New. Robert Laidlow: Reality Eaters
Vimbayi Kaziboni, Joseph Havlat, Bbc Philharmonic, Piatti Quartet
There is a marvellous sense of mindexpanding wonderment that characterises the experience of listening to Robert Laidlow's music. Yet while his compositions are often sparked by such knottily...
New. Robert Laidlow: Reality Eaters
Vimbayi Kaziboni, Joseph Havlat, Bbc Philharmonic, Piatti Quartet
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There is a marvellous sense of mindexpanding wonderment that characterises the experience of listening to Robert Laidlow's music. Yet while his compositions are often sparked by such knottily...
About
NMC is proud to release Reality Eaters, the debut album by “gigantically imaginative” (BBC Radio 3) composer Robert Laidlow. Bringing together three major works, the album explores “latent spaces”: hidden fields of possibility that underpin everything from artificial intelligence to the physical universe.
Written between 2018 and 2022, the music reflects a formative period in Laidlow’s career, shaped by his doctoral research and collaborations with leading UK ensembles. A long-standing relationship with the BBC Philharmonic was central to the album’s development, enabling sustained experimentation and access to the ensemble’s archive.
In piano concerto Warp, the orchestra becomes a shiftfting fabric, stretched and twisted as the soloist moves through conflicting temporal worlds. Gravity, for string quartet, traces humanity’s evolving understanding of the force - from myth and early science to Einstein’s warped spacetime - culminating in a collapsing singularity rendered as a striking “active silence.”
The album’s centrepiece, Silicon, engages directly with machine learning and AI. It has been featured in the New York Times, the New Scientist, Sky News, BBC Radio, and international television. Across its three movements, the orchestra encounters distorted reflections of itself: uncanny repetitions, invented musical behaviours and a spectral double generated from archival recordings. The result is a work that celebrates orchestral sound while questioning ideas of authenticity and control in an age of intelligent machines.
The title Reality Eaters reflects the album’s central metaphor. Black holes and artificial intelligence are imagined as forces that consume reality - whether physical or cultural - offffering fertile ground for musical exploration. Rather than a purely technical response, Laidlow’s music captures the emotional impact of these ideas, balancing precision with instability and structure with disruption. With Reality Eaters, Laidlow presents a vivid body of work that probes the boundaries of music, science and technology, inviting listeners into spaces where the familiar begins to dissolve and new forms emerge.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
August 2026
There is a marvellous sense of mindexpanding wonderment that characterises the experience of listening to Robert Laidlow's music. Yet while his compositions are often sparked by such knottily complex source material as, for instance, the science of gravitational waves, this is music that agitates the heart just as much as the intellect.
September 2026
In his informative booklet notes, Laidlow writes of his wish to explore 'latent spaces', or areas of hidden possibilities. This is most apparent in Silicon, a genuinely weird and original work that is all the better for it.
17th July 2026
Laidlow is as at home in the realms of science and technology as he is in the world of classical music. As this NMC debut album demonstrates, his intricate, wildly imaginative work is eminently approachable, even if the core concepts are highly complex.
18th July 2026
[On Gravity is] excellently played by the Piatti Quartet. This is music that is at times granite-like and at others vanishingly fragile and elusive - but the narrative of the piece is always compelling.
