Music Review: Far From A Machine
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Dreamy, dysphoric, dystopian, Far From A Machine marks Sophie Hadlum’s highly idiosyncratic entry into the world of the classical EP. Across a sequence of tracks with bleakly poetic titles like ‘The Storm Before the Calm’, ‘All I’ve Got Left of Me’, ‘The Worlds We Left Behind’, Hadlum conjures a sparsely populated, post-apocalyptic universe where arpeggios surge back and forth like waves.
Recorded on a Kawai baby grand in a grand old church in Coventry, Hadlum explains: “You can hear the wooden panels creaking and cracking as they contract and expand”, an effect that is all of apiece with this strange, cataclysmic soundscape where seismic scales collide, cascade and crescendo.
(Images courtesy of Anna Wardropper)
Hadlum was once described by her music tutor as ‘unteachable’, and to this day she composes and plays predominantly by ear. Of her album she explains: “Some of the compositions were worked on gradually over several months, some were mostly completed within a few days. ‘Meeting’ was composed for live performance which incorporated improvised physical theatre, while ‘All I’ve Got Left of Me’ was adapted from the soundtrack I composed for the short film Stripey Socks (Baileyface Productions).”
Far From A Machine showcases a genuinely distinctive and accomplished creative talent, in which the classic (Tchaikovsky, Chopin) colludes with the contemporary (Nyman, Einaudi) to produce something that warrants its own adjective. Ought ‘Hadlumian’ to be the title of her next album?
You can listen to her EP on Spotify HERE
or on YouTube below.