Joseph Finlay: Facets

Facets was composed between 2003 and 2007 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. Wave opens the record with rich ostinatos that meander purposefully towards the sea; Fleeting Release follows with cascading patterns that shift but never waver; It's About Time layers rich, dense quartets against the incessant punctuation of clock chimes whose recurring motif organises the record across its length. Once More carries an unquenchable sadness as it reaches constantly for an escape in something else; All That Glitters begins in simplicity and dissolves into polytonal complexity that ends in a patter of raindrops. Freedom Fries — named for the temporary renaming of French fries in parts of the United States during the 2003 Iraq war debate — mixes patriotic certainty with inner doubt, drawing on folk Americana while quietly subverting it; Better Days transforms 2000s electric guitar licks into a world of melancholy and turmoil. The record closes with the joyful staccato calypso of Nothing Else, the brightest gesture held back until last.

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.

In his liner notes for this release, Finlay describes 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 mid-2000s.