about the record

Following a limited vinyl edition in 2018, Oliver Coates’ arrangement of Pulitzer Prize-winning US composer John Luther Adams’ 2007 piece Canticles of the Sky appears for the first time across all formats.

In March 2017, Coates conducted 32 cellists in the UK premiere of the composition, displaying its intimacies after deeply communing with the trajectories of Adams’ fictional suns and moons, the guiding characters and carriers of the piece.

This recorded interpretation, performed by Coates for multi-layered solo cello, takes Canticles of the Sky to wondrous, dizzying new heights, envisaging Adams’ parallel dimension as an idealised construction. Marrying extra-musical studio techniques and meticulous arrangements to Coates’ fascination with early electronic synthesis (especially the work of Laurie Spiegel), the result offers an ultra-sensory take on classical string instrumentation.