Various Artists - Robyn Jacob: New Forevers (2026) [Hi-Res]
![Various Artists - Robyn Jacob: New Forevers (2026) [Hi-Res]](https://www.dibpic.com/uploads/posts/2026-08/1787727275_cmgx2uufsl8ol_600.jpg)
BAND/ARTIST: Robyn Jacob, Various Artists
- Title: Robyn Jacob: New Forevers
- Year Of Release: 2026
- Label: Redshift Records
- Genre: Jazz, Contemporary Classical
- Quality: mp3 320 kbps / flac lossless (tracks) / flac 24bits - 96.0kHz
- Total Time: 01:17:06
- Total Size: 178 / 323 mb / 1.27 gb
- WebSite: Album Preview
Tracklist
01. Portals I: In The Offing
02. Portals II: The Verge
03. New Forevers
04. Pith
05. Collective Ungraspable
06. Transference and Zoosemiotics
Redshift Records has been issuing the work of living Canadian composers out of North Vancouver since 2007, the recording arm of a concert society founded in 2001 by Jordan Nobles and Mark Takeshi McGregor and devoted to spatial presentations of new music in swimming pools, libraries, and graveyards. The catalogue is overwhelmingly a compact disc and download proposition. A twelve-inch pressing from this address is therefore a decision, and the sequencing bears that out.
Digitally, New Forevers runs to six pieces and opens with the two Portals works. The record does the reverse. Side A is given over entirely to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute title piece; the Portals pair are held for side two. The press notes frame the Portals as the way in, staging positions in a society’s reckoning with climate catastrophe. On vinyl, that reading isn’t available to you. You arrive at the hardest material first and work outward from it, which strikes me as the braver order.
Robyn Jacob is a pianist, singer and composer based in Vancouver. Most listeners who know her at all will know her through Only A Visitor, the avant-pop group whose fourth album Decay appeared on Mint Records in 2023, or through Gamelan Bike Bike, the Balinese-informed ensemble she co-led from 2013 until last year, its instruments built from metal pulled out of the city’s scrap bins. She is also half of The Giving Shapes with harpist Elisa Thorn. This is her first collection of concert music, and percussion sits at the centre of all of it.
‘New Forevers’ takes its subject from the language of cemeteries. Perpetual care is what a burial plot is sold with; it is also the term for the indefinite babysitting of a poisoned industrial site. The piece addresses Yellowknife’s Giant Mine, where 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust sit in mined-out chambers underground, held in place by a federal freezing programme costing billions and running, in principle, forever. Architek Percussion are joined by four voices — Asitha Tennekoon, Lucien Durey, Danny Najjar and Eric Biskupski — the only singing anywhere on the vinyl. Abstract spoken word opens it, and what assembles around that voice is a dystopian landscape of instruments and choral verses. Tuned mallet keyboards carry most of the eeriness, which figures, given the sixteen years Jacob has spent inside gamelan ensembles, where struck bars are the whole architecture. Big orchestral drums sit underneath. Players come and go throughout, and the sung writing eventually settles into harmonised figures whose inflexions point back towards early music. It is akin to a soundtrack for a depressing future, and I mean that as a description of what the piece achieves. I found it genuinely interesting. I can’t see myself returning to it often.
Worth saying plainly, since the instrumentation and the personnel might suggest otherwise: nothing here is improvised. Every one of these pieces is notated and commissioned, this one by Architek Percussion themselves, and the Montreal quartet have upwards of sixty commissions and premieres behind them across a catalogue running from Nicole Lizée to Jason Sharp. Giving a side over to a single eighteen-minute span is a format decision that suits the writing, which needs the uninterrupted run and the silence a well-cut side can hold at that dynamic floor.
Side B drops to two pieces from 2024. ‘Portals I: In The Offing’ is played by SHHH!! Ensemble, the Ottawa duo of percussionist Zac Pulak and pianist Edana Higham, and it is a far more stripped-back proposition — piano at the front of it throughout, percussion held well back, with the clipped agitation of the opening giving way to something slower and considerably more exposed—a nice piece indeed, and for me the most immediately rewarding thing on the record.
‘Portals II: The Verge’ sets Noam Bierstone and Alexander Haupt against Marilou LePage’s viola. What the ear registers across most of its twelve minutes is strings, plural — a small bowed ensemble in sustained harmony. Only one of the three players has a string instrument in their hands; the rest is bowed percussion, and the blend Jacob gets from that combination is the technical achievement of the record. I couldn’t find a structure to take hold of, and after several passes it still moves past me without settling. Jacob describes the piece as the held moment of balance before a plunge into the unknown, which accounts for the suspension, if not for my difficulty with it.
The digital edition adds three further pieces, among them a live performance by the Grammy-winning Sō Percussion and a solo mallet miniature. Those sit outside what the record is. That a label would back a collection of this kind to vinyl at all says a good deal about Redshift’s commitment to the artist involved — I do sometimes ask myself who buys music like this, and both composer and label evidently have an answer I don’t.
01. Portals I: In The Offing
02. Portals II: The Verge
03. New Forevers
04. Pith
05. Collective Ungraspable
06. Transference and Zoosemiotics
Redshift Records has been issuing the work of living Canadian composers out of North Vancouver since 2007, the recording arm of a concert society founded in 2001 by Jordan Nobles and Mark Takeshi McGregor and devoted to spatial presentations of new music in swimming pools, libraries, and graveyards. The catalogue is overwhelmingly a compact disc and download proposition. A twelve-inch pressing from this address is therefore a decision, and the sequencing bears that out.
Digitally, New Forevers runs to six pieces and opens with the two Portals works. The record does the reverse. Side A is given over entirely to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute title piece; the Portals pair are held for side two. The press notes frame the Portals as the way in, staging positions in a society’s reckoning with climate catastrophe. On vinyl, that reading isn’t available to you. You arrive at the hardest material first and work outward from it, which strikes me as the braver order.
Robyn Jacob is a pianist, singer and composer based in Vancouver. Most listeners who know her at all will know her through Only A Visitor, the avant-pop group whose fourth album Decay appeared on Mint Records in 2023, or through Gamelan Bike Bike, the Balinese-informed ensemble she co-led from 2013 until last year, its instruments built from metal pulled out of the city’s scrap bins. She is also half of The Giving Shapes with harpist Elisa Thorn. This is her first collection of concert music, and percussion sits at the centre of all of it.
‘New Forevers’ takes its subject from the language of cemeteries. Perpetual care is what a burial plot is sold with; it is also the term for the indefinite babysitting of a poisoned industrial site. The piece addresses Yellowknife’s Giant Mine, where 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust sit in mined-out chambers underground, held in place by a federal freezing programme costing billions and running, in principle, forever. Architek Percussion are joined by four voices — Asitha Tennekoon, Lucien Durey, Danny Najjar and Eric Biskupski — the only singing anywhere on the vinyl. Abstract spoken word opens it, and what assembles around that voice is a dystopian landscape of instruments and choral verses. Tuned mallet keyboards carry most of the eeriness, which figures, given the sixteen years Jacob has spent inside gamelan ensembles, where struck bars are the whole architecture. Big orchestral drums sit underneath. Players come and go throughout, and the sung writing eventually settles into harmonised figures whose inflexions point back towards early music. It is akin to a soundtrack for a depressing future, and I mean that as a description of what the piece achieves. I found it genuinely interesting. I can’t see myself returning to it often.
Worth saying plainly, since the instrumentation and the personnel might suggest otherwise: nothing here is improvised. Every one of these pieces is notated and commissioned, this one by Architek Percussion themselves, and the Montreal quartet have upwards of sixty commissions and premieres behind them across a catalogue running from Nicole Lizée to Jason Sharp. Giving a side over to a single eighteen-minute span is a format decision that suits the writing, which needs the uninterrupted run and the silence a well-cut side can hold at that dynamic floor.
Side B drops to two pieces from 2024. ‘Portals I: In The Offing’ is played by SHHH!! Ensemble, the Ottawa duo of percussionist Zac Pulak and pianist Edana Higham, and it is a far more stripped-back proposition — piano at the front of it throughout, percussion held well back, with the clipped agitation of the opening giving way to something slower and considerably more exposed—a nice piece indeed, and for me the most immediately rewarding thing on the record.
‘Portals II: The Verge’ sets Noam Bierstone and Alexander Haupt against Marilou LePage’s viola. What the ear registers across most of its twelve minutes is strings, plural — a small bowed ensemble in sustained harmony. Only one of the three players has a string instrument in their hands; the rest is bowed percussion, and the blend Jacob gets from that combination is the technical achievement of the record. I couldn’t find a structure to take hold of, and after several passes it still moves past me without settling. Jacob describes the piece as the held moment of balance before a plunge into the unknown, which accounts for the suspension, if not for my difficulty with it.
The digital edition adds three further pieces, among them a live performance by the Grammy-winning Sō Percussion and a solo mallet miniature. Those sit outside what the record is. That a label would back a collection of this kind to vinyl at all says a good deal about Redshift’s commitment to the artist involved — I do sometimes ask myself who buys music like this, and both composer and label evidently have an answer I don’t.
| Jazz | Classical | FLAC / APE | Mp3 | HD & Vinyl
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