Editorial Review:

Amazon.com:
If you remember the stark, bare-bones score to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, then you've heard Jocelyn Pook. A British composer with edgy, avant-garde sensibilities, she nevertheless lures you into her world of sound like a Venus flytrap: pretty on the outside, dangerous once you get in. 'Dionysus,' the opening track on Untold Things, is a haunting Gothic-style hymn sung by Melanie Pappenheim over minor-key string cycles. On 'Red Song,' Russian and Tatar vocal samples mix with Verdi's 'Te Deum' to create a global choral lament. 'Upon This Rock' sets a Middle Eastern ululating vocal sample against a decidedly English chorale and heroic strings. On 'Yellow Fever Psalm,' Pappenheim's vocal is played backwards in perfect harmony against a droning string arrangement. Pook terrain is one of thwarted expectations and musical puzzle-making whose songs seduce you with their minor-key melancholy. She often works in contrasts and she's particularly enamored of mixing Middle Eastern instruments and voices in western classical settings, building her orchestrations around the melodies of vocal samples, rather than the usual ambient technique of plopping a sample into the middle of an instrumental mix. Untold Things is a challenging album with untold charms that reveal themselves on repeated listening. --John Diliberto

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Related Items:

• Flood
• The Merchant Of Venice
• Eyes Wide Shut: Music From The Motion Picture
• Invocation
• Water Birth
• see more

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Disc 1:

1. Dionysus
2. Red Song
3. Upon This Rock
4. Yellow Fever Psalm
5. Hell, Fire, and Damnation
6. Take off Your Veil
7. The Last Day
8. Saints and Sinners
9. Butterfly Song
10. Calls, Cries, and Clamours
11. Saffron

Rating: - Imaginative, thought provoking compositions
Whimsical, pensive and kissed by a variety of world music samples, Jocelyn Pook's style in this recording reminds me a little of Deep Forest without the programmed beats. As with all her music that I'm familiar with, the tone of "Untold Things" is minor and distinctly laid back, yet pregnant with carefully patterned intent. This isn't mindless, repetitive filler, but intelligently crafted modern chamber music tinged with elements of New Age fusion. It could perhaps do with a little more livening up now and then, as in the intense and interesting track #5, "Take Off Your Veil" and the fun, drummy "Calls, Cries and Clamours," but overall, "Untold Things" provides an intriguing and satisfying listening experience. My favorite pieces are the poignant and hypnotically complimentary #8, "Saints and Sinners" and #11, Saffron, with their mix of harmonized vocals and sampled chants over a simple but affecting piano and psaltery ostinato. Joining Pook's vocals and viola are singers Melanie Pappenheim and Parvin Cox, psaltery player and co-arranger Harvey Brough, along with her customary collection of chamber orchestra strings, select world instruments, modest programmings and assiduously documented samplings. Try also Pook's gently elegant soundtrack for "William Shakespeare's `The Merchant of Venice'" and her much darker, more eclectic album "Flood" (the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"). For more the way of artful world music fusion, you might enjoy Hans Zimmer's "Millenium" and Paul Winter's "Earthbeat" (the source of the theme song for the "Survivor" reality TV series) as well.

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Rating: - Breathtaking
I've listened to this album countless times and it is still my favorite. The music and vocal virtuosity is simply breathtaking.

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Rating: - unbold thing
Warning: this record is not avant-garde. Comparisons to Penderecki and even Nyman are misleading. The tracks are all quite simple and downtempo with unchallenging celt/world sonorities which call to mind a dark Enya. Pook's comments on backward singing and invented languages as if these techniques were something radical I find a bit embarrassing - added to which they don't actually create much of an impression. In fact the whole project has something of a precious feel given that it is so lacking in real boldness. That wouldn't matter if the music was as emotionally charged as some have claimed, but it isn't. There's a kind of occultish spookiness seeping through, but I can get that from Sisters Of Mercy - in a more exciting and less roundabout way. My main feeling, having bought it was, and still is, `Oh dear, I don't REALLY need yet more worldy ambient stuff, do I?'. I can't guarantee you'll feel the same but there again I can't help wondering why there is currently such a frisson around this artist.

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Rating: - Untold Things
There is a song on this album called "Calls, Cries and Clamors". Well that's about the whole album. Unintelligible "Calls", Weird "Cries" with a background of "Clamor".

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Rating: - SANCTUS ET BENEDICTUS
This,the 3rd CD to be issued under Jocelyn Pook's name,is business as usual.Plenty of sampling of ethnic voices amid music which was composed for various other projects.Anyone who bought her other work will not be disappointed.A first time rounder buying out of curiosity in a sale would find it hard going unless that person was already attuned to Gavin Bryars,Michael Nyman,John Tavener.People who buy the so called Popular Classics would find Britten or Penderecki hard going. Music like this deserves to be listened to.In the end its ultimately rewarding as it can lead to so much more,out there on the fringe of what is now called Classical Crossover.
She has a very detailed website on Yahoo's egroups which also covers the work of Audrey Riley,Ann Stephenson,Caroline Lavelle and Sonia Slany