minimalism

Commissioned to write the soundtrack for a restored print of The Cursed Village, a classic of Spanish silent cinema, Barcelona’s Raül Refree decided to extend the film’s bleak atmosphere and theme of displacement on this concept album, which translates as The Space Between. Having started out in the 1990s in hardcore bands (Barcelona Corn Flakes), Refree has become prolific as both producer and composer. Here he incorporates pieces from another soundtrack, for Un año, una noche (2022), a film about a traumatised couple…

One would hope that the profile of the pianist and composer Duval Timothy might rise exponentially after his high-profile production work on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morale & the Big Steppers. This former art student – who dresses only in blue (in fealty to the signage in his home borough of Lewisham), co-wrote a cookbook of African recipes and currently lives between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone – has been making consistently excellent music for a long time. His quizzical piano miniatures have been sampled by Loyle…

Pascal Bideau is a French composer based in London who has written and arranged music for dozens of films and documentaries. He has studied Indonesian gamelan, and in his alter ego of Akusmi he explores some of the tropes of this stately, percussive ceremonial music, mixing it with minimalism, jazz and rave.Fleeting Future is rather lovely. Each piece is based around the hypnotic riffs used in gamelan, all using the pentatonic slendro scales, but Bideau orchestrates them by multitracking saxophonist Ruth Velten,…