MusicWeb online review

Music and Vision review (includes sound clip of track 5)

La Folia Online review

Newsday Review (by Pulitzer prize winner Justin Davidson)

Live Steve Martland Band Queen Elizabeth Hall, October 4 ,2002
Strange to open a series of concerts devoted to composer Louis Andriessen with a show by one of his pupils. More so given the Martland Band's take on Andriessen's On Jimmy Yancey, whose well-meant but hackneyed blues motifs hint that the pupil might have bettered the teacher.

The rest of the show doesn't suggest otherwise, as the ever-lively Martland leads his crack ensemble in a sparkling Beat The Retreat and a dizzy Re-Mix. He makes for a distracting presence, conducting like a flamingo dancing across hot coals. Yet as the band reach the absurdly tough Horses Of Instruction, he wanders off and leaves the musicians to fend for themselves.

They fend brilliantly. Its recorded version is one of the most thrilling quarter-hours of the last two decades, a spiralling, impossibly complex fury. Live, it's the same, only louder. And, therefore, better. Of course, if his band can live without a conductor for a piece this tricksy, one wonders why he bothers hand-waving for the rest of the set. But hell: when he's writing music this good, he deserves to soak up a little applause. Ace.

Sun Music

Martin Buzacott talks to Brisbane Festival Director Tony Gould about what makes Brisbane unique in a festival filled country.

Mention the name Steve Martland to anyone associated with the biennial Brisbane Festival and watch the smiles emerge. It's hard to believe that it's been two years since the English composer with his trademark flat-top haircut and Bermuda shorts was here, but his legacy lives on.For me and several others, Martland left the indelible recollection of fatigue and elation after entire nights spent drinking, talking music and laughing ourselves senseless with the insomniac bad-boy. For audiences it's the memory of his kick-ass 11 piece band that ripped apart the staid Suncorp Theatre in two unforgettable concerts. And for schoolchildren all over South-East Queensland it's the inspiration of Martland selflessly, with his common touch, spending hours and days and weeks working with them on their own music, which his band played.

Steve Martland was no blow-in, blow-out act. He came, he gave, and left something behind. He became one of us. And for all the fearsome reputation that preceded him, through his actions while here, he became in many ways the definitive Brisbane

Classical Reviews HMV Choice Sept/Oct.2001 No.11
This is a collection of works by the British Composer Steve Martland whose music is influenced by a wide variety of musical genres- classical,rock,folk and jazz. The musicallanguage is modern and intelligent but never over interllectual. After the powerful opening piece Horses Of Instruction, Kick is surprisingly lyrical- a simple folk melody is played on the violin which is then developed with variations and moves to a more modern jazz style. It is Martland's rhythmic invention which is the outstandingly attractive element in his writing and his wit in reinterpreting other musics such as baroque music in Re-Mix which uses a piece for viola da gamba by Marin Marais (made popular by the French film Toutes les matins du Monde). He creates an intoxicated version of Marin Marais's work- wild and French. The performance of the 11-piece ensemble reveal dynamic drive and energy.
Therese Wassily Saba

Classical CD of the week The Observer 16.09.2001
Liverpool born Steve Martland (b 1958) dared to borrow and adapt rock, Latin and techno for his high-octane scores when most composers were stuck in a post-schoenberg straightjacket. Still a restless subversive with -luckily for us- no signs of mellowing, he's become a guru for younger composers and a powerful evangelist for new music. This disc of works for his own excellent 11-piece band ranges from the pulsating to the softly lyrical, from English folk fiddle (in his football piece Kick) to the melancholy of Mr Anderson's Pavane (in memory of Lindsay Anderson) or the funky energy of his Principia. Martland's is an anarchic, distinctive, rousing voice, as this disc confirms.
Fiona Maddocks

The Wire Magazine issue 212 October 2001
When Steve Martland first burst on the contemporary music scene with an album on Factory's shortlived Classical imprint in 1989, the flurry of attention he aroused accentuated the energetic nature of his music. Following in the tracks of his mentor Louis Andriessen, Martland's early work was certainly post-minimal. But if the orchestral rigour of, say Babi Yar or its companion work Drill had an implicit model in Shostakovich's symphonies, he had also learned something about accessibility from Michael Nyman's Campesino Band, Lost Jockey et al.
12 years on, the nine pieces dating from 1986-1998 on Horses Of Instruction reveal that Martland's compositional style has lost none of its old vigour, even as it has matured. Originally commissioned forThe Bang On A Can Allstars, the title piece's fiercely rhythmical nature is here realised by the 11 piece Martland Band anchored by a drummer. His structures are sound, if not exactly new-short, expressive phrases dovetail with hocketing rhythms- but his imaginatively worked variations mark them out as modern. Martland's minimalist moments rarely lull the listener into a state of reverie, and when they do, staccato brass stabs usually act as an alarm call.
What makes this disc so compelling is the musical range it explores. Terminal (1998) has a dangerous undercurrent of cross-rhythms and a fuzzy guitar. Dancemotifs ancient and modern crop up throughout the collection, but also far quieter moods. The brass on Mr Anderson's Pavane ties stately movement with a very English melancholia, while Kick - essentially a series of five violin led variations on a folk theme- has an unfussy, modal purity. The longer Beat The Retreat and Eternal Delight show how Martland's grip on his material is grounded in his flexible imagination. In all an excellent return.
Louise Gray

The Scotsman, Friday, 30th November 2001

Steve Martland Band at The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

There's possibly no better antidote for a dreich, drizzly Edinburgh night than a short sharp dose of the Steve Martland Band.

Martland’s 11-piece band of saxophones, brass, electric fiddle, keyboard, rhythm and bass - classical music’s hooligan element - were at the Queen’s Hall last night, meting out their amplified aural punishment on the paltry few that bothered to turn up. Those who didn’t missed a treat.

Everything in this short programme was geared to live with you for at least a week after the event. The sustained ear-splitting fusion of brutal minimalism, rock, jazz and funk not only had the outer extremities stamping out the beat, but probably pulverised the odd gallstone within decibel range.

The magic of Martland’s music lies in the style of performance. His players - including Edinburgh-born percussionist Colin Currie, an international star in his own right - are his disciples, and crack instrumentalists to boot. They exude a raw, unstoppable energy that inevitably cancels out the essentially static formula in much of Martland’s writing. They are part of a self-styled line in musical anarchy. In Kick, a set of variations written for the English Football Association at the time of Euro ’96, they knocked the stuffing out of a tender old English folk tune in the same way a Millwall supporter would mug a nice old lady.

Beat the Retreat started off as the reverential tribute to 17th century composer Henry Purcell it is intended to be, but soon transformed into a grotesque parody on Baroque ground bass. Terminal, highlighting the band’s red hot kit player, lives up to its name. The final assault Re-Mix, sounded like Kurt Weill with obligato shotgun. I left feeling physically drained, but considerably cheerier.
Kenneth Walton

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE DEC.2001
Steve Martland's music crosses so many of the supposedly absolute boundries between different musical worlds that it is impossible to categorise. The most significant of his teachers was Louis Andriessen, and the hard instrumental edges, clean cut harmony, abrupt transitions and driving rhythms of the Dutch composer's style provide the foundation of Martland's works, heard in its purest form on this disc, perhaps, in the impressive Purcell homage of 1995, Beat The Retreat. But there is much more besides- the riffs and the melodic tags of rock and dance music, the skirls of folk tunes, the syncopations and chord voicings of jazz. Like Andriessen, Martland has always taken his music to as wide an audience as possible, and never been afraid of adapting his language accordingly. If the lengthy and highly compartmentalised Horses Of Instruction and the mysterious Eternal Delight, are the most complex works here, then the Thistle Of Scotland, written for an education project, is a beautifully conceived and lucid miniature. Terminal started life as a collaboration with the rock band Spiritualized and Re-Mix is an inescapably catchy march of ever increaing wildness that surley is directly descended from Weill and Eisler.
PERFORMANCE ***** (5 star)
SOUND **** (4 star)
Andrew Clements

The Gramophone (Awards issue 2001)
''An essential Martland collection, superbly performed by his greatest advocates''.
First of all, I want to make clear that this is a superb disc, an indispensable guide for anyone who wishes to get to know Steve Martland's music or to hear the unmistakable sound of his marvellous band. There is playing on this recording of such virtuosity that it really beggars belief, particularly in Beat the retreat and Terminal. Of course, there have long been rumours that BMG recorded the band in 1997 at the time of its national Contemporary music tour but, if true, this putative second CD has never been released. Now the wait is over, and not before time.
The title work, Horses of Instruction, is a must. I don't know how many performances I have attended of this piece, both by the SMB or the Bang On A Can Allstars (for whom it was originally written) but one element has remained constant on each occasion: a sense of eager anticipation that you're about to hear something truely pleasurable, a feeling that you might expect for Four Last Songs but one that is all too rare for contemporary music. (This is by the way, about all Horses of Instruction could be said to have in common with Richard Strauss!). The SMB play the piece unconducted and you sense it has become almost an emblem of the group's identitiy.
It is interesting to compare the two versions of the piece. The SMB arrangement is especially strong for the opening five minutes which can sound weak without the explosive entries of the drum kit. However- and this will no doubt seem sacrilegious to a SMB groupie- I personally much prefer the All-Stars' arrangement for the ending, where sax player Evan Ziporyn has space to weave his magic. The SMB drive the music at a faster tempo and I have misgivings about this. However, there can be no better testament to the merits of their approach than this recording. Let's hope that a recording of the All-Stars version can also be arranged so that others can make up their mind about this startling music.
The composer writes movingly in the CD booklet text about his ensemble. He states that these recordings 'could not be achieved without the faith, commitment or, indeed, critisicms of a group of people whose individual and collective musicianship makes me humble'. In a sense, Martland is right to show humility. He writes music with a directness and single-mindeness that is both its greatest strength and a potential cause of exasperation for the unconvinced listener. You hear the joins in his music and when they don't work, there's no hiding place. There are moments, too, when you feel that the composer could have taken a little more care in choosing his notes, such as whole sections of Eternal Delight or much of Thistle Of Scotland. But I would willingly sit through these also-rans for the marvellous passages of Beat The Retreat or Horses Of Instruction that touch on genius.
What's special about the SMB is the extent to which individual members assert ownership over the music, something symbolised by the aformentioned unconducted performances of Horses Of Instruction. Take for instance Re-Mix, a transcription of viol music by Marin Marais. It's always seemed to me a shoddy piece of work on Martland's part ( and still sounds it when other groups play the piece). The performance here, replete with Klezmer-like yowling from the saxes and braying brass, is quite simply a tour de force and it makes me entirely review my opinion of the music. The same could be said for the exceptional rhythm guitar and soprano sax playing which so beguiles the ear in Terminal, a work originally composed for the rock band Spiritualized.
The SMB's performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1997 was quite simply one of the best concerts I have ever attended. I never expected a recording to be able to re-capture the energy of that occasion. This Black Box release proves me wrong.
Martyn Harry

International Record review Dec.2001
SMB Horses Of Instruction
A presence on the UK music scene for a decade and a half now, of late little has been heard of Steve Martland on disc. This new release gathers up most of the pieces written for his own band and, with a 1986-98 time span, gives a good (if not inclusive) overview of a dedicated musical non-conformist.
Written for and premiered by Bang On A Can Allstars, Horses Of Instruction takes on an altogether funkier profile in its band re-write, especially in the section where brass and saxophones pursue a suave melodic riff over pulsing marimba and guitar chords (4'58'')- Stravinsky and Reich in a jazz funk rendezvous, maybe? Martland dispatches this and the frentic closing sequence (8'40'') with characteristic aplomb. Programme this work immediately before Eternal Delight, a similarly Blake-inspired companion-piece and, texturally and harmonically, Martland's most intricate- cerebral- ensemble piece to date. Absorbing too, though maybe not as celebratory as he imagines?
Kick fulfils the brief for a football-connected piece by subjecting a spitited English fiddle tune to a sequence of punchy, deconstructive variations- ingenious andmuch more engrossing than the average Premiership fixture! The imaginary dance fantasia of Beat The Retreat is rhythmically a more subtle affaire than Martland's 'stay and party' maxim might suggest. Its Purcell derivation sounds out loud andclear with the trumpet tune that emerges in the undulating central section (5'40''). There is commemoration of a more intimate kind in Mr Anderson's Pavane, a sombre but never dour tribute to the British film director whose overreaching ambition cost him dear.
The Martland 'lolipops' are here too: Principia, whose 'young persons guide' to rhythmic displacement has gone down in industrial qualities at schools and colleges for over a decade and Thistle of Scotland, a plaintive traditional melody with a deceptively 'regular' beat. Re-Mix situtes Marin Marais decisively and unapologetically in the alternative cabaret scene of the mid-1980's. Terminal is an intriguing synthesis between the idioms of Martland and the trance-rock ensemble Spiritualized, resulting in process music you can dance to.
The Steve Martland Band, on cracking form throughout this disc, really benefit from a recorded balance that treats them as a serious- in terms of musicianship- ensemble, rather than a dance outfit for wannabe trendies. There are typically upfront notes from Martland (though the introductory appreciation is a little fawning) and the now customary Black Box weblinks. Entertainment with a kick, just as the composer intends.
Graham Simpson

The Daily Telegraph
Putting this disc on the CD player is rather like inviting into your home one of those cars with booming hi-fi that pause outside your house at night when you are trying to sleep. The booklet describes Martland's music as '' Rock meets Reich'', but it's more like brain-dead dance music meets brainless minimalism.
If you don't have a headache before you start listening, the odds are you will have one after being affronted by its 70 minutes of incessant rhythmic head-banging. What a supposedly serious label like BlackBox is doing giving credence to such a tediously one-track composer as Martland is anyones's guess, particularly when its other recent issues of contemporary music have been so welcome and stimulating.
Here instead, we get the rock-styled Steve Martland Band pounding out mindless rhythms in nine pieces that are barely distinguishable one from another. Only one track, the earliest, Re-Mix from 1986, has anything to attract rather then repel the ear. and only probably then because some of its material has been borrowed from French baroque composer Marin Marais.
Matthew Rye