The Sixteenth

The Sixteenth is the recorded music project of Wellington-based composer and producer Richard Walley. He writes orchestral and electronic music that tends to organise itself around a single obsessive subject per album – and then work it until there’s nothing left.

His debut You Could Be Happy (2024) explored emotional landscape through shoegaze, ambient, and post-classical influences. His second album, The Mountain (2025), took a more literal approach: six tracks, each mapping a different aspect of New Zealand’s Mount Earnslaw (Pikirakatahi) – its geological formation, its peaks, the light and weather that move across it. “Of course when I actually looked at a map a couple of months later,” Walley has said, “I realised I’d been looking at the wrong bits.” The feelings, he insists, were real regardless.

Winters in the World (2026) is his third album and his most ambitious. Inspired by Eleanor Parker’s scholarly study of Anglo-Saxon seasonal culture, it traces a full year through the pre-Christian and Christian calendars that coexisted in early medieval England – from Winterfylleth (the first full moon of winter, the old year-boundary) through Advent, Christmas, Candlemas, Lent, Easter, Midsummer, harvest, and back again. The two systems sit on top of each other throughout, exactly as they did a thousand years ago – and the album holds that structure without resolving it. Musically it is his most diverse: seven atmospheric orchestral pieces alongside five house tracks at 120 BPM, with four-to-the-floor rhythms, modal harmonies, and big orchestral builds and drops. Taking influence from Steve Reich, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Murcof, and the illuminated manuscripts of the Très Riches Heures, it is, against all reasonable expectation, a dance record.

Photo Credit: Lara Bland