Michael Price
Tender Symmetry

Truly a very interesting record released by Erased Tapes, one of the most cutting-edge entities in the field of experimental and minimalist music, and home to artists such as Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, and Masayoshi Fujita. Among these, a place of honor also belongs to Michael Price, a composer, producer, and arranger of internationally recognized value and fame, and winner of an Emmy Award in 2014 for the series "Sherlock" broadcast on the BBC (but he has also worked on different projects such as the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy). A great architecture enthusiast, although he only acknowledges himself as an "amateur", he lays the conceptual and compositional foundations and, regarding the recording and diffusion of sound, on principles that are closely linked to the structures of buildings. As he himself has declared for "Tender Symmetry," he has stopped merely admiring and contemplating buildings but has begun to partake in them and fill the spaces personally in a process of identifying with their spirit, which, depending on the places, can have different stories to tell. From this point of view, for what is purely a sociological interest, let's say it is undeniable that ultimately every single place is full of stories to tell.

But clearly, Michael chose specific places: a Tudor manor on the banks of the Mersey in Liverpool; an industrial site, including a complete community of 18th-century workers in Cheshire; Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire; a modernist house on Willow Road, London, designed in 1939 by architect Erno Goldfinger; the chapel painted by artist Sir Stanley Spencer in Hampshire; a complex of tunnels built inside the White Cliffs in Kent in the early 1940s; the chapel of All Hallows Church in London. All of this was also possible thanks to the availability of the National Trust, which is responsible for the conservation and enhancement of the cultural and natural heritage of the United Kingdom and wanted to adopt Price's idea, providing him with these structures where the composer literally evoked in seven compositions pieces of history from each of these places, all of which were influenced by their interaction with humans.

Recorded with the collaboration of soprano Grace Davidson and the Shards choir (which contributed to the realization of "All Melody" by Nils Frahm), "Tender Symmetry" is an avant-garde musical work that pushes beyond the boundaries of experimental music as a studio endeavor, placing itself in a neo-classical dimension but at the same time recalling "environmental" experiences and installations in the truest sense, like the experiences of fundamental minimalist composers starting with the usual John Cage, with an inspiration undoubtedly of a dramatic nature that evokes the poetic thought of William Blake and conceptually tackles dramatic historical issues such as ecclesiastical obscurantism, the historic drama of the industrial revolution's impact on the most disadvantaged layers of the UK population, World War II. A monumental work, therefore, but also a great undertaking on a technical level and regarding the recording processes, which were not always smooth or facilitated by typical structures like a studio and, perhaps for this reason, even more so allowed that kind of catharsis for which Price and his collaborators managed to align and reproduce those emotional contents they sought to explore.