in brieflive
24.03

Albion, Now

Manchester Collective: »Series of Four #2« 
© Caroline Bittencourt
© Caroline Bittencourt

What does Britain sound like now? Like a country longing for ideals and meaning following its abandonment of any sort of common cause or experience. The catastrophe of Brexit looms large. 

At least Britain still has talent. Manchester Collective is one of the nimble ensembles that have emerged from a British artistic landscape in which old infrastructural certainties no longer rule. It is a flexible, string-based group that plays with heart, soul and extraordinary technical finesse. Its ear for detail, sense of floating lightness and good taste in composers caught the attention of the Danish String Quartet, which presented the ensemble’s exploration of contemporary Britishness as part of its Series of Four festival. 

All the composers featured see beyond thinking of innovation in terms of tonality. The wild hockets and reels of »Muttos« from Christian Mason’s Sardinian Songbook tap a typically English handling of folk material, as do Dobrinka Tabakova’s Insight and Jonathan Dove’s Out of Time. Those pieces, and Andrew Hamilton’s absurdist musical jigsaw puzzle In beautiful May, speak of loss as much as Anna Meredith’s Tuggemo shrieks a sort of plastic optimism. 

The highlights were the half-lit remembrances of Jocelyn Campbell’s 3AM and Edmund Finnis’s String Quartet No 2. Finnis’s piece extends a salient, introspective form of British minimalism. The third movement, played without vibrato, seems to express a longing to exist beyond the confines it has prescribed for itself. Very British. Just as much so was the particular charm that flowed all night from MC-founder Rakhi Singh, who with her colleagues, played everything with astonishing, tender beauty.  

© PR

»Music is, to us, a kind of closed club of nepotism, networking and Copenhagen cowboy energy. But in reality, it’s got nothing to do with expensive guitars or technical skill. For us, music is something you can feel in your chest, or something that gives you goosebumps. The best concerts are when someone screams so earnestly that the rest of us don’t have to. The best music expresses emotions in a way that would get you picked up by an ambulance if you did it out on the street. For us, music should fuck with the people who have it too comfortable, and give those who have it fucked a feeling that they’re not alone. Boom. And what the fuck is a chord and a key anyway? Kisses from Nightmaries.«

Nightmaries blend saws, guitars and voices into a dark-country, no-wave, cowboy-doom nightmare. They create the kind of soundtrack that feels like a fever dream you somehow don’t want to wake up from. As the world gets stranger and darker, Nightmaries lean into the madness, serving up slow-burning songs that creep under your skin like a poison that takes its sweet time. Put on your favourite steel-toe boots, dip your smoky eyes in an ashtray, and prepare yourself for sloppy doom with punk energy.

© PR

»To me, music is love. I love how music allows you to skip the small talk and connect directly with people’s innermost selves. It is an extraordinary and moving way to meet one another.«

Fenja wrote her first song at the age of twelve – about a polar bear dying due to climate change – and themes of existentialism, nature, and her own sensitive nature came to define the lyrics and sound she has since developed. She released her debut album, Flugtdyr, in 2021, and in February 2026, she released the album Menneskedyr.

© PR
© PR

Danish composer Sofus Forsberg has died at the age of 56. With his distinctive blend of melodic sensibility, electronic processing and rhythmic precision, he created a musical world that moved effortlessly between IDM, pop and the avant-garde.

© Simon Weyhe

»Music for me is my hobby, my job, my outlet, my mood, an endless source of discovering new music and new, old music, some of the best and can be some of the worst. And I love it!« 

Track72 aka Tue Track aka Anders Lundby Brixen. Producer, DJ, rapper and more. Known for his role in the trio Malk De Koijn, which since the mid-1990s has created a personal universe in Danish hip-hop. Has performed in Ponyblod, Xtra Naan, Track Abdullah Rock, Booty Cologne and others.

© PR
© PR

On Wednesday, 5 August 2026, it happened again: a chord in John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) changed after two and a half years. Classic FM reports.

The work was written by the American avant-garde composer John Cage in the mid-1980s. The score consists of eight pages of music, and, as the title suggests, the instruction is to play it »as slow as possible.«