March saw the much-anticipated new Tansy Davies album, ‘Troubairitz’, released on the nonclassical label, featuring Davies’ twisted funk hybrids neon, Salt Box, inside out 2, and Grind Show (electric), together with Troubairitz, a song cycle based on 12th century 'Provençal' poems by women troubadours, and remixes of her work by other artists. The album was successfully launched at a nonclassical club night. The disc has received a shining four-star review! The album was recorded by the Azalea Ensemble, Anna Snow and Damien Harron with Chris Austin during an inspiring Aldeburgh residency in October. It is recorded and produced by Gabriel Prokofiev and Nick Martin.
‘...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.
Neon, the first track, establishes several characteristics. Lopsided rhythms careen and crash. The sound world is dirty, the music “distressed”. We visit the same world at a slower pace in inside out 2, a piece with the erratic progress and fascination of a wonky machine. Another piece, Grind Show (electric), conjures up Goya...the Azalea Ensemble, conducted by Christopher Austin, recreates these faintly disturbing landscape pieces with lurid precision and grit.
...Troubairitz, for soprano and drum, imagines a 21st-century version of medieval music, using texts by women troubadours. Salt Box gives us more “distressed” sounds, aided by electronics, trails of melody and gestures fragmenting to the point of collapse.
Five remixes wrap up proceedings, with Mira Calix’s remix of Greenhouses taking the crown. But it’s still Tansy Davies’s show.’
The Times (Geoff Brown), 1 April 2011
Listen to Tansy Davies talking about her influences on this nonclassical podcast