Amelia Warner - Halcyon Amelia Warner

Neo-classical London-based composer Amelia Warner is known for her work on Mary Shelley, Wild Mountain Thyme, Mr. Malcolm’s List, and the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Young Woman and the Sea, starring Daisy Ridley. Warner’s stunning orchestral scores infused with electronic elements have won several awards, including Breakthrough Composer of The Year at the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) Awards, shortlisted for Best Original Score Oscar, and nominations in the Discovery of the Year category at the World Soundtrack Awards, a Hollywood Music in Media Award, and recognition as a nominee for the ASCAP Composers’ Choice Awards. Halcyon is her first artist album release following EPs Arms (2015), Visitors (2018) and Haven (2020).

Halcyon is a beautiful, evocative, comforting, reassuring, haunting album. It’s a sonic uroboros, a Möbius strip of curling piano themes and delicate violin motifs and washes of electronics, carefully crafted over the last two years “It was a slow process, because it was in between films. Whenever I had a gap, I'd focus on the album for a couple of months. Then six months would go by, and then I’d go back to it. But it ended up being such a lovely way of doing something. The tracks had time to marinade. And because there was so much space in between them, there would often be something from the last track that I did that I'd want to bring forward and start a new track from.”In sum, “it was very spacious. The whole process of making it was very slow. That was a really nice luxury.” In fact, “the initial starting point for me was actually a film score way of working,” she acknowledges. “I wanted an album where you're using the same themes throughout the whole album in different ways. Hence an initial chord progression “which is actually in pretty much every track in some way or another”, and an opening track, First Light, which is mirrored by a closing track, Halcyon, that shares its DNA. “I wanted the first version of that piece to feel like the morning, a new day, this dawn feeling. Something new, something starting, something hopeful, something positive – and just quite fun. So, First Light. Then the last Halcyon is much more reflective. You're bringing in other elements and turning it on its head, making it backwards. “I always had this image of life flashing-before-your-eyes moment,” she continues. “When you reflect back upon your life, or when you reflect back upon the day, you have this rushing version of memory, and life, and fragments of memory. For me, that one was trying to evoke that feeling. You can hear all the little bits, but they're all cut up and messed around with until it all clears up for the very end.