A bold, immersive reimagining of Shaker musical tradition, Academy Award-winning composer Daniel Blumberg’s score for Mona Fastvold’s 'The Testament of Ann Lee' presents radical reinterpretations of traditional hymns with original compositions shaped directly on set. Developed in deep collaboration with Fastvold, the music grew alongside the film’s choreography and performances, drawing on the physicality and ecstatic vocal practices of Shaker worship.

Blumberg assembled nearly 100 singers, including extreme vocal improvisers Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton, Shelley Hirsch, Freya Edmondes alongside a cast of untrained voices – to create a wordless cacophony of vocal textures that mirrors the Shakers’ ecstatic spiritual practices. This vocal landscape intertwines with tuned percussion, spectral bell tones, celeste, and an ensemble of experimental string players, forming a sonic world that is both elemental and deeply spiritual. The soundtrack includes ten reimagined Shaker hymns performed by the cast, plus three original songs, including end‑credits song ‘Clothed by the Sun’ performed as a duet by Blumberg and Amanda Seyfried.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Testament of Ann Lee
2. Manchester
3. Hero Prayer One
4. Walk To Infirmary
5. Infirmary
6. Walk to Wardleys
7. Wardleys
8. Worship
9. Sex Celeste
10. Beautiful Treasures
11. Search for Ann
12. I Never Did Believe
13. Hunger & Thirst
14. Ship
15. Lower Deck
16. Today Today
17. Storm
18. All is Summer
19. Magical Boat Ride
20. John's Running Song
21. Whores
22. Niskayuna
23. The Eclipse
24. Bow Down O Zion
25. Building & Growing
26. William Walking
27. I Love Mother (Pretty Mother's Home)
28. Arrest
29. Stone Prison
30. Shattuck
31. Down to the Deep
32. Beautiful Treasures Funeral
33. Clothed by the Sun

In Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of Naples, Sotto le Nuvole, the ground shakes periodically. Between Mount Vesuvius and the Tyrrhenian Sea, the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields hiss volcanic gas and steam. Below the sleeping volcano, modern day Naples emerges in black and white and fills with voices, with lives. From the traces of history and the concerns of the present, Rosi documents a city immersed in its continuous past, with Daniel Blumberg’s minimal soundscape hovering in a sonic space between liquid and air.

Tasked with creating a soundscape that would suspend space within Rosi’s film, Blumberg called upon the extended technique of saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher to create a gossamer fabric of traces and sounds abstracted from their instruments. Having transitioned from theoretical physics to the saxophone, John Butcher has always deeply considered space in the context of his playing. His concerns are with flow, density and how the saxophone is situated in the living world. Zeroing in on the core sonic properties of the mechanical and acoustic components of the saxophone, Seymour Wright has integrated its every breath, reed vibration, keypad clatter and hissed microtone of his alto into his own, unique improvisational language. In his work with these two seminal players, Blumberg makes his most concentrated soundtrack to date - reinforcing the film's sense of overlapping time and space, and pushing at the limits of experimentation.

Initially recorded in Daniel’s flat in London, Butcher and Wright centre themselves around long, consistent tones, so soft that it seems breath is being gently pulled from the saxophone's bell by an invisible hand. Blumberg himself adds haunting bass harmonica, and recordings of Wright’s launeddas - a traditional and ancient triple pipe polyphonic reed instrument from Sardinia, Italy. Blumberg then travelled to the volcanic region of Baia, next to Pompeii. Once a flourishing classical Roman city loved by Nero, Baia slowly sank under hydrothermal pressure, leaving the city in a kind of geological purgatory. Using specialised geophones and hydrophones, Blumberg took those initial recordings and amplified them underwater, sending them calling out across the ruins of Baia’s mosaics, Nymphaeum statues and villas.

“It was important to me that the music was whispered in the same landscape that Gianfranco has worked for the past three years, so that you can hear the volcanic air gulping, the lapping of the waves, the steam and bubbles popping against John and Seymour’s saxophone breaths – an echo from a suspended time.”

What emerges is deeply melancholic, tender, subtle and right at the edges of audio technology. Submerged in an aquarian mausoleum, the mysterious vibrations of the saxophone and its bell become an echo of an echo, wading from the future into the past. ‘Sotto le Nuvole’ is less a soundtrack than a process of aeration - a sonic puncture in the material of the film which allows its central message to breathe, and a remarkable experiment at the limits of the saxophone’s possibility.

TRACK LISTING

1. Nuvole I
2. Nuvole II
3. Nuvole III
4. Nuvole IV
5. Nuvole IX
6. Nuvole V
7. Nuvole VI
8. Nuvole VII
9. Nuvole VIII
10. Nuvole X

Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Original Score, and shot in the glorious, vintage VistaVision format, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist stands as a monumental achievement in filmmaking. Opening with a mesmerizing and continuous 10-minute overture, composer Daniel Blumberg’s music sets the stage for the film’s epic narrative, which spans multiple decades and follows fictional Hungarian architect László Toth (played by Adrien Brody) as he rebuilds his life in post-war America.

Encompassing large-scale brass orchestrations, intimately lyrical piano melodies and freewheeling, improvisational jazz, The Brutalist’s score is as ambitious and broad in scope as the film itself. Envisioning the score as slabs of sound – rich and resonating while also measured and restrained – the music developed into the sonic embodiment of the Brutalist design aesthetic, where imposing scale and raw textures meet values of simplicity and economy. To craft its singular sound, Blumberg worked with a cast of boundary-pushing musicians and improvisers, traveling across the UK and Europe with a custom-built remote recording setup to capture his players on location. Exploiting the tension between the fluidity of improvised music and the meticulous precision of film scoring, Blumberg coaxed out beautifully rich and resonant performances from his collaborators, including avant-garde innovators Axel Dörner (trumpet), Evan Parker (saxophone), Sophie Agnel (piano), and John Tilbury (piano), to name a few.

TRACK LISTING

1. Overture (Ship)
2. Overture (László)
3. Overture (Bus)
4. Chair
5. Van Buren’s Estate
6. Library
7. Jazz Club
8. Porn
9. Monologue
10. Up The Hill
11. Pennsylvania
12. Bicycle
13. Steel
14. Intermission
15. Erzsébet
16. Handjob
17. Bath
18. Building Site
19. Ribbon Cutting
20. Picnic By The Lake
21. Gordon's Dinner
22. Looking At You
23. Vidui
24. New York
25. Stairs
26. Carrara
27. Marble
28. Tunnel
29. Construction
30. Heroin
31. Search Party
32. Epilogue (Venice)

GUT, the brand new album from Ivor Novello winning musician and composer Daniel Blumberg.

An unflinchingly raw and personal album. A suite of six songs performed entirely by Blumberg comprising an extraordinary, soaring vocal take and an unconventional palette of bass harmonica, Steinberger ebass, synthesiser and electronic drums. The album makes reference to the intestinal disease Blumberg has suffered over the last few years, its songs tracing a body stripped back and rebuilt: renderings of pain, frustration and fatigue in ballads made sinew and bone.

New York director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux, Childhood of a Leader) has made a film to the album shot on 16mm, which will be released at a later date.

GUT is Blumberg’s third solo record on Mute following the release of Minus (2018) and On&On (2020), as well as his award winning score for the film The World To Come (dir. Mona Fastvold, 2021).

TRACK LISTING

1. BONE
2. CHEERUP
3. HOLDBACK
4. BODY
5. KNOCK
6. GUT

Daniel Blumberg has composed an enchanting new original score for Mona Fastvold’s critically acclaimed The World To Come. The film premiered at the 77th Venice Film Festival 2020 and was released in UK cinemas during Summer 2021. Highlighted as “a marvelous score” in Variety and “powerfully moving” by The Film Stage, the score includes the title track featuring Josephine Foster. Blumberg enlisted the talents of an ensemble of radical, internationally revered musicians, whilst the score was co-produced with world-renowned producer Peter Walsh (Scott Walker).

Released on Limited edition double clear vinyl and CD.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Opening (Dyer’s Farmhouse)
A2 Nellie
A3 Abigail’s Walk
A4 Tallie
A5 Flummoxed
A6 Chicken Plucking
A7 The Storm
A8 Falling In Love
B1 First Kiss
B2 The Orchard
B3 The Woods
B4 Spying House
B5 Thoughts And Townships
B6 The Fire
B7 Empty House
B8 Tallie Missing
C1 Finny Letter
C2 Atlas
C3 The Wagon
C4 Love And Death
C5 Rooftop
C6 The World To Come
D1 Abigail’s Theme (Brötzmann Solo)
D2 Tallie’s Theme (Brötzmann Solo)

On&On, is the brand new album from Daniel Blumberg. A 9-track song-cycle that confirms the London musician and visual artist as a unique creative force, pushing the art of song into expansive new territories.

On&On - which follows 2018’s Minus, Blumberg’s debut for Mute - is a consolidation of the deconstructed song aesthetic he has developed, operating at the intersection between conventional song structures and free improvisation. Now he takes this further, incorporating recurring, shape-shifting motifs and at times dissolving the boundaries between songs altogether.

Born out of live sessions with the same core group of players as Minus: Daniel Blumberg (vocals, guitar, harmonica), Ute Kanngiesser (cello), Billy Steiger (violin), Tom Wheatley (double bass) and Jim White (drums), with the addition of electronic maverick Elvin Brandhi (vocals). As such it represents a deepening of relationships and distillation of techniques for this tight-knit group of free-playing musicians, who are loosely based around Café OTO.

The album is recorded by Peter Walsh (Scott Walker), who has captured the group’s extraordinary performances - encompassing the full expressive range of their instruments from softly-bowed melodies and tender vocal harmonies to rough-hewn scrapes, plucks and rattles - while the sound of the room and the outside world spill naturally into the sound field.

TRACK LISTING

1 On&On
2 Sidestep Summer
3 On&On&On
4 Bound
5 Silence Breaker
6 On&On&On&On
7 Teethgritter
8 On&On&On&On&On
9 Pillow

Daniel Blumberg announces his debut album release for Mute, ‘Minus’, the first release under his own name.

An astonishing work, the record weds an improvisational, free-music ethos to the rawest emotional songwriting, rooted deep in the personal turmoil Blumberg experienced whilst making the record.

The album was recorded live with legendary producer Peter Walsh (Scott Walker’s collaborator since ‘Climate Of Hunter’) in just five days during a remote residential stay in Wales, amidst a debilitating breakup with his partner of seven years along with Blumberg's ongoing struggle with mental illness which resulted in his hospitalization just a week before recording.

Still only 27 years old, Blumberg has written himself a rich musical history; from his teenage band who signed to XL whilst he was still at school, onto and through the projects of Yuck, Oupa and Hebronix, whilst solidifying close creative partnerships with the likes of David Berman (Silver Jews), Low, Lambchop and Royal Trux’s Neil Michael Hagerty (with whom Blumberg has performed as a member of the Howling Hex).

With ‘Minus’, though, there is a sense that Daniel Blumberg has finally arrived at the place he has been searching for - an arresting and progressive work, one which is set to establish him as one of Britain’s most unique contemporary voices.

TRACK LISTING

Minus
The Fuse
Madder
Stacked
Permanent
The Bomb
Used To Be Older