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HAIGH, ROBERT - Black Sarabande

Format: LP Label & Cat.Number: Unseen Worlds UW029LP Release Year: 2020 Note: second HAIGH album for Unseen Worlds - highly praised by critics around the globe: "Simply stunning ambient/minimal release. Floored me. The structure, pacing and depth of these pieces is incredible. That's really saying something given how much ambient stuff is already out there and currently being produced. I hear shades of Eno/Budd's best work, Satie, Deaf Center and maybe even a little SOTL. Absolutely beautiful!" [T. Louth-Robbins] Price (incl. 19% VAT): €20.00 More Info Robert Haigh's second full length LP for Unseen Worlds, Black Sarabande, is out today on LP, CD, and digital, uncovering a further layer of refinement to his music. It's no mistake that Haigh's releases have fluctuated between the underground and popular consciousness over the past forty years. This tension - between darkness and light, melancholy and solace, cacophony and clarity - is central to his work. With Black Sarabande, Haigh has gifted us with one of the quietest, most generous and vulnerable releases of his career. Advance Press for Black Sarabande "Robert Haigh’s latest album (under his own name) is a tender collection of spacious and textural piano pieces, full of rural ruminations and introspective intimacy." (9.0, scored review) - Zara Wladawsky, DJ Mag "Having worked on mid-’80s Nurse With Wound albums, Robert Haigh thrived with Omni Trio’s pioneering ‘90s productions for Moving Shadow, but his piano work, both under his and the SEMA name, reaches even further. His latest collection embraces the resonant ambience and subtle electronic embellishments of Harold Budd’s and Brian Eno’s The Pearl.” - Uncut Magazine “Robert Haigh's storied career reads like an almanac of ambient music. His latest is an unhurried flow of ambient piano pieces that, despite the implications of the title, are only momentarily dark and far from risqué, perhaps at times more suited for those soft intimate moments made for two, or most certainly personal reflections made for one.” - Slavko Bucifal, Exclaim! “Everything I’ve ever written about any album, concert or piece of music is wrong. I know this because of something that happened while I was quietly listening to ‘Arc Of Crows’ by pianist Robert Haigh, a track taken from his new album Black Sarabande.” - Further ​"'Why?'" - Philip Clark, WIRE "This contemporary classical pianist’s music proves more unsettling the more you disturb its placid surface. Depending on what release you discovered first, you might have believed there were two different Robert Haighs operating in the UK during the 1980s and ’90s. There was the pianist and composer who worked with Nurse With Wound and released elegant modern classical albums like 1987’s Valentine Out of Season. But what to make of the Robert Haigh behind the neck-whipping jungle breakbeats of the Omni Trio, a force throughout the drum ’n’ bass era in the UK? As that project drew to a close in the early 2000s, the more contemplative side of Haigh reemerged with a string of contemporary classical albums. They made for a perfect fit for New York’s Unseen Worlds label; his 2017 album Creatures of the Deep slotted well alongside pianists new and old, ranging from “Blue” Gene Tyranny to Lubomyr Melnyk to Leo Svirsky. Haigh’s Black Sarabande explores terrain similar to Deep, mixing gorgeous piano melodies with a patina of electronics. But where that previous album evoked the properties of water, Sarabande feels grounded. It draws on Haigh’s childhood memories of UK coal country and the hardscrabble “pit village” of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire where he was raised. There’s a heavy atmosphere to these 11 tracks, never wholly enveloped in blackness but always threatened to tip over into it. The opening title track is hushed, provoking comparisons to Harold Budd or Erik Satie. Yet as Haigh’s struck keys hover in space, they turn slightly discordant, like a chill settling into the skin. “Stranger on the Lake” strikes a balance between piano and electronics to luminous effect, its melody shadowed by ghostly overtones. Midway through, the ambient haze swells, and when it finally recedes, the piece is suffused with harp plucks and electronics, making you feel like you’ve left one piece behind and emerged in another one entirely. Black Sarabande’s calm surface proves illusory the more listens you give it. Struck piano wires startle the surface of the otherwise-placid “Wire Horses”; a gush of strings arrives and just as quickly disappears into the woozy, fluttering ambience of “Painted Serpent.” There are moments when Haigh’s playing verges on silence, so that if you’re listening on earbuds, you might hear your own footsteps through the snow more loudly than the music. The gorgeous and brief “Air Madeleine” sounds as if you’re walking around a frozen pond in the countryside and seated next to Haigh on the creaky piano bench all at once, as imaginary a landscape (and interior) as anything Brian Eno could have conceived." [Pitchfork] https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/black-sarabande