Joseph Finlay: Facets

Facets was composed between 2003 and 2008 and substantially developed in a shared house in Cricklewood, North London, where composer Joseph Finlay and guitarist Stewart French were living alongside a group of friends. Finlay, completing a Masters in composition at the Royal Academy of Music, was writing by day; French, a fellow RAM graduate then working in the City, would return in the evenings with guitar in hand, trying new sketches in his office foyer during the day to the confusion of his colleagues. What began as an experiment between friends became a sustained dialogue about what a guitar album might be.

The pieces Finlay produced during this period refused classification. Drawing equally on classical harmony, jazz, popular song, folk, and country, they reflected a composer in the process of leaving behind academic modernism for something more intuitive and, in his own later phrase, "a little bit, dare I admit it, cool." The music sets clear melodies against rhythmic complexity, extended harmony against popular idiom, and a certain sly humour against passages of genuine interiority. It is the record of a composer working out what kind of composer he wanted to be.

The eight movements each inhabit a distinct sound-world. Only Once opens the record in bright, staccato calypso; Fleeting Release is built of cascading patterns that shift without resolving; It's About Time — whose chiming motif recurs across the record — layers rich dense quartets against the insistent measure of a clock; Freedom Fries, named for the temporary renaming of French fries in American restaurants during the 2003 Iraq war debate, draws on folk Americana while quietly subverting it; All That Glitters begins in simplicity and dissolves into polytonal complexity that ends in a patter of raindrops. The other pieces — Wave, Once More, Better Days — complete a portrait of the record's creative moment and of the friendship that produced it.

The recording was made in 2007 and released in 2009 in a limited edition of 500 copies, circulating privately among colleagues and friends rather than receiving commercial distribution. The 2026 version reintroduces the record in newly edited and remastered form, with tempo adjustments developed in collaboration between composer and performer over the intervening years. Though the scores remain as Finlay wrote them, the 2026 recording presents the music in a form that both artists consider its definitive realisation — the culmination of nearly two decades of continuing dialogue about the work.

Finlay's own note on the record, written to accompany this release, is reproduced in full elsewhere on this page. He writes of Facets as "the musical facets of me then, the sounds that I sought to juggle and to bring into contact with one another" — a record made before the aesthetic boundary crossings it performs had become common, whose openness to idiom now feels less radical than it once did, and which stands as a document of two musicians' shared artistic moment in the middle of the last decade.

On Facets, Joseph Finlay, 2023:

"Returning to this music is like returning to another version of myself. Facets was dreamed up and written in 2007, when Stewart and I lived with a group of friends in a big shared house in Cricklewood. Stewart and I were young, and filled with self-assurance and self-doubt in equal measure. Post music college, Stewart had taken a job in the city; I would give him scribbled sketches and he would silently try them out in the office foyer, to the confusion of his colleagues. I had come to the end of a Masters degree in composition at a conservatoire. I was slowly losing my longstanding commitment to modernism, to the avant-garde musical techniques rooted in the serialism of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and the later ‘total serialism’ of Stockhausen and Boulez. I was already feeling more connected to more ‘anarchic’ modernist composers, like John Cage and, in the UK, Cornelius Cardew. The ‘clownishness’ of Cage, and before him, Erik Satie, helped steer me through the staid modernism and formality of my composition department, who rarely seemed to know what to make of me. But I was already playing and writing Jazz. And I had dreams of writing pop music, of clear melodies, evocative harmonies and thick grooves. Of being a little bit, dare I admit it, cool. All of that is in Facets. It represents the musical facets of me then, the sounds that I sought to juggle and to bring into contact with one another. Stewart and I set out to create an album that was uncategorisable, that wasn’t clearly classical, despite that being the background that both of us came from, but also had feet in rock, folk, electronica and even country and western. In a slightly naïve sense we wanted it just to be music. Listening now, to this remastered version which gives it a newly contemporary sound, I note that my interests just cannot leave each other alone. The pieces designed to have ‘pop’ sound begin with simplicity and clean harmonies but frequently take unexpected diversions, taking blind alleys into layering, extended harmony and rhythmic complexity. Whereas those that are more straightforwardly ‘contemporary classical’ in style have melodies that demand to be sung, chord sequences that want to move you and references which hope to connect to your life beyond music. The clock chimes that set apart the differing sections of It’s About Time transport me back in time to the mid-2000s, when everything seemed less complicated (but almost certainly wasn’t) but also still chime in my present, collapsing time into an endless cycle of bells. Occasionally elements that were specific to the period jump out – we named the track that draws heavily on folk americana Freedom Fries – based on the temporary renaming of French fries in parts of the United States in 2003 due to France’s opposition to the Iraq war. Precise moments like that have been forgotten but the underlying subversion of national musical tropes still feels relevant. There is so much of Facets that still touches a chord with me. The joyful staccato calypso of Only Once; Fleeting Release’s cascading patterns that shift but never waver; the rich ostinatos of Wave which seem to meander purposefully towards the sea; the rich, dense quarters of It’s About Time, punctuated by the incessant sounds of the clock; the unquenchable sadness of Once More as it constantly reaches for an escape in something else; Freedom Fries which mixes patriotic certainty with inner doubt; the way Better Days transforms 2000s electric guitar licks into a world of melancholy and turmoil; and the initial simplicity of All That Glitters, where ever increasing polytonal complexity emerges as if from nowhere, ending in a patter of raindrops. All these pieces remain parts of me. Facets of a person I once was. Facets, I hope, of others too. It’s hard to be sure that the same person who wrote this music is writing this text now. It is, and it isn’t. After all, the more things change, the more they stay the same."