Gates by Riot Ensemble

This album brings together four striking contemporary works that hover on the fragile boundary between order and collapse. Performed by Riot Ensemble, the programme traces a web of connections between ritual, excess, and the physicality of sound, with each composer engaging—explicitly or obliquely—with echoes of the Baroque.

Eden Lonsdale’s Tränen und Ozeane unfolds as a haze of sacred memory, where circling lines, microtonal lament and distant organum dissolve into one another. Eric Skytterholm Egan’s privacy of mind slips between abstraction and corporeality, splintering into multiple beginnings and endings drawn from Couperin. Kaija Saariaho’s Gates explores thresholds and transformation through interwoven timbres and whispered incantation, while Bernhard Gander’s ö injects raw, distorted energy inspired by Motörhead, pushing refined structures to breaking point.

Across the album, Riot Ensemble navigates the listener through this tightrope with precision and intensity, revealing music that thrives on tension, instability, and luminous detail.

Based in London, Riot Ensemble is a group of 23 soloists dedicated to the performance of contemporary music.

In 2020, Riot was awarded the debut Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Ensemble Prize. They have performed at Darmstadt, Wien Modern, November Music, Dark Music Days, and are in multi-year residence at HCMFUK, the Royal Academy of Music and Liverpool University.

riotensemble.com