press
& reviews
“…in Campbell’s music it all comes together in the rustling, in silken songs, in bewitching appearances of piano and agitated percussion. As listeners we are at the heart of the flow, in a tumultuous incantation, as if we were swimming against the tide towards the source.”
— Inactuelles- Musiques Singulières
“Chris Campbell amazes and catches our senses, opening our antennae and allowing us to capture and feel the unspeakable, to leap into the infinitely large with dizzying expansion. Vital.”
“Extraordinarily compelling… This is fantastic music. One cannot sit down and listen and then blithely walk away. To listen to this [music]is to step into a different world and become lost in sound. “
— I Care If You Listen
“Orison is a dazzling, refreshing, and distinctively individual composition.”
— Best of 2021-Sequenza 21: Orison
“Christopher Campbell not only makes his own extremely unique music but he also helps make music by lots of other composers happen.”
— New Music Box (New Music USA)
“And on it goes, like an aural Quay Brothers movie or a Guy Maddin soundtrack--one jerry-built mechanism or electronic birdsong or ceremony after another, meandering along, sometimes by itself and sometimes cunningly layered, until gradually, or suddenly, replaced by another.. What will come next, the listener keeps wondering, and what does come next is, miraculously, never disappointing.”
— American Record Guide
“Campbell is both bold and thoughtful, and in my book, that is the highest form of wisdom."
— MONSIEUR DELIRE
"[The music] works in a manner both grand and organically crafty. Aspects of Glass/Reich-like minimalism, baroque-ish finery, judicious dissonance, cavernous drones, and pop music melodrama-it’s all here in a candy-colored kaleidoscope that feels as natural as a sunny day walk through an eclectic neighborhood, where everyone’s got their window open and music up loud, and it all seems to magically come together."
— ICON magazine
“[O]ne should come to the music ready to be surprised. Included are passages that suggest a junkyard hoedown, an improv from centuries ago, and a woozy nightmare of sickly convulsions. … no one can accuse Campbell of playing it safe.”
— TEXTURA
“Chris Campbell’s [work] is less a piece of music than an imaginary movie for the ear. Rickety mechanisms, synthetic pastoral scenes with twittering birdsong, ceremonies, and every sort of looping, whistling, scraping, droning, slithering, rattling string or wind or percussion or electric instrument you can think of, along with a few you can’t ... are concatenated into a sound-poem that even when densely layered ... never seems cluttered, and somehow adds up to much more than a mere sonic collage. Rather it creates a simulacrum of the play of mind and memory--and suggests an ancient, mythic story, too.”
— The Absolute Sound
"Cathartic and gorgeous ... Truly a mesmerizing listen."
— Radio K
"A hard-to-describe hybrid of post-minimalist classical, new-new age, and electro-acoustic, [Campbell] incorporates things you didn't know could make such interesting music. … Be ready to land in uncharted musical territory, where it's best to just take it all in."
“Melancholy and contemplative. The [music] evokes a kind of uncertain transition where one must move forward, but with no clear vision of where.”
— CHAIN D.L.K.
"This is deep and thoughtful music - an extended work that covers much sonic territory. Campbell and his exemplary musicians have created a unique and compelling narrative of beauty in harmony & dissonance."
— WMBR
“Campbell 's music is an entirely human oasis, which shines in the realization of a rational objective whose boundaries and certainties cannot be established. With him, the listener matures in the musical flow, and grows into the dimensions that the music manages to create."
— Percorsi Musicale
“His is an imagination filled with vivid, living musical sounds, both intuitively human but at other times, beyond; at moments, celestial, but at other times, earthy and guttural. [He creates] terse and potent sound poems that are lean and economical, detailing rich ideas that float through spheres of memory. “
— George Tsontakis, American composer and conductor
"…the piece surrounds the listener and leads them on a path of meditation. The ensemble weaves a "nuanced" dialogue that allows the sound to rise and fall, keeping the listener's attention awake as one follows the exchanges between the strings, the piano, and the drums. In moments more evanescent- the notes almost disappear, and other moments are more firmly rooted where the ensemble is lovingly reunited with the listener. This dialogue continues until the end of the work, where the sound seems to gradually dematerialize, leaving the listener in resonance with their own interiority, comforted by the sound experience lived in up to that moment."
— Kathodik Magazine
“[The music is] organic and human, ebbing and flowing in an occasionally edgy way that keeps me listening raptly.”
— The Big Takeover Magazine
“…[an]esteemed composer and producer of inimitable vision.”
“An active composer, his most recent album “Orison” has been described as a ‘jewel of contemporary composition’.”
— Classical Post
"Brilliant. Much of it seems to have the same interest in repetition and development or apparent repetition and development that we find in the music of Philip Glass. Campbell has put together a fine ensemble and there's brilliant use of tone color on this record."
— New Sounds WNYC
“The total effect is ... mesmerizing.”
— Gramma UK
