The Sunday Times’s best classical albums of 2025 so far. (UK)
“wild and wacky to a new level...invigorating...classical, jazz, pop, baroque, minimalist, maximalist, acoustic, electronic - are stirred together and served up in 13 delicious dollops... impossible to listen with a straight face....head of steam...Imagine one of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention tracks fused with a hurtling Conlon Nancarrow piano piece and you’re still only half way there.” The Sunday Times

“Paxton is an artist we need....a fearless high wire artist, never losing his balance and clearly relishing at every moment the challenge and the thrill...dazzling compositional feats...essentially a soundtrack for our historical moment...dynamic mosaic where no such distinction between categories no longer matters...Astonishingly, individual pieces ...music to make the skin tingle with pleasure, the eyes open wide and the taste buds salivate...blissful experience of sustained sensory exhalation.” The Wire (UK)

The Jazz Times (USA)
“Paxton wears his blissful mania on his brightly coloured sleeve...journey into the frenetic and the ridiculous...incessantly joyful album, bold and catchy, exploding in colors and melodies and thick with texture....a hopeful harbinger for the shape of jazz-adjacency to come... fast-paced, often comic, meticulously complex. It takes cues from video games, 1960s pop orchestration and 2020s pop production...clouds of counterpoint... sonic adrenaline...vying forces, but happy opponents, playing out scenarios in  carefully choreographed dances.” Jazz Times

“Music that makes me grin and groove...super nova of a new work
Alex paxton is not shy of a brazen sensorial mash up...riot and a rainbow...brimmingly heartfelt multi sensorial, genuinely energising fizzer of a new work.
super charged joy...forces us all to sit up and loosen up and buck up.”
Kate Mollison, BBC 3 New Music Show (UK)

Bandcamp (USA)
“extremely accessible in its tuneful generosity...astonishing formal rigor, sophistication, and an unerring ear for pop hooks...... a seriously entertaining and invigorating activity.”
Bandcamp Album of the Day

Arts Desk (UK)
“entertaining contemporary music...wild, untrammelled, odd, enticing and – on all parameters – turned up to 11... infectious exuberance...it’s funny, both ha-ha and (in a good way) peculiar...diverse, but bound together by a strongly-defined compositional voice...this is not refined Swiss-chocolate music, this is the indecent sweetness of Jelly Babies and gaudy bubble-gum...jazzy rollercoaster-ride... “hanging out with your best friend, who you definitely don’t fancy. Not even a little bit.” It is intoxicating, and I think I might fancy the friend too. ...commitment to the weird...like a comedian who’s always “on”......going-back-to-primary-school dream...Above all I was swept along by Paxton’s inventiveness and energy” ARTS desk

“a sonic explosion of his unique creativity...clear influences are jazz and folk music...Pat Metheny...uninhibited expression..wild abandon..humour, play-fullness and wildness of his music is in abundance...eminently playable and accessible....get on this ride...have your senses startlingly jolted with electricity.”
BBC Music Magazine  Anne Templer.

“a world where the idea of being embarrassed, reserved, sensible or shy is nullified, cancelled out, embracing instead an outlook of uproarious, carefree abandon...proliferations of diverse counterpoint ...tune to be loudly performed to the skies by anyone and everyone...lack of fucks given bring to mind the restless, unruly mob-like turba of Bach’s Passions...subversive combination of glee, mania, grotesque, eccentricity, chaos and celebration, presented with an earthy, demotic, fantastical, child-like fascination with timbre, colour and, above all, line...genuinely breathtaking...the only urge is to sing and make merry...obstreperous euphoria...prolonged musical structures like these that Paxton makes his strongest impression...If music can change the world, this is one of the ways it might do it....a delirious, delicious pushback against sterility, tradition, formality and inhibition, through unbounded ensemble joy” 5against4 Simon Cummings

“I hear infinite possibilities...takes us places we have never seen before, as if we are in a glorious parallel existence. His music paints worlds that defy sonic possibilities...make the listener feel welcome at the party..maximalist heaven..It’s magical; there’s a “knowing” for me in Alex’s music that makes me feel at home...makes me (and so many others) small, gasp, and feel decorated like magnificent ice cream sundaes...This is where I dream of being in the (classical) music world).” i care if you listen 

“GENRE-DEFYING...electronic music; hints of contemporary classical music and moments that sound like a film score...inventive mind...unlike anything I’ve heard before...like being in a musical amusement park with thrills, twists and turns that are guaranteed to delight.” Cultural Attache

“Sound Strobe...kinetic, overflowing, and generous music...never sleeps, deliberately forgets his Ritalin, and his state of wakefulness merges with a manic episode...opens a window into the effervescent soul of the composer...perceives no boundaries...common thread of the score is the melody: an emotional starting point, a seeker of pleasure (the kind that touches the entire body)...thrilling”
Crescendo Magazine

“a maximalist delight...vivid and unexpected as we might imagine...only Paxton could put those together and create something so remarkable...alarming imagination... sheer bad-ass textures...we are more than impressed“ Planet Hugill.

“Wow. This is wild... happily frantic orchestral music....I found myself deeply engaged... they’ve channeled into my ADHD and figured that this must be how it sounds when I walk down the street...I can’t look away… it’s absolutely fascinating.... a ride unlike any other. Fucking crazy and meditative. Hell yeah.” Far Out Fox

“...this orchestral, this is classical...sounds timeless...call it innocent? a delight to spend time with...smells delicious, it tastes divine, it sounds just right. It is one of the musical delights of the year so far, this is happy music, this is happy music, this actually feels like happy music…” OrganTHING

“a true journey into the depths of how classical music should sound in the 21st century....ballets of birds in full breeding season, colorful animal show with diamond flashes...break down barriers and codes, with feverish creativity....unique music deeply rooted in our contemporary world, full of life and exuberance, contagious madness and rainbow bombast. Vital.” Silence and Sound

“A joyful and rewarding sonic experience from start to finish, set in a utopian ambient landscape, orchestrated like a symphony and decorated with ASMR inflections” Beat Burger

“British composer/improviser who'd wowed me at the Long Play festival in Brooklyn in May. His Scrunchy Touch Sweetly to Fall (Kite n Finger run) was vibrant! playful! Technicolor! ...enormous arpeggios in a cartoon ballet...wonderfully fresh.” Bachtrack - Ensemble Modern Live

“creates its own paradoxical world of teeming multicolour life, absurdity, Boschian sarcasm, and exuberance”
Explore Ensemble

REVIEWS from Previous albums

 

Happy Music For Orchestra

Album and Live WORKS:
iLolli-pop, Corncrack-Dreams,: Love Kittens, Od Ody Pink’d, Strawberry, Water Music, Sweet Wishes, Bye

“A Magician of Sound.
classical-jazz sonic blasts ...violently overwhelming...I was seduced, and am not the only one
...digesting Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five band recordings, John Zorn’s Downtown experimentalism, Harrison Birtwistle’s brash blocks of sound, music of the Celtic oral tradition, Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval chants — and it all comes out, sometimes at once...carefully constructed ...forbiddingly dense it is balanced by its playfulness... hyperkinetic rainbow-hued...its joy and freedom.”
Financial Times (Happy Music for Orchestra Review)

“Paxton will Make your ears ping..brings brightly coloured, loopy joy to our ears..sweet energy & frantic humour...It’s jazzy & noisy & oddly serious.” The Guardian (Fiona Maddocks- Happy Music for Orchestra Review)

“an opportunity to revisit that early life carnival of sensation, to suspend the imperatives of orderly and goal-orientated progress and luxuriate in immediacy...wild imaginings...Paxton forges structures that miraculously hold together, while threatening constantly to burst apart from the sheer exuberance of his tempestuous orchestration...the orchestra seem to skip, hop or spin as the mood of the instant demands....melodic fragments flitter like incidental patterns forming across the brilliantly tinted surface of a swarming continuum....conceptually sophisticated as well as irrepressible in spirit.” the Wire (Happy Music for Orchestra Review)

“...some of the most genuinely extraordinary orchestral music you’ll ever have the good fortune to experience....staggeringly happy...unstoppable, continue-at-all-costs need to sing. Melody is literally everywhere... exuberant kindred spirits letting rip with the simultaneous elegance and zeal of football supporters....a demented dawn chorus...ultimate experience for the aural senses – it’s undeniably a superabundance, yet it’s also an unbelievable, glorious treat” 5 against 4

“a manic, full-frontal, maximalist music, coming at you like a freshly-unleashed tiger, with an energy that is inspiring & exhausting...African water drumming, free jazz, Ligeti, Roobarb and Custard...brave pursuit of a self-made vision...seriously intoxicating music” Arts Desk (Happy Music for Orchestra)

“Sheer sensual sonic magic from Alex Paxton on that whole album...
I just wish they (Dreammusics Orchestra) were sound tracking all of my slumbers.” New Music Show BBC Radio 3

“A raptors gurgling a cataract of catharsis, an album we can’t get enough of hear not he new music show...a pleasure garden of torrents and plashes” New Music Show BBC Radio 3 (Water Music)

“Chaotic, frenzied and maximised sensation is the order of the day for Alex Paxton’s gloriously childlike...cartoonish world of blinding colour, elastic movement and warm humour...frenzied action...ecstatic surges and sudden lulls evoke a child gradually tiring themselves out with play...meticulous, finger-breaking arrangements. Paxton presents tension between raw, fleeting sensation and the restrictive geometry of adulthood...rich emotional expression...gorgeous, yearning melody...the difficulty of saying goodbye to a loved one is conveyed with moving realism. In focusing on raw sensation, Happy Music For Orchestra’s cartoonish character proves a disarmingly naturalistic, powerful means of expressing real emotion.” Quietus (Happy Music for Orchestra Review)

“dirty bubble- gum’...'Richard Strauss TikTok’... exuberant, virtuosic, at times beautiful, often impatient, energetic, juvenile, colourful, funny, messy, annoying &, yes, happy music... Textures and styles morph and meld with an astonishing speed across... cartoon music, math rock, movie music, free jazz, commercial jingles, cheerily little diatonic tunes...rococo of a hoarder's living room...dizzying and impressive... very contemporary: very very complicated emotions that are no less earnestly and strongly felt for it... like lying down on a couch completely exhausted but still scrolling on a smartphone... sheer super- abundance of novelty and thrill... hyper-virtuosic noodling...post-(post-post-post-)punk style... panying the flushing of a toilet...so much to enjoy in this music... extraordinarily vibrant and virtuosic playing from the Dreammusics Orchestra” Tempo Magazine

“A rising star...unique and restless approach...His style shines through with the use of a roaring and bustling brass, restless strings, high-pitched buzz and an omnipresent sense of playfulness and easy-goingness...Even without using electronic means, he creates the sense of a crisp hyperpop-infused electronic sound...(Bye) is reminiscent of meeting someone special who you do not want to part ways with... Paxton's lovely and complex layering of sounds, reminiscent of the hectic, anxiety-ridden modern-day lifestyle, should remind us that, even in the midst of unreplied emails, unpaid bills, and a growing sense of loneliness in a more-than-ever interconnected world, it is still possible to find joy and feel alive.” All About Jazz

"A candy store, which is so quite detailed excellent, so painted in all details. And then I had to think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the movie...also has such a clownish, actually sad undertone sometimes....I was really quite often moved while listening... Really very beautifully produced, because despite this overabundance and this insanely dense texture, it all remains audible through and you can really get into this space... And it's all about joy, happy music, joy. Not in clarity, balance, perfection and good taste, but in disorder, friction, imprecision and excess...insanely precise perfection in this disorder is great, because the rhythms are so complex. I find it rhythmically totally interesting through these hetero rhythmic overlays...you actually never know what's coming. There is repetition, there are developments, you can sometimes read out something like motifs or themes, but actually it can all be over in the next moment and something completely different can come. You're always a bit up in the air and don't know what's going to happen.” SWR Record Review show “New Sound Carries”. (Happy Music for Orchestra Review)

“listen & then listen again & again to the music...like opening a treasure box..multi layered treat...beautiful orchestral arrangements...almost perfect fusion between jazz & orchestral...noisy, fulsome and evocative..a cordial and mesmeric patchwork..the entire album is captivating...any improvised music lover presses “play” they will find it difficult to prise themselves away..fun eye-popping music...clever individual and very very good...there is everything to love about this album.” Platinum Mind (Happy Music for Orchestra Review)

“marvellous stuff..meticulously arranged frantic unpredictable arrangements that give the impression of improvisation.. sounds like absolutely nothing else.” Boogalo Radio

“It's brave to even attempt to put this composer into one box...the promise of utter enjoyment is high.”
Classical Music Daily

“Playful entities... Over the course of numerous commissions and three studio albums Paxton’s has stood in defiance of traditional stylistic boundaries...uncompromising intensity...central to Paxton’s joyously maximalist aesthetic is an almost childlike innocence and playfulness present in so much of his work” Van Magazine (Happy Music for Orchestra)

“Playful entities... Over the course of numerous commissions and three studio albums Paxton’s has stood in defiance of traditional stylistic boundaries...uncompromising intensity...central to Paxton’s joyously maximalist aesthetic is an almost childlike innocence and playfulness present in so much of his work” Van Magazine

Ilolli-pop

Album and Live WORKS: iLolli-pop, Corncrack-Dreams,

“fantastically bananas free-jazz-orchestra maximalism ….. unmapped technicolour territory…. fantastical sound collages… like a cartoon rollercoaster… unfathomable glitching chaos…unique a vision as you might hear anywhere.” The Quietus (Ilolli-pop)



Frankfurt Opera - Ilolli-pop Live. Ensemble Modern 2025
The last Happy New Ears evening this season is dedicated to this amazing person and his work ilolli-pop...full of detail and variety...exuberant piece moves between precisely balanced orchestral colours and sophisticated textures including electronics and anarchic outbursts... crazy soundtrack for a bizarrely funny animated film. One reviewer said: ‘Harrison Birtwistle came to mind, but with a big grin on his face instead of a grumpy frown ...'

“Fantastic delirium...An effervescence of day glow energy that just can’t be resisted”
BBC 3 New Music Show, Tom service

“absurdly colorful…delirious sound universe of Alex Paxton is a staggering experience, vaguely frightening, demanding and joyful at the same time: abundant, teeming, teeming, overflowing, luxuriant, it resembles these wanderings of nature in an accidentally and exceptionally favorable environment, so nourished that 'they escape any rule or constraint - not to mention the law of gravity.….a hair-raising disc.”
Crescendo Magazine (ilolli-pop)

“wonderfully imaginative, manically energetic world of Alex Paxton, music that never seems to sit still, taking us on journeys across myriad brilliant textures and timbres…imaginative and madcap…terrific roller-coaster journey” Planet Hugill (ilolli-pop)

“Paxton's imaginative tapestry of sound is one of the unexpected surprises of contemporary music: an elusive patchwork of improvisation and classical rigor, composite music and anarchy, a celebration of orchestral-jazz maximalism.” OndRaock (ilolli-pop)

“meticulously scored…seems to change with every bar, enfolding bite-size pieces of classic minimalism, brass brand tradition, electronic noise, & video game plasticity..intensely virtuosic and giddily joyful. electronically slathered trombone… Paxton is a monster improviser …connects his garrulous attack to the most extroverted playing of George Lewis & Roswell Rudd..."
Bandcamp Daily Best Contemporary Classical. Peter Margasak (ilolli-pop)

“jovial and gay… Vivaldi-like spring chicken energy… this music is like a refreshing drink of water after a long period of thirst…manic treat to keep our spirits up” Morning Star (ilolli-pop)

“play solo that made the eyes sting and then use his slide to make farting noises and knock over pints on the front tables…’religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst”…In the hands of a master like composer / improvisor Alex Paxton, the trombone does all this and more. cheerful chaos – more Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em  than Hellzapoppin’….crepuscular souls to perfection…Bone of his Bone Extraordinary.”
The Wire (ilolli-pop)

“a riotous, hot pink overabundance of love and rage”  The Wire (Mouth Song Take 1. live)

“Paxton has become something of a go-to composer for adventurous modern classical, improvising and experimental groups…sugar-high toddlers on a speeded-up merry-go-round, tossing jelly tots to dancing revellers…clever, rambunctious and hugely playful second album” Jazz in Europe (ilolli-pop Review)

“Really quirky, fun, dynamic…Wow! gives your senses a bit of shake. I tell you, I had to listen a number of times, absolutely terrific.”
James McDougall - BBC Radio 3

“One day, classical music could turn into this and in all honesty we hope so…decomposes , resembles, tears whole pieces, mistreats them, puts back together by making Beethoven coexist with Mingus… sonorous harlequin whose dress is not made up from rhombus but of various geometric figures…the sensations, smells, colours of what our lives could be if only we could emancipate ourselves from current conditions of Homo Economics and simply becoming Humanity: a wild race, stripped of convictions rigid teachings and guided visions of the world around us.” Roots Music.it (ilolli-pop)

“whirling chases, where strings, brass, collages and percussion collide by pouring out billions of sound stars, drawing their origins from the history of music….ilolli-pop is a source of wonder, with its improbable crossings and its definitively singular approach, where experiments turn into explosive melodies clinging to our eardrums, seeking to unlock the secret of absolute music. Vital.” Silence and Sound (ilolli-pop)

“Tentacle Flow…I think of circus trombones, jazz, noise, cartoon tunes, brass, slot machines, Walt Disney, Stravinsky, little creatures munching away. And all of this at a rapid pace. Your sound is funny. And pretty crazy. Where does this creative abundance come from?” Berner Kuluragena (ilolli-pop)

“playful and reveals in the juxtapositions of stylistic extremes, kind of like Glen Miller meets noise music.” - Micheal Schell flotation device KBCS radio. (ilolli-pop)

“life that this offbeat troublemaker tries to capture, and one wonders with what organs he writes: the laughter and the joys (it bubbles and sparkles), the excitements (reproductive or aggressive), the energy and vitality – like a sap that knows only springtime”Crescendo Magazine (Music for Bosch People)

“Really quirky, fun, dynamic…Wow! gives your senses a bit of shake. I tell you, I had to listen a number of times, absolutely terrific.”
James McDougall BBC Radio 3

“Fantastic delirium” Tom Service New Music Show (BBC)

“of considerable interest to followers of contemporary Jazz…full of Changes of pace and mood..always great fun” London Jazz News (ilolli-pop)

Music for Bosch People (Album 2021 BRC, NMC)

WORKS: Music for Bosch People, Some Prayer

“In a dark time this music will make you smile.....antic experimentalism.....manic contrast heavy.....This is the most joyous sound I’ve heard in ages!” New York Times (Music for Bosch People)

“Paxton, Like Hieronymous Bosch, is one of those rare artists who manage to make a virtue of excess.
The turbulent and joyful spirit of his music bubbles up irrepressibly in his trombone playing, and courses torrentially though his flamboyantly unpredictable compositions. . .Surfing the crest of their exuberance is an extraordinary experience.” The Wire Magazine (Music for Bosch People)

"Feels like an evacuation of something fundamental and urgent...bleeding chunks of something greater than sum of their parts; a compositional outpouring that started its inexorable flow sometime ago and will surely continue on over after the neat boundaries of a mere CD's runtime have been met" TEMPO magazine(Neil Luck)


“Colourful wonder bag..glam rock - and dubstep-soaked  thoroughly refreshing eclecticism
…an impression of exuberant joy, real community, excessive partying and over-scumping champagne. So this album might just be the best time imaginable” Müsik Texte (Ole Hubner)

“Operatic Game Boy music played by a virtuosic motley crew that’s inexplicably been hired to provide live jingles for a primetime TV show sometime in the recent past that never quite was”  Point of Departure

"Paxton is a system-crasher of genre, who merges jamming video game soundtracks, musical overtures, virtuoso chamber music and jazz improv into an unmistakable style...highly complex, sophisticated and extremely entertaining, virtuoso ad absurdum" Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik (Music For Bosch People)

“Step forward Alex Paxton, incipient savior of difficult listening . . . formidable virtuosity. It seems to be a meditation on virtuosity: Paxton’s own take on Charlie Parker-style bebop or Paganini. . . . mountains of crisp detail that are legible when taken singly but accumulate into a surreal and overwhelming whole”
Positionen

“a joyful mashup . . .such an engaging energy and Ivesian imagination” Planet Hugill

"Not a lot causes this writer to laugh out loud, but this album did, repeatedly . . . images of an anarchic opera, samples from TV and film adding to this rich and borderline frantic mêlé . . . cutting-edge neo-classical with more than a touch of downtown New York-style jazz improvisation and, what’s more, it’s tremendous fun"
LondonJazzNews (Music for Bosch People)

“We hear the trombone run the gamut from furious chatter to muffled screams, sorrowful sighs into searing growls and back. “Virtuosic” doesn’t really cover it.” Point of Departure (Music for Bosch People)

“What none of the litriture says is that his music is completely bonkers. The tittle track is 15 minutes long  & I loved the whole thing, it grabs your attention all the way through…I highly recommend this album it is great fun” Peter Slavid on European Modern Jazz, HayesFm (Music for Bosch People)

• the music is whimsical, animated and polystylistic, with abrupt changes reminiscent of classic John Zorn, as though determined to portray an entire fantasy world in one tableau
• Sequenza21 Blog Micheal Schell (Music for Bosch People)

“Uniquely and audaciously manic. Call an ambulance, just in case.
This is one of the naughtiest CDs to come my way in some time…shares Zappa's creativity, and his talent for pushing his music as far as it can go without teetering it into anarchy…Ideas are thrown against the wall with machine gun rapidity, and they go splat all over the listener, no matter how adept he or she is ducking…It’s like bring tied down and tickled ruthlessly by a gang of nerds...not that I would know.” Amazon. 5 stars
“Alex is a bloody phenomenal composer and visionary” Prxludes.net