Bells & Whistles

On Bells & Whistles’ first recordings, you will indeed find bells and whistles. Which is to say every form of tuned percussion from marimba to piano, and every variety of wind instrument from woodflute to flugelhorn. But, as the name implies, you’ll also encounter many more exotic textures  – guitars, dulcimers, kotos, choirs, harpsichords, organs, accordions, synthesisers and a whole wagonload of drums.

Yet Bells & Whistles’ music isn’t merely a feast for the ears. Drawing on influences as diverse as the Penguin Café Orchestra, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, traditional Indonesian, Arabic, South American, Celtic and African music, not to mention the Western classical and jazz traditions, composer Christopher Evans fuses them into something fresh, uplifting and moving. This is not New Age music designed to lull the listener into a beatific coma. Neither is it experimental music designed to test the limits of your endurance. It’s by turns rhythmic, playful, melodic, and joyful – though often with a melancholy undertow.

Explains Christopher: “As someone who loves a vast range of music from so many traditions and parts of the world, I’ve long been frustrated by most efforts to bring them together in an accessible form. Either they sounded like market-driven attempts to popularise ‘exotic’ forms of music with Western beats and spacy synths, or they demanded too much of the listener.

“I mean, much as I love Steve Reich’s Drumming, for instance, I recognise that most people won’t be able to give it 60 minutes of their undivided attention. Or they’ll be frightened off by its place in the ‘avant garde’ canon.

“Equally, much as I enjoy the polyrhythms of Balinese gamelan, like most Western listeners I can’t pretend to follow the development of a 30-minute composition – or to fully understand its inner logic or cultural significance.

“So with much of the music composed for Bells & Whistles, I tried to harness some of the excitement these diverse forms provoked in me without simply boiling them down into some kind of multicultural soup with a dancebeat.”

Most of Bells & Whistles’ music is painstakingly composed through, right down to the last tambourine. But improvisation also plays a large part in many of the pieces. In fact listeners are often surprised to learn that one of them was totally improvised without a single overdub. Many are equally surprised to discover that Bells & Whistles’ music is entirely keyboard-generated.

“I hate music that sounds synthetic, so apart from the occasional synth lead I’ve focused on making it sound as acoustic as possible,” says Christopher. “Ideally, this music would be played by a live ensemble, but since that would have entailed hiring a full orchestra, numerous percussionists, guitarists, a pianist and a large choir – all prepared to follow my every whim – I decided to compromise!”

The music of Bells & Whistles ranges from the surging polyrhythms of Snap and Sunspot, through the delicate exoticism of Spice and Ojime, to the haunting pictures in sound of Samhain and Tundra. There also irresistibly playful pieces like Carousel and Skipper, the grandeur of Ring Out and the lyricism of In Flight, with its Debussy-like flute solo.

The album culminates in Empyrean, a soaring adagio for strings and brass whose 12 minutes take the listener on a spiritual journey through longing, turmoil and serenity.