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HAIGH, ROBERT — Black Sarabande
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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 Haighs 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 Trios 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 Budds and Brian Enos 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 risqu, 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 Ive 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 pianists 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 1987s 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 Yorks 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.
Haighs 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 Haighs childhood memories of UK coal country and the hardscrabble pit village of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire where he was raised. Theres 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 Haighs 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 youve left one piece behind and emerged in another one entirely.
Black Sarabandes 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 Haighs playing verges on silence, so that if youre 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 youre 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
Advance Press for Black Sarabande
"Robert Haighs 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 Trios 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 Budds and Brian Enos 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 risqu, 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 Ive 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 pianists 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 1987s 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 Yorks 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.
Haighs 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 Haighs childhood memories of UK coal country and the hardscrabble pit village of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire where he was raised. Theres 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 Haighs 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 youve left one piece behind and emerged in another one entirely.
Black Sarabandes 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 Haighs playing verges on silence, so that if youre 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 youre 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