Listen to Life Piles Up performed by the Villiers Quartet here:
This piece is a reflection on the mounds of life that pile up in our houses, on our desks and in our minds. The weight of to-do lists and pressure of deadlines in lines of sound. The first section’s rising mounds and pressurised utterances give way to the second section’s equally unusual swampy texture. Slow-moving, muddy textural ideas flow through a series of harmonically-ambiguous rhythmic distortions and stretched palindromes—a reflection on the madness of life, serious in tone but with more than a hint of playfulness.
