Hilgrove Kenrick & Nick Norton-Smith find stillness in motion on collaborative EP 'Sylph'

Some works demand attention with immediacy; others seep quietly into the bloodstream until you realise they’ve altered your sense of time. That is where 'Sylph', the collaboration between Hilgrove Kenrick and Nick Norton-Smith, belongs. It’s a composition that sidesteps bombast in favour of patience, carving out space where sound, silence, and memory intertwine.

The centre of gravity lies in Norton-Smith’s soprano saxophone, its voice gliding and circling with unhurried grace. Around it, Kenrick layers a fragile architecture of strings and electronic resonance, a hybrid of orchestral weight and vaporous synths. Rather than competing for dominance, the instruments breathe into one another, swelling and dissolving in a way that feels closer to weather than to traditional arrangement.

What emerges is neither soundtrack nor straightforward chamber piece. The duo draw from their experience in film and theatre, but 'Sylph' avoids cinematic obviousness. Instead, it leaves emotional interpretation in the listener’s hands. Suspended notes invite contemplation, while the slow burn of its development resists the easy payoffs of more declarative music.

The composition moves with an undercurrent of quiet tension, a sense that something profound hovers just beyond reach. It’s this refusal to settle into comfort that makes the piece compelling: it lives in the in-between, where genre borders blur and patience reveals its reward.

For listeners who approach music as both meditation and exploration, 'Sylph' something that doesn’t shout for your attention, but keeps pulling you back. In an age of immediacy, these two remind us of the power in waiting, listening, and allowing music to unfold at its own, unhurried pace.