Astrid Sonne: Great Doubt review – experimental viola player’s elliptical R&B

Denmark-born, London-based Astrid Sonne is part of that growing band of classically trained musicians who have moved into the realm of the pop singer-songwriter. Like Julia Holter, Mica Levi or Owen Pallett, she seems to draw from her conservatoire training as obliquely as a previous generation of rock stars might have drawn from their art school training. Instead of showing off her virtuosity as a viola player or her skills at writing four-part harmony, Sonne manipulates stray elements of 20th-century modernism and beyond to illuminate her curious, elliptical songs.

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Her previous LPs have comprised wordless, drumless instrumentals: painterly constructions which invoked choral samples and minimalist synth pulses, with Sonne occasionally playing drones and flourishes on her viola. There are similarly intriguing instrumentals dotted throughout this album, but what’s compelling about Great Doubt is hearing Sonne singing her own songs, pioneering a gloriously odd, twitchy, off-kilter form of R&B.

Staying Here sounds like Wendy Carlos playing a twisted Bach prelude on a steampunk Moog, while ravey synth voicings pulsate softly over the top. Say You Love Me is a woozy piece of dub pitched somewhere between Robert Wyatt and King Tubby; Boost mixes doomy drones over some comically huge hip-hop beats; Everything Is Unreal sets a Laurie Anderson-style narration against minimalist backing. Best of all is Do You Wanna (Have a Baby), where Sonne asks herself (and humanity) the biggest of all questions over monstrous, decisive, thumpy drums, all wonderfully undercut by hymnal piano and horror movie strings.

Sonne has previously talked about how difficult she finds writing lyrics, which is why she’s previously preferred making instrumentals. Here she sings in a soft, intimate voice, her words lost in the raptures of devotion, as if paralysed by love. It quite fits the blissful mood of this record.

Also out this month

Philip Glass Solo (Nonesuch) sees the minimalist figurehead revisiting several old compositions on his home piano during lockdown. Highlights include his organ work Mad Rush played as a rubato-heavy piano jangle, and an adaptation of Truman Sleeps, from Glass’s Truman Show soundtrack. Ambient Ensemble (Backward Music) sees Quebec-based musician Nick Schofield laying down hypnotic piano patterns that he alters in pitch, on tape, and then overlays with synths and the lush orchestrations of a small chamber ensemble. The New York pianist Vijay Iyer seems to reinvent the piano trio with every new LP and Compassion (ECM), featuring bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, is no exception. As well as a rumbling, waltz-time reworking of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed, there are hard-grooving pieces, heavy-duty avant garde freakouts and ruminative meditations (It Goes, Prelude Orison, the title track) that are closer to fin de siècle romanticism than jazz.