My Great Listen - Gemma Peacocke - Phil News

Nautilus is one of the most gloriously fierce and fun orchestral pieces I’ve ever heard. This aggressive, bassheavy synthpop piece is by Anna Meredith, a Scottish composer and producer who wrote it when she was first starting to use electronics in her instrumental music. Its rising bassline comprises a series of 12/8 bars followed by a 15/8 bar; the offkilter time signatures lend Nautilus a slightly unhinged vibe. Various arrangements of Nautilus have been used in Lady Gaga’s film Five Foot Two and on the Eighth Grade soundtrack, and a full orchestral version was released this year by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dalia Stasevska.

Björk has been a superstar of avantpop since the 1990s and I fell in love with her music as an earnestly angsty teenager. For me (and a lot of other lugubrious young people), Björk’s music was a gateway drug to Icelandic bands Sigur Rós and Múm. I had all three on high rotation when I was finishing my music degree at Vic. I loved that, like me, these Icelandic oddballs were also from a small, isolated and misty country, and that they combined unusual
harmonies and extended song forms with pop sensibilities.

The version of ‘All is Full of Love’ that still cuts me to the quick is the trip-hop mix with a futuristic, queer cyborg music video. The music is structurally simple and harmonically rich with major seventh chords that are bittersweet and that create a heartrending tension. The orchestration is incredibly stripped back; it is mostly understated synth pads and pentatonic zither flourishes so that Björk’s multitracked voice singing “All is full of love” over and over becomes ecstatic in its ritualistic repetition.

Warren Maxwell is both a wildly fantastic musician and a beautiful human being. ‘Home, Land & Sea’ takes my breath away; it’s one of my all-time favourite songs from Aotearoa and it pulls me back home whenever I listen to it. It’s also a perfect protest song in that the sound is joyous and sweet, belying the defiance and heartache in the lyrics. The Rhodes keyboard and laid-back drumset playing give the song a nostalgic feeling, calling back to protest music from an earlier era. Hollie Smith’s harmony on the final chorus opens the song up into an anthem.

TrinityRoots released this song on their second album, Home, Land and Sea, back in 2004. Two decades later, the subject matter is as rich and important as ever, and the music is still causing homesickness in Kiwis everywhere.

You can hear the world premiere performance Gemma Peacocke's new work for Brass and Percussion, Don't You Trust Me?, at Baroque & Beyond: Colours of Brass

7.30pm, Thursday 31 October
Holy Trinity Cathedral