CD Review | Andrew Staniland, The Laws of Nature

The Laws of Nature 

Andrew Staniland, composer and performer

Leaf Music, 2025

Perhaps it’s a trend but twice this month I’ve found myself reviewing works by Canadian composers designed for playback on Dolby ATMOS systems. Justin Gray’s Immersed is a piece where segments prerecorded on many instruments plus electronics are mixed and combined with visuals to create an immersive AV experience. It premiered at the TD Music Hall at Massey Hall and is due for release in various formats soon.

Andrew Staniland’s The Laws of Nature is rather different. It’s entirely electronic. It was created in two stages at MEARL (the ElectroAcoustic Research Lab at Memorial University) using the digital instrument/computer JADE. The first part of the project involved creating six pieces for a dance work for Kittiwake Dance Theatre which became Dancer Portraits. This involved six dancers improvising while wearing EEG headsets with the output “sonified” in real time. The outputs were then used as the basic building blocks for the six movement suite The Laws of Nature, with much more composer input to create some kind of musical structure.

The six movements of Dancer Portraits do feel quite different than their reworked form in The Laws of Nature. Each portrait has its own sonic world. There are thuddy and brighter percussive sounds, as well as sounds reminiscent of bells, hooters and drones. There are passages that sound almost like wordless chants with wind noise added and much more. It does feel, though, like music that would be more fun to experience as part of a dance performance than just listening.

The Laws of Nature also has significant soundscape variation between movements, but each feels more structured and there’s a kind of driving pulse or momentum that pushes the whole thing forward. It feels, too, like there’s an increase in complexity as the piece progresses from “Interweave,” which is almost like techno without the back beat (or drugs), to the final eponymous movement. It is a kind of elegy with thumpy bass, chattering and whistling, backed by drones and a final, heavily distorted text from Euclid’s Elements: “The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.”  

Both works have been released in CD, digital download and streaming formats. This poses something of a dilemma for the home consumer since hardly anyone has the equipment to play the full ATMOS mix which requires speakers all around, and above, the audience. Indeed, I only know of two such setups in Toronto at Massey Hall and at Universal Music’s Canadian HQ.

So for the home consumer there will be a choice of stereo or Apple’s streaming ATMOS product, of which I have no experience. For the purposes of this review I had access to a binaural headphone mix which should simulate that product reasonably closely. It’s mostly what I listened to, though I did sample some of the tracks in hi-res stereo over both speakers and headphones.

So what’s the experience like in different listening modes? First off, this is one for headphones. Speakers are just too distancing for something that needs to feel immersive, like you could be inside the dancers’ brains. On cans, the stereo mix was crisp and clear, detailed and very solid. It feels quite immersive but definitely as though the performance is to the listener’s front. The binaural mix feels more disassociated in space, like being in the middle of an orchestra but one where the players are moving around. It feels like one’s head is being messed with, but in a good way, and it would be my preference.

So, if I were purchasing the recording and had the right gear, I think I’d go with the streamed ATMOS option. The stereo DL options are 44.1kHz/16bit 48kHz/24bit and MP3 and there’s a physical CD too.

The Laws of Nature is an interesting experiment and showcases some very cool technology. I think we are going to see more such works in the future, likely incorporating similarly created visuals such as were seen a year or two ago in Tapestry Opera’s RUR: A Torrent of Light.