Bartholomew (Chris Bartholomew) is an electronic musician and creative technologist based in Newcastle. His music combines experimental and generative techniques with acoustic instrumentation to tell personal stories and evoke landscapes – real and imaginary. The results are cinematic, emotive and filled with textures. In a record store, you’d find his records alongside Bonobo, Hannah Peel or Ludwig Gorannson. 

Before the pandemic, Bartholomew had was a successful composer and sound designer for theatre productions. Specialising in physical and devised theatre, his scores have been heard at the Barbican Centre, National Theatre Studio and The Bush Theatre, before going off to tour nationally and around the world. During the lockdown, Bartholomew re-focused on making his own music inspired by events in his own life and his new home in the North East of Britain. 

The first album to come from this renewed vision was Moorbound – a love letter to Newcastle’s town moor, which sold out its physical release in under 24 hours and received support from BBC Introducing, Resonance FM and Narc Magazine. The audiovisual live show took him around the UK culminating in a support slot with Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan at Newcastle’s Cumberland Arms. From this Bartholomew’s next album Subterranea was signed to Castles in Space’s Lunar Module CD imprint. 

Subterranea continues the sonic themes of Moorbound – the blending of acoustic and electronic textures rolling under sweeping melodies. Thematically is where the two diverge – whilst the former was full of nervous optimism for the future, the latter deals with the fallout of the plans which go wrong, the preparation that fails and winds that bend even the trees with the thickest roots. Subterranea is a recognition of the importance of stability to Bartholomew, the pain of uprooting and an acceptance of the limits of his control. 

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