Robert Laidlow: Reality Eaters

Release date: 17 July 2026

NMC is proud to release Reality Eaters, the debut album by “gigantically imaginative” (BBC Radio 3) composer Robert Laidlow. Bringing together three major works, the album explores “latent spaces”: hidden fields of possibility that underpin everything from artificial intelligence to the physical universe. Written between 2018 and 2022, the music reflects a formative period in Laidlow’s career, shaped by his doctoral research and collaborations with leading UK ensembles. 

A long-standing relationship with the BBC Philharmonic was central to the album’s development, enabling sustained experimentation and access to the ensemble’s archive. In piano concerto Warp, the orchestra becomes a shifting fabric, stretched and twisted as the soloist moves through conflicting temporal worlds. Gravity, for string quartet, traces humanity’s evolving understanding of the force - from myth and early science to Einstein’s warped spacetime - culminating in a collapsing singularity rendered as a striking “active silence.” 

The album’s centrepiece, Silicon, engages directly with machine learning and AI. It has been featured in the New York Times, the New Scientist, Sky News, BBC Radio, and international television. Across its three movements, the orchestra encounters distorted reflections of itself: uncanny repetitions, invented musical behaviours and a spectral double generated from archival recordings. The result is a work that celebrates orchestral sound while questioning ideas of authenticity and control in an age of intelligent machines. 

The title Reality Eaters reflects the album’s central metaphor. Black holes and artificial intelligence are imagined as forces that consume reality - whether physical or cultural - offffering fertile ground for musical exploration. Rather than a purely technical response, Laidlow’s music captures the emotional impact of these ideas, balancing precision with instability and structure with disruption. 

With Reality Eaters, Laidlow presents a vivid body of work that probes the boundaries of music, science and technology, inviting listeners into spaces where the familiar begins to dissolve and new forms emerge. 

Robert Laidlow’s work has been performed and recorded by leading musicians in the UK, including the Riot Ensemble, the Britten Sinfonia, the Elias Quartet, the Piatti Quartet, Chineke!, Joseph Havlat and David Zucchi. He has been commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society Composer’s Prize, awarded an Ivan Juritz Prize, and been nominated for two Ivor Novello Composers Awards along with the RMA Tippett Medal.

Robert Laidlow
Vimbayi Kaziboni, Joseph Havlat, BBC Philharmonic, Piatti Quartet

Format: CD, download, streaming

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RECORDING CREDITS