★Another Timbre
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…
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…
Visiting Cloud
What happens when electroacoustic thought migrates into the physical realm of acoustic instruments? Visiting Cloud documents a three-year collaboration between Finnish composer Marja Ahti and Italian ensemble Blutwurst, where two of Ahti's electroacoustic works - Fluctuating Streams (from The Current Inside, 2019) and Chora (from Vegetal Negatives, 2018) - undergo radical transformation into acoustic versions that stretch, deepen, and reimagine their original forms. Initiated by Blutwurst in 202…
The Willow Bends and So Do I
This hour-long ensemble piece from 2024, recorded in Stockholm, marks the twelfth album by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg on Another Timbre. Granberg, born in Umeå in 1974, studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York, but is self-taught as a composer. He formed his ensemble Skogen in 2005 to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi. Apart from his ongoing work with Sk…
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.
Longing Landscape
Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer, clarinetist, and central figure in the Wandelweiser collective, presents three recent chamber works—all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, with one piece featuring the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa. These compositions mark a significant evolution in Frey's aesthetic. As Ian Mikyska of the Prague collective explains, "Jürg is neither writing the music he used to write nor writing the music that anyone expects of him"—moving beyon…
G o m b e r t
Seven beautiful, melancholic motets and a chanson by Renaissance composer Nicolas Gombert, arranged for instruments by James Weeks, who also composed the interludes. "One of the least expected and most beautiful records we are likely to hear this year." - Clive Bell
Flowers of Emptiness
"Maybe I'm like a still life painter," Linda Catlin Smith says, "looking at the same objects again and again over the years." Yet this survey of chamber works—spanning 1986 to 2024—shows a composer whose perspectives continually shift, finding something fresh in each iteration. Hers is "a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty." The Guardian awarded five stars, placing it #3 in their Top Classical Releases of 2024.
Apa…
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
Scrub
A duo improvisation recorded in an exhibition space with several of Max Eastley's sound sculptures, and next door to a park where a firework display was taking place...
Endspace
Duo improvisations recorded at Goldsmiths College, London, July 2007. Angharad Davies (violin) and Tisha Mukarji (inside piano) - two of the most distinctive young improvisers on the UK scene - unite for their first recording as a duo. An entirely acoustic affair impossible to ignore the heritage that goes before such a recording of piano and violin: the slow pace of Feldman and the New York School, the grey austerity of the Wandelweiser collective echo through these five improvisations.
Davies …
Tasting
Recorded live at the June 2006 Jazz à Poitiers festival, this gem pairs two extraordinary musicians in an unusual and very welcome configuration. Phil Minton - the legendary British vocalist with decades of experience exploring the outer possibilities of the human voice - meets Sophie Agnel, one of the most interesting and original voices on today's scene, though still largely undiscovered given her small discography. Her approach to piano is truly surprising: a mysterious and fascinating mixtur…
Wanderer
Wanderer assembles eight sophisticated chamber pieces from Linda Catlin Smith, rendered by the ever-inventive Apartment House ensemble. Across this collection, Smith’s distinct voice emerges through piano, strings, winds, percussion, and brass, revealing an uncompressed sense of time and patience. Philip Thomas’s solo piano work offers gentle resonance and poised silence, while duos and quintets - performed with Mark Knoop, Mira Benjamin, Anton Lukoszevieze, Heather Roche, and others - bring nua…
Mouth To Mouth
Four compositions by the US-Chinese composer:
'Of Monsters' - Ingrid Lee, piano Merima Kljuko, accordion'Cells' - Ingrid Lee & Rowan Smith, amplified snare drums'Bead Spit' - Ingrid Lee, piano, Max Kutner, electric guitar, Tony Gennaro, percussion'Another' - Eric KM Clark & Andy Studer, violins, Heather Lockie, viola, Meldoy Yenn, cello, Jake Rosenzweig, bass & Tony Gennaro, vibraphone
Arethusa
Wade Matthews (software synthesis, manipulated field recordings) and Stéphane Rives (soprano saxophone) recorded these four pieces in Madrid in July 2008, creating music that speaks to transformation, identity, and the improviser's paradox. The album takes its name from Ovid's tale of Arethusa—a nymph fleeing the river god Alpheus who, in attempting to escape change, becomes water itself. As Matthews writes in his liner notes, "in her quest to remain herself, she has become exactly what she fled…