‘a sumptuous piece of work ‘
Corey Mwamba, BBC Radio 3 Freeness
‘a quite stunning achievement’
Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
‘the most surprising and rewarding album I have heard this year’
Chris Baber, Jazzviews
‘extraordinary and compelling…an expansive, cacophonous triumph’
Adrian Pallant, LondonJazzNews
‘a powerful fusion of the emotional and the mathematical, at scale’
AJ Dehany, LondonJazzNews
Pendulums is a bold new suite of original music for Bellringers, Improvisers and Electronics featuring some of the UK's most exciting musicians alongside the award-winning Bellringers of St Paul's Church Birmingham, and live electro-acoustic pieces of remixed field recordings from churches, bells and related found sounds along the way.
Pendulums was commissioned by Ideas of Noise with additional funding from Help Musicians UK and Arts Council England. The recordings for the album were made at the premiere on 8th February 2020 with additional recordings on 27th October 2020 at St Paul’s Church Birmingham.
‘The music on this record is inspired by the sounds, patterns and processes of bellringing. Some of it involves musicians pretending to be bells, other parts involve bellringers pretending to be metronomes, sometimes everyone plays together.
Campanology is an interesting art form in that it embraces many contradictions; it is simultaneously extrovert and introvert, ritual and recreational, music and not-music.
I love the collectivism that I felt from rehearsing with the bellringers at St Paul’s, and the meditative feeling that descends in the ringing chamber when a course is being rung. I hope to capture some of those thoughts in the music, and that you enjoy listening to it.’
Andrew Woodhead
