Laurence Crane & Asamisimasa - Sound Of Horse (2016)

The music of the English composer Laurence Crane as performed by the Norwegian group Asamisimasa. Available as a CD with a 16 page booklet and a 2LP with printed inner sleeves and bonus track.

On the face of it, his carefully hand-written scores move notes across a page, using minimal resources to create elegant formal shapes whose simple repetitions or drones gather cumulative weight as they go. But in, these sounds evoke a vivid imaginative world, from the humdrum - the chime of a clock, a siren's wail, the whirr of an air-conditioning system - to the sublime. Unlike most composers, Crane deals with beauty quite unapologetically, and this is a very beautiful album.

Crane (born in Oxford, 1961) operates in an international context but it's possible to read his music as in some ways emblematically English, however fanciful such determinism may be. One thinks of Brian Eno, say, as much as Morton Feldman; of the painters Constable and Turner, even. It is also hard not to see an element of wilful English eccentrism in Crane's choice of texts for the three movements of 'Events': lists of famous people's birthdays, selected foreign exchange rates, and a record of UK weather, all taken from one day's edition of The Guardian.