Migrating Bird – Veroniqué Serret
With her third studio album, ‘Migrating Bird’, Veronique Serret delivers a heartfelt ode to Brisbane’s bushland. The Sydney-based violinist, composer and vocalist effortlessly blends her classical and contemporary influences, transporting us into the ethereal soundscapes of her mind. One of the album’s opening tracks, ‘Carbon Footprints’, immediately grips us with its pulsating rhythms and immersive textures—it is a wonderfully off-kilter composition that meshes Serret’s violin with the raw sounds of didgeridoos, wooden percussion and sampled field recordings from Serret’s time spent in Mt Cootha, Brisbane. When the world stood still and our cities took pause, I turned to mother nature … this is what she said to me.
SIMULTANEITY – Ari Tsugi
Simultaneity (同時性) is the product of Ari Tsugi’s ambitious mission to capture, through music, a “journey of a spirit which seeks warmth, contentedness and ultimately the answer to his question of existence”. The Glasgow-based musical collective, despite not treading any new ground in the realm of jazz-fusion, nonetheless delivers a strong debut album filled to the brim with virtuosic, mind-bending grooves. Simultaneity is an eclectic mix of genres and textures, and all the better for it. The album jumps from psychedelia to soft jazz, synthesizers to saxophones, in a way that is never incongruous and unfailingly delightful.
