tomas phillips

Quartet For Instruments

Composer Tomas Philips has to date enjoyed an enviable career, releasing full-length works for some of the most talismanic of labels in the field of minimal music, including Line and Trente Oiseaux - the label founded by one of the progenitors of 'lowercase' style composition, Bernhard Gunter (who contributes to this disc as mastering engineer). Taking up a two-month residency program at San Francisco's Headlands Center For The Arts, Philips utilised piano, clarinet, minimal electronics and cello and set about integrating the principles of improvisation into the compositional process. An extension of his 2006 work, Intermission/Six Feuilles (released via Line), Quartet For Instruments is an outstanding long-form piece, one which avoids the excessive niceties of pop-modern composition whilst also shirking the more obviously abrasive tendencies the genre is prone to. Philips challenges the listener under more subtly contrived circumstances, leading you into a maze-like musical structure, riddled with potholes of silence and sudden repetitions. The slow pacing and sense of harmonic ambiguity presiding over the piece make it easy to feel as though you've been set adrift across these forty minutes, and the dynamics and timing of the performances are scrupulously restrained throughout. Morton Feldman clearly exerts a strong influence on Philips' work, and you can certainly hear the bond this emerging artist has with the aforementioned Bernhard Gunter, but with Quartet For Instruments, Philips really leaves his mark as a significant new voice in his own right. Limited to 400 copies, this release comes highly recommended.