Togetherness Music for Sixteen Musicians (featuring Evan Parker)
Alexander Hawkins

2021

With Togetherness Music, British pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins presents a fascinating musical panorama, a distillation and synthesis of different traditions and influences, reflecting the broad spectrum of an extraordinary musical spirit.

Released to celebrate Hawkins' 40th birthday, this six-movement quasi-orchestral work is an extensive expansion and revision of a piece which originated with a commission from conductor and composer Aaron Holloway-Nahum for the Riot Ensemble, to feature Hawkins and saxophone icon Evan Parker - with whom Hawkins has enjoyed a now more than decade-long musical association - as soloists.

The new incarnation of the work features the original forces, augmented by additional acoustic improvisers and the electronic wizardry of matthew wright. Whilst the Riot Ensemble are primarily renowned for their performances of notated contemporary classical music, and Parker is one of the seminal figures in free improvisation and the post-Coltrane jazz continuum, roles shift fluidly throughout this work, creating an entirely distinctive soundworld.

Leçons de ténèbres

2023

London’s Riot Ensemble present Leçons de ténèbres, a landmark portrait album of Patricia Alessandrini. Covering the most significant instalments of her creative output across the last fifteen years, Leçons de ténèbres showcases Riot Ensemble’s extensive experience in experimental performance, bringing us five works that fuse concert music aesthetics with electronic processing.

Often starting with a pre-existing piece of music, Patricia Alessandrini utilises electronic processes to distort and filter audio recordings to find radical musical deviations from the source, transcribing the results for new instrumental forces.

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Riot Ensemble: Speak, Be Silent
The Riot Ensemble

2022

London’s Riot Ensemble present works by four of the most important composers in contemporary music today—Chaya Czernowin, Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders, and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir—alongside rising star Mirela Ivičević, who was commissioned as part of the ensemble’s 2017 Call for Scores. Four of the works are recorded here for the first time.

Inspired by the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, Liza Lim’s violin concerto Speak, Be Silent, featuring American violinist Sarah Saviet as soloist, explores ideas of union and connection, as well as the ecstasy that comes at moments of change or transition. The atmospheric Ró—the Icelandic word for serenity—by Anna Thorvaldsdóttir is a piece of quiet but threatening moods that eventually comes to convey a fragile sense of identity and wholeness. In stark contrast, Mirela Ivičević’s Baby Magnify/Lilith’s New Toy features the capricious demon and seductress Lilith experimenting her way through a series of alchemical transformations.

Painted Light
Solem Quartet

2023

This inventively curated album from the ever exploratory Solem Quartet presents music that is awash with colour. The refined beauty of Edmund Finnis’s Devotions and stained-glass luminosity of Camden Reeves’s The Blue Windows are complemented by works by Lili Boulanger and Henriëtte Bosmans from the early twentieth century, when the depth and vividness of colour in Impressionist paintings seemed to spill into music.

A sense of awed wonder before the natural world informs Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Earth, for which the Quartet is joined by the composer as vocalist, while Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now – heard here in an arrangement by the Quartet’s violinist William Newell – provides a delicate lesson in perspective.

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Overview Effect
Roger Goula

2016

Cognitive Shift Recordings debut release will be the first album from composer Roger Goula; Overview Effect. The album encapsulates the ethos of the new label, bridging the gap between modern classical and electronic music, creating a cohesive work that is both entirely of the moment and timeless.

The record’s stunning classical string instrumentation is performed by the illustrious quartet of Thomas Gould, Peter Gregson, Lucy Railton and Stephen Upshaw.

Vestige
Riot Ensemble

2023

Based on their debut performance at London's Wigmore Hall during the COVID19 Pandemic, Vestige ranges from an intimate vocal solo by Naomi Pinnock, through pensive string trios of Alex Groves and Peter Wilson, to virtuosic chamber music of Ashkan Behzadi, Michaela Catranis and Enno Poppe. The album also includes Elizabeth Lutyens’ Requiescat, which was highlighted by Fiona Maddocks in a review in The Guardian:

“Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83), whose recognition is long overdue, was among a group of composers commissioned to write a work in memory of Stravinsky, after his death in 1971. The result was Requiescat, which set lines from William Blake’s The Couch of Death, accompanied by string trio: five minutes of ethereal, quietly ebbing music that brings to mind Blake’s angel paintings…Each of these contrasting tracks is played with expression and finesse by this first-rate group.”

Vestige is Riot Ensemble's second co-production with Deutschlandfunk, and fourth production on the Coviello Contemporary label.