The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, June 2026
By Peter Margasak · July 09, 2026
The taxonomy of contemporary classical music—new music, contemporary music, whatever you want to call it—is a thorny issue. But every month, we’ll take a look at some of the best composer-driven music to surface here on Bandcamp—that which makes room for electronic experimentation, improvisation, and powerful takes on old classics.
Noticing that so many musical love songs throughout history employ a related four measure chord sequence with a descending chromatic lament, Australian composer Thomas Meadowcroft decided to underline the practice in a piece of his own. His latest sets a famed maxim coined by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to that same musical design. Norwegian singer Ditte Marie Bræin glides weightlessly through his text—“Love is to give what you do not have to someone who does not want it”—spread across 42 soothing minutes, the words interspersed with quotations from other notable love songs that use the same form. We hear familiar lines from “Dido’s Lament,” “Blue Skies,” “Michelle,” and “Your Song,” among others, words of sorrow that propose different shades of meaning in the Lacan text. The music, played with crystalline precision and atmospheric grace by Oslo’s asamisimasa, unfurls in a Shepard tone-like circular structure, an illusory descent that actually floats in the same chords. The sonic profile is defined by the warmly reverberant Fender Rhodes chords played by Ellen Ugelvik. The result is a gauzy drift, interwoven with lilting cello gestures, electric guitar swells, almost pastel bass clarinet shadings, bowed metal and tinkling bells, and a synthesizer and tape delay by the composer—a kind of druggy live sampling of Bræin’s most aspirated words. While the piece certainly has an ambient veneer and maintains a cool equanimity, those steady drifts that bring in the quotes and subtle modulations of activity and tension impart a variability that complicates any sense of calm or predictability.