Kendall: shouting forever into the receiver

Award-winning British composer Hannah Kendall is at the forefront of British music, confronting our collective history and exploring social themes through music which both honours and challenges contemporary musical culture

Her new album shouting forever into the receiver, the latest release in NMC's acclaimed Debut Disc series, presents a broad survey of Kendall's recent music, from solo instrumental pieces to large works.

Three of the works on this album form a triptych exploring Cuban writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo's notion of the 'Plantation Machine'. Ensemble Modern perform the title track, while New York-based Wavefield Ensemble perform Even sweetness can catch the throat and unconventional quartet loadbang present when flesh is pressed against the dark. All three pieces incorporate rasping walkie-talkie radios, ghostly wind-up music boxes and haunting harmonicas to explore the 'machinic system' of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its 'ongoing feedback loop system that continues today' (Kendall). Throughout, Kendall asks 'Where is the hope?' and 'How can the repetitious workings of this machinic system be disrupted and thwarted?'

The album also features three solo works from Kendall's Tuxedo series, inspired by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Harpist Anne Denholm-Blair and violinist Jonathan Morton use various objects associated with Afro hair to transform the sound of their instruments in Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2. and Tuxedo: Crown; Sun King respectively, creating complex webs of meaning, while cellist Louise McMonagle plays Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, written in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and including the piercing sound of an ACME Metropolitan Police Whistle.

The album is completed by the Halle's blistering recording of Where is the chariot of fire?, a response to Lemn Sissay's poem "Godsell", described by the New Statesman as "searingly impactful".