David Bird: Hinterlands

If I were in the business of giving composers career advice, this is exactly the next release I would have suggested for Bird. Hinterlands, which follows 2023’s Wire Hums, a “mystifying” work for cello and electronics, 2021’s Iron Orchid, a “mind-expanding” collection for piano and electronics, and 2020’s Mirrors, which used his voice as a basis for multilayered collages, is Bird’s first true portrait album. While still deeply engaged with the blend of technology and acoustic instruments, the four works here give the clearest picture of Bird’s mastery of orchestration, expanding his emotionally resonant music across several configurations.

The title work, for example, makes full use of lovemusic’s lineup of Emiliano Gavito (flute), Adam Starkie (clarinet), Sophie Wahlmüller (viola), Christian Lozano (electric guitar), and Finbar Hosie (electronics), instantly developing intrigue and suspense worthy of a Bernard Herrmann score. Ambient Machine for bassoon and cello (Ben Roidl-Ward and Isidora Nojkovic) explores the multiple qualities of the two instruments, from drones to squeals, in a brief work that never stops moving. Bird calls Chroma “an exercise in ‘sonic metallurgy,” and it’s full of shiny sounds and spine-tingling sequences, all captured perfectly by the Grossman Ensemble. The album ends with American City, a dramatic, three-movement string quartet played by the great Mivos Quartet. Inspired by the history of Magnitogorsk, a Soviet factory complex based on U.S. Steel’s plant in Gary, Indiana, it feels like a three-act play, with the first movement introducing the scene, the second setting up the antagonists, and the third leading to an uneasy resolution. The other works also have external inspirations, from a William Gibson story to white noise machines, but exist firmly on their own considerable merits. I’m glad Bird listened to my unspoken advice. Hinterlands is a triumph.

— Jeremy Shatan, 5.15.2026

The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, May 2026

This terrific portrait album of music by David Bird underlines how one’s real-life trajectory can impact their work. Bird spent a couple of years at a job at the University of Chicago, and his immersion in the city’s contemporary music ecosystem imprinted itself on this music, with half of the works performed by ensembles connected to the city. Chicago bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward and cellist Isidora Nojkovic tackle “Ambient Machine,” which concerns itself with the way devices producing white noise have become such a ubiquitous sleep aid. Yet rather than mimic the device’s sonic effect, where all audible frequencies are produced at equal intensity, the duet wends through all sorts of harrowing twists and turns, many awash in shifting strains of dissonance and density. In fact, the piece feels like an antidote to something static, with refined interplay, wild dynamic swings, and changing articulations, whether rheumy long tones or phrases that ping around to evoke disparate musical eras. Bird envisioned “Chroma” as “sonic metallurgy,” asking the UC-based chamber group Grossman Ensemble to tease out microscopic details from an elegant array of minimal phrases and elliptical gestures to focus on the subtlest alterations in color, all amid tightly arranged ensemble interplay. The now-Europe-based Mivos Quartet tackle Bird’s “American City,” a three-movement piece about the Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex in Russia—which drew inspiration from the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. Accordingly, the composition transmits the rugged, blocky intensity of industrial production. The album opens with the title piece, commissioned by the French group lovemusic. The music’s haunting, furtive motions—where slashing, intense gestures and lines zip over lush, microtonal beds of hovering beauty—was inspired by an imaginary portal between Earth and Mars in the William Gibson story that also provided its title.

— Peter Margasak, 6.08.2026

When music and metal mix, people take notice. Just look at how metal, or the idea of metal, spawned an entire music genre, along with the names of bands seeking hard-edged glamor (Metallica, Iron Maiden, Alice in Chains, etc.) Some of the connection is symbolic, of course. But in the music on Hinterlands, the new album from composer David Bird, the hardness and coldness of metal seem almost literally audible.

Interestingly, Bird achieves that effect mostly with acoustic instruments, many of them made of wood. The Mivos Quartet (also heard on Lei Liang’s recent live string quartets album) performs the three movements of American City on their usual cello, viola, and two violins. It’s the most organic-sounding piece on the album, yet its first movement revels in dissonant harshness.

The second movement rides on repeated-note obbligatos that suggest electronic wave oscillations, until the strings merge into what sounds like a bath of actual electronics. The finale, titled “The First Trees Were All Metal,” is a longer study in transmuting acoustic sounds away from their native warmth and toward the cold.

Bird’s specific inspiration was the Soviet Union’s Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex, which, he explains, ironically earned the moniker “American City” because it was modeled after U.S. Steel’s plant in Gary, Indiana. That final movement is a hard-hitting but dreary end to an album that’s very “chill” – and not in the popular sense of relaxation.

‘Hinterlands’

The title track, performed by the French ensemble lovemusic on woodwinds, viola, electric guitar and electronics, proceeds episodically. The first two segments paint airy flute breaths and clarinet harmonies atop dissonant, coldly ambient washes of sound. A quiet third segment sees the flute and clarinet speaking softly, harmonically – but quickly intruded upon by ghostly, breathless gestures from the ensemble.

Harmonic development worms its way out of the morass, but never in settled or logical form. An effect like a slowed-down siren develops. Individual voices then emerge in swirling chromatic figures. A compelling momentum builds via slow, dissonant oscillations.

As if in surrender, the harmonies that return in a final segment have grown dissonant. A hypnotic wave of electronics slowly envelops them. The whole piece creates a tension between the instruments’ organic sounds and the collective coldness of the composer’s vision for what the ensemble can sound like.

By contrast, such tension is mostly absent in “Ambient Machine.” Here bassoon and cello evoke machinery grinding away. The piece dispenses almost entirely with common notions of musicality. Bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward and cellist Isidora Nojkovic commissioned the work and perform it with gladiatorial intensity.

“Chroma” looks back at first to “Hinterlands,” with bubbling sheets of sound. But the attacking presence of piano and percussion among the musicians of the Grossman Ensemble help build a more explicitly communicative, even verbal atmosphere. Extended techniques and dissonances sustain the metallic, industrial atmosphere that characterizes the whole album, here with more complexity and drama. Undulations create blurry rhythms in various registers. Synthesizer-like effects evoke Expressionist visions (think R.U.R.).

But a gentle coda’s softer harmonies suggest a core of fleshy humanity amid the sterility of metal. And that’s the magic of music. However artificial or nonbiological the devices we construct to produce it, we can always detect the spirit of the composers and musicians making it. How we decipher that spirit is up to us. The “metal” on this album isn’t the heavy kind. But it feels weighty with meaning.

— Jon Sobel, 7.01.2026