Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’ me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.

– ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’

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Not only home to the longest night of the year; International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers and World Soil Day – December also plays host to a kaleidoscopic array of new music – with highlights below from Belfast to Brighton.

1. Lost Property/ Splitting the Atom – Brighton // 1 December

Splitting the Atom is Lost Property and Club Zygotic’s bi-monthly showcase of aural oddities, held in the strange gloom of The Green Door Store in Brighton. The exposed brickwork and shadowed corners of this listed space are graced with all manner of outsounds

2. Secluded Bronte: Magnetic Crochet – Belfast // 5 December

Secluded Bronte occupy a universe of their own making. Their music is so heterogenous it defies easy categorisation. The Anglo-Welsh trio were formed in London and launched on the other side of the Atlantic in New York City in 2002. Magnetic Crochet is a suite of songs, poetry, theatre and hardcore musique concrète.

3. Detlev Glanert’s Requiem for Hieronymous Bosch – London // 7 December

Semyon Bychkov conducts Detlev Glanert’s Requiem for Hieronymous Bosch

In 2016, Detlev Glanert chose to mark five centuries since the death of his countryman, the painter Hieronymous Bosch, with a grand and extraordinary new work. Glanert’s Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch, unveiled that year in Amsterdam, combines the Latin texts of the Requiem Mass with selections from the medieval manuscript collection Carmina Burana. The result, for four soloists, two choirs, organ and orchestra, is an ‘inward spectacle’ equivalent in intensity to one of Bach’s passions but full of Glanert’s radioactive excitability and irreverence.

4. LCMF: On Hauntology – London // 8 December

A night of technomancy, glossolalia and divining the dead. We present rarely heard works composed in the 1960s and 1970s by Liszt, Schubert and Beethoven as dictated to spiritual medium Rosemary Brown, witness the extraordinary, almost possessed, vocal improvisations of Maggie Nicols, and screen a classic video piece by artist Susan Hiller, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’, that transforms the TV into a primitive hearth, inviting us to see ‘the TV set [that] exists in everybody’s living room as a potential vehicle of reverie’.

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