Recur - A Strange Loop (Aumeta) [Neo-classical / Cinematic]

The Slow Music Movement
2 days ago
2 min read

Updated: 14 hours ago

The cover for Recur's A Strange Loop album, showing abstract art with dark horizontal stripes against a light background. Text on top right reads "recur a strange loop." Moody and textured.

Recur is a collaborative project led by award winning composer, educator and sound designer Tim Harrison, who works across music and interactive audio experiences, most notably on the TV show Black Mirror, video game Assassin's Creed and in collaboration with Daman Albarn and Ai Weiwei over the years.

Composer and sound designer Tim Harrison, aka Recur, in a helmet plays music on a smoky, blue-lit stage, surrounded by microphones. The mood is mysterious and atmospheric.

A Strange Loop is quite the epic project. Created over a nine year period with no less than fifty musicians involved, including Portico Quartet's saxophonist Jack Wyllie and the Ligeti String Quartet. Over such an extended period and with so many moving parts things could easily have gone awry, but Harrison has done a sterling job of arranging the various talents and instruments into richly textured, cinematic soundscapes that effortlessly glide between ambient, electronic and neo-classical worlds like it's the most natural thing in the world.

The album is best listened to as a whole, so dust off your headphones and find a quiet moment to sink into the well sequenced passages, and with its cinematic undercurrents writing your own story could also be an option. "Oscillate" opens proceedings and is a fine ambient gateway, the sax refrain wafting over the electronic ebb and flow, and with the sort of sound design that makes you wish that you'd gone for the next headphone model up. The gently introduction then takes a minimal chamber music turn with the classical musicians providing a light touch as "Id Etude" tip toes through the speakers.

Next up "Gnossienne" ushers in the albums denser cinematic body with its classy, decidedly twentieth century string arrangement patiently building as exotic percussion pitters and patters from above without dampening proceedings. Seatbelt fastening is then advised as "Nocturne" decides it's time to look to the future, launch the tale into less gravity beholden realms and add some drama and intrigue to proceedings, whilst "Hieroglyph" would be the perfect soundtrack as you explore the first eerily abandoned spaceship that you come across.

If you make it to the escape hatch alive then "Lament" will take you on a neoclassical orbit around the neighbouring planetary mine, it's distant heavy machinery clunking in the background as the interplanetary mining company digs deep into the hitherto unspoilt surface in search of profit. "Ode to Void" initially offers some respite, but it's not long before the uneasy strings build and sweep you into a turbulent gravitational conflux requiring all hands on deck to make it through to the well deserved, warm and familiar glow of "Iridescent", its rays lighting the path back home and "Drifts" dense ambient neoclassical strains tinged with melancholy that the adventure is over, but also breathing a sigh of relief that you made it through to tell the tale.