Phil Bancroft launches Myriad Streams music platform and new album

Known for his work with award-winning Trio AAB and his international quartet featuring Reid Anderson, Thomas Strønen and Mike Walker, Phil Bancroft’s new album features Paul Harrison on piano, Stu Ritchie on drums and Aidan O’Donnell on bass, and heralds a major initiative as the first of eight albums to be released on Myriad Streams, a brand-new bespoke artist-led web platform. “Myriad Streams is conceived as an antidote to Spotify,” explains Bancroft. “A human not industrial scale presentation of culture, providing a calm place for listeners to get to know one artist – without 100,000 other artists clamouring for their attention.”

Five of Bancroft’s other albums will be available on the site, with a reissue of Headlong by his International Quartet; The Salmon’s Tail – an orchestral epic by Kevin Murray, Hungry Star – a newly-recorded Trio album with Scottish guitarist Graeme Stephen and Tabla player Gyan Singh; Live at the Blue Lamp by Bancroft’s Standards Trio with brother Tom on drums and Testimony – an improvised solo saxophone suite.

Myriad Streams features a free access streamable playlist of Bancroft’s music with a variety of line-ups, which changes every few weeks, while the full range of albums are accessible inside the site for subscribers and available for download on Bandcamp. On its release, an album becomes the front-of-house playlist.

The platform will also showcase the wide range of Bancroft’s projects and collaborations with previously unavailable studio and live recordings plus tracks from Trio AAB, Colin Steele’s Stramash, Aidan O’Rourke’s (Lau), John Rae’s Celtic Feet and The John Rae Collective, Paul Harrison’s acclaimed Sugarworks, a tribute to Martyn Bennett, and scores for film and street dance exploring sampled music.

As the site develops it will explore non-monetary transactions, including credits for successful sharing, redeemable against subscriptions or downloads. Bancroft aims to build direct relationships with a diverse range of listeners, allowing people of differing finances to support the sustainable creation of music they love. Bancroft’s vision of the future is for a village of Myriad Streams sites, each featuring the music of one artist. He concludes: “Myriad Streams can perhaps be best understood as a piece of functional art, centred around non-commercial music, exploring the triangular relationship between a listener, an artist and that artist’s work and practice.”

For more info visit www.myriadstreams.com