Robert Laidlow's 'Reality Eaters' album blends science and classical music

Robert Laidlow, a composer equally at home in science and technology as in classical music, has released his debut album 'Reality Eaters' on the NMC label. The album showcases his intricate and wildly imaginative work, which, despite highly complex core concepts, remains eminently approachable.

The first track, 'Warp', is a 12-minute piano concerto that proposes a musical solution to Einstein's field equations. Pianist Joseph Havlat boldly ventures where no pianist has gone before amid the distorting fabric of orchestral space-time. Strident orchestral lines spiral ever upwards, stretching instruments to their limits, while the piano maintains its course towards a serene conclusion. Handsomely recorded, the BBC Philharmonic under Vimbayi Kaziboni provides vibrantly detailed support.

The Piatti Quartet performs 'Gravity', a harmonically unstable if slightly verbose homage to Newton's universal law, at one point pitching the players into the musical equivalent of a black hole.

'Silicon', a mind-expanding three-movement work of symphonic proportions, employs a cheeky wit as it reckons with the impact of AI on human creativity. The opening movement, 'Mind', sees Laidlow's music wrestle with a machine instructed to imitate his own output. 'Body' uses teasing adaptive electronics to create diabolical musical deepfakes. Finally, 'Soul' pits the BBC Philharmonic against an AI algorithm trained on its own broadcasts, complete with phantom announcers.