‘Note to chamber ensembles everywhere: commission Tansy to create new works; your audiences will dig her music.’
Exclaim.ca (Glen Hall), 28 March 2011
 
The much-awaited release of Tansy Davies’ album ‘Troubairitz’ in March on the NONCLASSICAL label has got the music world – classical and non – talking. Davies and the innovative club night cum record label NONCLASSICAL have much in common; both are unafraid to push boundaries, challenge expectations and ignore any attempt to fix genre. The same revolutionary spirit is continued by the disc’s performers, the stunning Azalea Ensemble with conductor Christopher Austin and soloists Anna Snow (voice) and Damien Harron (Percussion). The album ‘Troubairitz’ sees the shared vision of all these groups collide in a kaleidoscope of sound and colour.
 
‘...With Tansy Davies, contemporary street life pulses through particularly strongly...Davies, you feel, is completely at home underground with hallucinogenic lights and hard-driven rhythms.  Yet she’s also a composer who shapes her notes with the adventurous timbres and clarity of contemporary music’s avant-garde...Abrasive and abrupt, it’s both classical and non-classical, infused with funk and alternative rock, and it fills this exuberant new CD.
The Times (Geoff Brown), 1 April 2011
 
The album opens with Davies’ twisted funk hybrids neon, Salt Box, inside out 2, and Grind Show (electric), which have inspired comments from the pop/rock and classical world alike:
 
'Neon is like a Vespa ride through downtown on a Saturday night: lots of rhythmic verve, driving motifs, iridescent colours and intriguing alleyways. Salt Box is a mysterious walkabout exploring aspects of the Kent shoreline with oriental-ish reed lines, insistent bass clarinet interjections, curious, scuttling electronics and a magnetic character. Utterly gripping,  Greenhouses is a dark song about young American activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by the Israeli army while defending homes in the Gaza strip ― a riveting performance by vocalist Anna Snow.’
Exclaim.ca (Glen Hall), 28 March 2011
 
‘Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.’
The arts desk (Graham Rickson), 8 April 2011
 
Then come the songs of the troubairitz, the female counterpart to the twelfth-century troubadours:
 
‘these eight songs are given sparse, improvisatory percussion accompaniments and sung coolly by Anna Snow, whose vibrato-free voice suits the music’s restraint perfectly. For all that Davies’s angular melodies inform us that this is 21st-century music, these songs sound archaic and timeless, as if they’re being composed on the spot.
The arts desk (Graham Rickson), 8 April 2011
 
‘The cycle is an exercise in self-restraint as much as anything, because Davies's beautifully simple vocal lines are mostly unaccompanied, with added percussion in four of the seven songs. Their austerity and expressive flexibility seem far removed from the world of Davies's instrumental writing, in which influences from rock and jazz, as well as the usual canon of late 20th-century composers, is fused into a pungent musical language distinctly her own.’
Guardian (Andrew Clements), 14 April 2011
 
The disc closes with six remixes of Davies’ music:
 
‘Elsewhere we have imaginative remixes of several pieces featured on the disc – Gabriel Prokofiev’s entertaining deconstruction of neon making one appreciate how strange the work sounds in its original form.’
The arts desk (Graham Rickson), 8 April 2011
 
Listen to Tansy Davies talking about her influences on this nonclassical podcast