London-born musician Shiva Feshareki has always blended two seemingly contradictory worlds. She is best known for creating improvisatory, sampledelic soundscapes using DJ equipment: Stanton turntables, a Roland Space Echo, the real-time sampling capabilities of a Korg Kaoss Pad, a theremin which spins on a turntable to create unusual electronic pulses. But she’s also a trained composer with a doctorate from the Royal College of Music, and has long championed avant garde works by likeminded women such as Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue and Leslie García.
This album straddles both of Feshareki’s worlds. The main event is Still Point, a 40-minute concerto for double orchestra and turntables that was written – incredibly – in 1948 by a 23-year-old Daphne Oram, a decade before she founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Feshareki spent years exploring Oram’s archive in order to reimagine Still Point with fellow composer James Bulley before performing it at the 2018 Proms, and this is an eventful realisation. The first movement sounds like a grand, ominous film score, laced with high modernism; the second is a dystopian collage of 78rpm turntable sounds, discordant effects and air raid sirens. The final movement is the sound of a nation emerging from the ravages of war – shabby, end-of-empire grandeur and postwar uncertainty, all put through the dub chamber.
