Sylvia Lim — Flare

Flare collections together six modern classical chamber works from up-and-coming Malaysian Australian composer Sylvia Lim. Her work mixes the gloomy and emotional felt, with the lightly searing to the awkwardly bounding. This collection is relatively varied in both its sound & instrumental use

This is a CD release appearing on the always worthy Another Timber. As always, we get the label's house-style minimal mini gatefold presentation- cover artwork-wise, we have a murky and dense abstract painting blending black, dark green, and yellow tones.

Ms Lim has been releasing work since the early 2020s. The pieces here date from between 2021 and 2025. With runtimes between four and eighteen minutes.

The pieces here move from the title track, which is for solo piano and is built by a continual bounding & clanking series of non-harmonic patterns. You keep thinking its pace will suddenly wear itself- but again & again it reignites it’s wayward/ semi discordant gallop again. Onto “Same but different” which is for two acoustic guitars. Its structure is a mix of stark galloping to plucking tones and blunt clanks. At times there is an urgency/ pace, at others it pares back to even starker awkwardness.

The final piece, “Field of Play” which Lim co-composed with it’s celloist player Natasha Zielazinski, is the longest on this collection, nearing eighteen and a half minutes. It moves from layers of simmering & blunt hover, through to bitter/ sweet sawing’s, onto steadily bounding billows, to winding down saw & bay.

With Flare Lim shows her ability to blend the felt and the fraught- in a largely compelling, if at times angularly lopsided manner.