Award-winning composer, improvising-trombonist and band leader Alex Paxton describes Music for Bosch People like this: “It’s like minimal but loads more notes like video-games but with more song like jazz but much more gay like old music but more current like yummy sweet but more stick like paint but more scratch like tapestry but filthily like prayer but more loud like loud groove and more rude like fingers and faces too but somehow more smelly like smelly things cooking with more chew and change like louder prayers that groove with like stinking-hot-pink in poo-brown but even more desperate-like than that like drums and Dream Musics…”

His work draws upon an range of classical, experimental, electronic and folk music traditions to create a unique and explosive voice. The ‘Bosch’ in the title refers to the 16th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose horrifically fantastical images inspire Paxton to make highly-charged genre-hopping music that is joyful and exciting but with violent aspects mixed in as well.

Paxton uses the phrase ‘infinite MIDI synths’ to describe the way he composes. Tracks 3–7 began life as layers of recorded improvisations on a simple little stylophone and a small cheap MIDI synth, which were then written over with notation and orchestrated for a live band of drums, sax, guitar and trombone, electronics and tape elements. The title track is the densest, most complex piece he’s ever written and was composed especially for this recording. LONDONGLUM is a manic solo for vocalising trombonist that showcases Paxton’s compelling musical language.

Paxton was elected to the 9th International Composition Seminar with Ensemble Modern, has won the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, Dankworth Jazz Prize, Leverhulme Art Scholar Prize, Harriet Cohen Music Award, appointed as London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Composer and has been commissioned by legendary multi-instrumentalist John Zorn.

“Manic, brilliant, beauty” – Listenpony