Music for Violin Alone

Music for Violin Alone - Aisha Orazbayeva's fourth solo album was recorded in a makeshift studio in an empty house in Le Poujol sur Orb (France) during the first two weeks of the French lockdown. Recorded both as a response to all loss of work due to COVID-19 and a way to be heard again. The pieces on the album are the pieces Aisha came to discover and learn during the two years of maternity leave. Two years of maternity leave have also been two years of creative silence, a search for new approaches, repertoire and ways of playing.

The works presented on this album have all been written by or dedicated to violinists-composers (with Oliver Leith being an exception) - J.S.Bach, Angharad Davies, Nicola Matteis Jr., Malcolm Goldstein (dedicatee of Cage's Eight Whiskus and Tenney's Koan).

The album opens with Circular Bowing Study by Angharad Davies - an extended exploration of a technique no matter how limited, it continues back through the ages with works that are filled with silence (Bach, Cage and Leith) and works with almost total absence of it (Tenney, Matteis), and closes with Aisha's own composition - broken harmonics of a string trapped inside a ring.

Music for Violin Alone is like a map of invisible violin sounds where past and present pathways are being drawn and redrawn over and over again until they are confined to a single technique or a broken sound or disappear into a total silence.