We first heard Balmorhea‘s latest work, “Clamor,” performed live in Nashville at the tail end of the band’s most recent U.S. tour. Situated in between the darker, cosmological passages of Constellations and the more hopeful compositions of All Is Wild, All Is Silent, the lush, propulsive exuberance of “Clamor” felt like the perfect bridge between those two modes and a new chapter for the band one in the same. (Of course, if you’ve followed the critically acclaimed Texas quintet for any length of time, this dynamic will be familiar.) To be sure, we’ve lost count of how many film, commercial and video-game scores, full-lengths and singles Balmorhea has released in the last few years, but we can tell you that each new work lends the listener a rich and singular experience. Indeed, there are few bands working today that exhibit Balmorhea’s thirst for progression, giving a genre as (unfortunately) marginal as modern classical a renewed life and regularly attracting the previously unconverted to its door. Once there, the band eagerly pushes listeners down its slippery slope by introducing them to a myriad of talented underground composers who remix their work and who, coincidentally, each have catalogs worth embracing on their own. Balmorhea’s “Candor”/”Clamor” seven-inch, which includes a download card that can be used to access remixes by Prefuse 73 and Benoît Pioulard, was just released by Western Vinyl. Also, if you’d like to read more about Balmorhea, check-out our Q&A with co-founder Michael Muller and the diary the band kept exclusively for MAGNET while on tour in Europe this past spring. And if that’s not enough, here are bonus mp3s for “Bowsprit” and “Night Squall,” each from Constellations.
“Clamor” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/Clamor.mp3
“Bowsprit” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/Bowsprit.mp3
“Night Squall” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/NightSquall.mp3
