Kate Moore | Compositions on CD

Ridgeway | 2023

‘This album is about the eeriness of the landscape, the sound of its contours and the mystical language of its shades and shadows, both divinely beautiful and dark and mysterious, captivating and threatening, challenging and glorious. Rather than painting the landscape of an attractive view, I attempted to recreate the experience of being in the landscape itself through music.’ Kate Moore

A set of compositions by composer Kate Moore written around the concept of connecting memory of places and sensory experience, the album centres on the two major pieces, Ridgeway (2009) and The Dam (2015). Moore is at her most expressive in those immersive, visceral works, as she refers to personal experience and memories. In the title piece, Ridgeway, the giant white horse of Uffington, set in the dramatic prehistoric landscape where Moore lived for a time as a child, comes to life as in a powerful dream. The pieces on the album cover a period in the composer’s output between 2009 and 2019; they are linked by her deep fascination for the natural forces that shape the world, and her ability to articulate and express it through her music. Ridgeway is Kate Moore’s second album on Unsounds after the critically acclaimed Revolver in 2021.

Revolver | 2021

The music on this album was originally written for a dance piece by Australian artist Ken Unsworth with The Australian Dance Artists premiered 31 October 2017 in Sydney.

‘Kate Moore’s richly multi layered imagination creates a score of diverse and challenging opportunities with some beautiful moments for the dance performers. The notion of a score for Restraints that should create uncertainties for the dancers puts them off kilter so they can refocus to produce new spectacles of movement and emotion.‘ Ken Unsworth

Inspired by the kinetic physicality and aesthetics of balance found in Ken Unsworth’s work, Moore’s music embodies a feeling of suspension between movement and stasis. Evolving and revolving melodies, poised skillfully in poly-rhythmic structures, the music creates an intoxicating and emotional impression. There is a feeling of constant motion and flow of sonic currents that typifies much of Kate Moore’s music.

The music shifts from the material world, the gradually shifting stone-like cycles of the title track “Revolver”, the restrained power and poignancy of “The Boxer” to the various slow unfurling melodies of the tightrope inspired “Song Of Ropes”, and finally to a contemplation of the immaterial in “Way Of The Dead”.

The pieces are performed with extraordinary virtuosity by the musicians Anna McMichael, Rowena Macneish, Kirsty McCahon, Genevieve Lang and Claire Edwardes. This album is Kate Moore’s first collaboration with Unsounds. Anna McMichael has released several projects with the label.