Christopher Fox - You, Us, Me

“This second Metier disc devoted to the inventive British composer comprises first recordings of eight works, mostly involving Ian Pace and joined by Amanda Crawley in two song-cycles, A-N-N-A Blossom-time and Louisiana, using Poems (in Fox's own translation from the German) by Kurt Schwitters. These are dry, droll, stylistically capricious miniatures, musical dada. The piano piece You, Us, Me (Habeñera) inspired by Bizet's Carmen and Catherine Clements's feminist commentary on it, is contrastingly unitary, minimalistic, rigorous. Besides three other piano solos, including the Joseph Beuys-influenced Block, for an instrument "prepared" wit Blu-Tak, there are two tape pieces, both evoking Schwitters as a wartime detainee in Britain.”