★Another Timbre
Geschrieben in Wasser
On geschrieben in wasser., Klaus Lang pares the piano quartet down to a faintly breathing organism, letting soft, slowly shifting harmonies hover at the edge of audibility like something written on water just before it disappears.
For a Lemon Tree
On For a Lemon Tree, Kristofer Svensson, Maya Bennardo and Erik Blennow Calälv cultivate a fragile, glowing sound‑world where violin, bass clarinet and kacapi trace slow, intertwined lines, turning silence, breath and overtone into their primary compositional materials.
Clarinet Quintet
On his Clarinet Quintet, Jürg Frey stretches time until it feels almost weightless, using soft clarinet breaths and hushed strings to trace a slow, luminous drift where tiny inflections become whole landscapes of feeling.
Flare
On Flare, Sylvia Lim turns six chamber works into a series of luminous close‑ups, magnifying tiny shifts of timbre, breath and touch until fragile sounds bloom into something cathartic, raw and quietly destabilising.
Tending
On Tending, James Creed threads four ensemble works through a shared practice of careful, collective attention, letting sparse parts, quiet doublings and gently unstable textures accumulate into music that feels like weather slowly forming in the air around you.
Trios (6CD Box)
In the final decade of his life, Morton Feldman turned his attention to the trio format with an intensity that would yield some of the most profound and uncompromising music of the twentieth century. Between 1978 and 1984, he composed three monumental works for flute, piano and percussion that together constitute an immense meditation on time, memory and the irreducible strangeness of sound itself. This landmark 6CD box set from Another Timbre presents all three pieces — totalling six and a half…
Another Timbre Bundle
Another Timbre presents five essential releases exploring the furthest reaches of contemporary composition and electroacoustic investigation. This special bundle brings together works that exist beyond conventional categories - music demanding patience, recalibrated listening, and willingness to encounter sound in its most essential states.
Jakob Ullmann - Solo I & Solo IV (at250)Marja Ahti - Visiting Cloud (Two Translations) (at247)Jürg Frey - Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre (at249)Eldr…
Duet
French cellist Martine Altenburger and British guitarist John Russell recorded this live performance at the Musique en Mouvement Festival in Jarny, France in November 2008. Altenburger, Toulouse-based and conservatory-trained, moves between performances of Cage and Scelsi and improvisation with sound explorers like Michel Doneda and Lê Quan Ninh (who mastered this session). Russell, a London hardcore improviser, brings decades of experience to this encounter.
One reviewer describes listening to …
An Account Of My Hut
Duo improvisations for shakuhachi and ney recorded in Ealing, west London, July and October 2007. Clive Bell (shakuhachi) and Bechir Saade (ney) - two deeply committed improvisers working at the intersection of traditional practice and contemporary exploration - unite for their first recording as a duo. An entirely acoustic affair. Both instruments are made of plants from the same grass family - the shakuhachi from bamboo, the ney from reeds - and share fundamental similarities in timbre, breath…
Solo I / Solo IV
2026 repress. In the quiet extremities of contemporary composition, few have ventured as far into the territory of disappearance as Jakob Ullmann. This release documents the simultaneous realization of two works from his remarkable series of Solo pieces - compositions that exist somewhere between notation and performance, between instruction and interpretation, hovering at the very threshold of audibility. Begun in the late 1980s as Ullmann sought to depart from strict Western notational convent…
Je Laisse à la Nuit son Poids D'Ombre
How does music inhabit the space between two worlds? Jürg Frey confronts this question directly in Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre, a composition for ten musicians that exists in deliberate suspension, refusing the security of solid ground. Commissioned by ensemble]h[iatus, the piece emerged from extended collaboration between composer and performers, particularly in navigating two specific challenges: the distinctive voice of Thomas Lehn's analogue synthesiser and the relationship between…
Songs
A suite of five pieces for acoustic instruments and electronics by Argentine-born composer Santiago Diez Fischer, who lives and teaches in France and whose work occupies a unique space between new music, experimental rock, and free improvisation. All five pieces were written specifically for Gyre Ensemble - Alejandro Oliván López (baritone saxophone), Stefanie Mirwald-Keiser (accordion), and Christian Streit Smith (percussion) - a trio whose particular combination of timbres and approaches has c…
Dead-Wall Reveries
How does a composer who spent years immersed in cultural theory and philosophy return to music-making? For Eldritch Priest - known to many through his provocative book Boring Formless Nonsense - the answer involves cultivating a compositional sensibility that appears offhanded while remaining rigorously structured, music that flirts relentlessly with ideas to blur distinctions between trivial regard and focused attention. This release documents three works spanning more than two decades, tracing…
Dust Book
A 50 minute solo for viola d'amore played by Marco Fusi. The piece was composed in 2022-2023, and has six movements.
Curva Triangulus
Catherine Lamb works at the boundary between perception and illusion. In Curva Triangulus (2018/21), the American composer takes Bridget Riley's geometric forms as starting point for "warping" Renaissance materials through geometric musical figures. The result is a 41-minute composition for eight instruments where the distinction between melody and harmony dissolves: one generates the other, rather than existing as separate entities.
The score demands an exceptional ensemble. Bern's Ensemble Pro…
Outermost Melodies
Ian Antonio discovered Jürg Frey via algorithm. About 15 years ago, SoundCloud kept leading him to the same piece, maybe Circular Music No. 2. "I wouldn't notice the piece starting but then realize I was in fact listening to it closely," he recalls. "The stillness and closeness and warmth were somewhat new to me." At the time, Antonio played "a lot of very loud and often very fast music" with groups like Wet Ink, Talujon, Zs, and Yarn/Wire. Frey's music was "very much the opposite."
This double …
Control And Its Opposites
“Eighty minutes of trumpet/electronics and alto sax. Here, the length works in its favor. An advantage, oddly, to listening at home (and reading the back of the sleeve): You know it's 80 minutes long so you "read" it as such, as it's happening, sitting back a bit, seeking a wider focus. Wright gets nicely strident here and there, Coleman generally staying with breath tones early on, getting more vociferous later, Kasyansky hither and yon, doing a fine job integrating and coloring. There's a brea…
Meshes
2009 release ** "Two improvisations-one live, one without audience-by an Anglo-French trio of new voices from trombonist Forge, electronics artists Julian and cellist Papapostolou. The music is quiet and spacious....there is a wonderful sense of slowness to the music that suggests each sound, every contribution comes only after careful consideration."
Loiter Volcano
The excellently titled Loiter Volcano was a constant source of somewhat surprising pleasure the first time I listened. "Surprising" because the general attack leans a bit more toward efi (I suppose "post-efi" has been appropriate for a good while) than I normally care for. But this mix of electronics, percussion and cello simply filled the space in a manner that held me rapt throughout. As with the other release featuring Dumont, it's partially about the textures and their creative deployment bu…
Centre Of Mass (For Cymbal And Resonant Objects)
Solo improvisation for cymbal and rotating objects