Robert Laidlow's debut album turns science into music

Composer Robert Laidlow, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, has released his debut album “Reality Eaters” on the NMC label. The album features three works drawing inspiration from science and technology.

Ambitious piano concerto

The first piece, “Warp,” is a 12-minute piano concerto that proposes a musical solution to Einstein's field equations. Pianist Joseph Havlat performs the solo, while the BBC Philharmonic under conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni creates spiraling orchestral lines that push instruments to their limits. The piece concludes with a serene piano cadence.

Quartet tribute to Newton

The second composition, “Gravity,” pays homage to Newton's universal law of gravitation. Performed by the Piatti Quartet, it is described as harmonically unstable and slightly verbose, with a moment where the musicians descend into a musical equivalent of a black hole.

Musical dialogue with AI

The album's closing work, “Silicon,” is a three-movement symphonic piece that wittily examines the impact of artificial intelligence on human creativity. The first movement, “Mind,” features music wrestling with a machine instructed to imitate Laidlow's own output. The second, “Body,” employs adaptive electronics to create musical deepfakes. The final movement, “Soul,” pits the BBC Philharmonic against an AI algorithm trained on its own broadcasts, complete with phantom announcers.

The album has been praised for its rich sound and detailed interpretation.