, his music acquired a living-breathing-sweating essence that it’s maintained over his 25-year career. This is, after all, an artist who named one of his releases Nihilism Is Pointless…
His new album Canary, however, raises the bar with soul-stirring meditation on life, death and the afterlife in the wake of his mother’s passing, followed not long thereafter by the stillbirth of his son. Influenced by what he describes as the aural “dreamworld” created by Susumu Yokota, as well as the post-traumatic shell shock that galvanized the compositions of Luigi Nono, Olivier Messiaen, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Reynolds is especially adapt at blurring the line between mechanical and organic sound sources.
Reynolds hybridizes programmed and played sound sources not like some gleeful modern-day Frankenstein/Kurzweil who’s lost perspective on what it means to be alive, but as someone who sees electronic music as a fertile medium to express meaning. As a teenager growing up in Oxford, England during the ’90s, Reynolds was close to ground zero when Radiohead showed that they could conserve the humanity of their music, even as they plunged head-first into a kind of digital abyss.
Similarly, though Canary peers over the edge of the precipice we all find ourselves facing today — a bomb going off, the fragmentation of our collective mindscape, the awakening of machine intelligence, a child’s life cut-off at birth, and the quotidian reality of living the rest of one’s life without their parents — Reynolds always manages to locate a heartbeat in his electro-organic mélange of sounds.
Reynolds has collaborated with Anne Müller (Erased Tapes) and Alex Stolze (Bodi Bill), Mike Bannard at The Aviary, and others. Sebastian also continues to work on commissions for Neon Dance. His projects have received airtime across the BBC and beyond.
