Discs of Chris Newman’s music only appear sporadically. Mode brought out its first disc of the British-born but Berlin-resident composer more than five years ago; that was a selection of Newman’s piano sonatas , but this follow-up concentrates on earlier pieces, two from the 80s, two from the 90s, and provides a good sample of the kind of angular, raw sound with which Newman, born in 1958, announced himself in the 80s. It’s naggingly memorable music in which the process by which the notes are generated – often an entirely non-musical one – has always mattered at least as much as the final aural result. So while the spiky rhythmic unisons of a work such as Symphony, from 1981, and the seamless series of musical snapshots in 1994’s Ghosts, which recycles ideas from earlier works, share a family resemblance, their starting points were very different. Rhythmic ideas from Beethoven’s Fifth provide one of the layers in the Ghost Symphony of 1998; in Cologne (1987), it’s the bad English translation of a German travel brochure that furnishes the text which appears towards the end, which Newman himself recites in his deadpan manner.
