Portico Quartet - Terrain

Like so many others, the unique impact of the events of 2020 became a foundational backdrop to Portico Quartet's time composing and recording; causing them to take stock, re-think, and imagine a new pathway. Indian novelist Arundhati Roy expressed the sense of grief and rupture from the pandemic as "a portal, a gateway between one world and the next", and as they created the music that would become Terrain they were drawn towards longer, slowly unfolding pieces, which are perhaps the most artistically free and also the most beautiful they have ever made.

These are compositions more in the lineage of Line and Shed Song (Isla -2009), Rubidium (Portico Quartet - 2012) and Immediately Visible (Memory Streams - 2019). Drawing on ambient and American minimalisst music, each of the three parts of Terrain are all subtly different, but a short repeating motif  is the starting point in each. There is a sense of a shared journey to each of these pieces – they move through different worlds, with a sense of horizontal movement that lends the music a pulsing momentum. And there is a sense of dialogue too, both between the composers, and between tranquillity and a subtle, unsettling melancholy, that speaks to both our interior and exterior worlds, to our own personal landscape, to our Terrain.