Ailís Ní Ríain: Holocene Onyx Brass, Hammonds Brass Band (NMC)

Thanks to Graham Rickson at The Arts Desk

A perk of this gig is enlarging one’s vocabulary, so I now know that the Holocene is ‘is an interglacial period within the ongoing glacial cycles of the Quaternary’. Put simply, it’s the 11,700 years since the last Ice Age, a relatively warm period in the planet’s history between ice ages. Ailís Ní Ríain’s 14-minute Holocene was premiered at Bradford Cathedral in June (where this live recording was made), a New Music Biennial collaboration between Ní Ríain and Onyx Brass, supported by the local Hammonds Band. Listen to this through headphones and you’re made aware of the work’s strata, the busier brass quintet writing playing out over slow-moving, dense slabs of sound. Chords slip in and out of focus, the murky textures periodically broken by chattering trumpets and trombones. It’s akin to witnessing a seismic event in slow motion, a doleful close with a handful of instruments gasping for breath suggesting that the future doesn’t look too hopeful. Ní Ríain’s deafness means that she can only hear low frequencies: that Holocene is so viscerally effective suggests that she possesses a remarkable musical imagination. Recommended.

Holocene is available from NMC Recordings