The Best Contemporary Classical of 2021 — Bandcamp Daily, ÉU

… the ravishing opening piece The Indistinguishables features the luminescent sounds of Montréal’s Quatuor Bozzini playing dazzling swells, melodic fragments, and resonant pizzicato… — Bandcamp Daily, ÉU

A new album of music by Leo Chadburn, Slower / Talker explores a striking sound-world of drifting piano and transparent string harmonies, bold silences and meticulous, grid-like musical structures, which frame understated spoken voiceovers and fleeting song. It features performances by two of the world’s leading groups for experimental music: Apartment House (UK) and Quatuor Bozzini (Canada), alongside the voices of the composer and the actor Gemma Saunders (National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company). Slower / Talker comprises six pieces, written over the period of a decade. It follows Leo Chadburn’s five previous albums of avant pop and electronic music (released under his own name and the pseudonym Simon Bookish). While the musical palette is restrained, influenced by minimal music, visual art and structuralist film, the texts look out into the world. These encompass a list of seventy names of moth species in The Indistinguishables, a list of topographical features encircling London in Freezywater, the words of Mao Zedong (X Chairman Maos), a reflection on a pioneering journey by deep-ocean explorer Jacques Piccard (Five Loops for the Bathscaphe), the idiosyncratic vocabulary of the fragrance industry (Vapour Descriptors) and a stream of consciousness on the culture and properties of chemical elements (The Halogens).