The Music of Making Strange is the first portrait CD of English composer Alex Hills. In Alex’s musical language, elements collide in unexpected ways––a sound one might expect to hear in a piece by the German modernist composer Lachenmann is here used to articulate a riff from a Velvet Underground song. Linked partly by a common engagement with the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ‘ostranenie’ or ‘enstrangement’, these works show a range of influences from Spectralism to the The Dead Kennedys. The two ensemble pieces that bookend the disc show a particular concern with the finer details of sound, re–imagining the piano as a microtonal instrument in a sort of concerto for its resonance, and marrying vocal, percussion and cello timbres in a setting of Shklovsky’s seminal text on enstrangement. A disc that is uncompromising and intellectually rigorous yet playful and surprising, featuring some of the UK’s most creative and sought-after young performers of new music.