★Another Timbre
LL
LL (Another Timbre at70) chronicles the collaborative project Partial - namely, Chicago experimentalists Noe Cuellar and Joseph Clayton Mills. Commissioned as part of a site-specific installation at Pilsen Vintage and Thrift, the album uses only the sound materials found in the store’s crowded basement: toys, tools, clocks, broken dishes, odd bits of furniture, and personal relics - each object transformed into a sonic protagonist. Across “Marcel” (24:35), “Paul” (15:46), and the miniature “a si…
Logical harmonies
Logical Harmonies assembles seven pieces by UK composer Richard Glover, realized by a mobile ensemble including Philip Thomas (piano), Mark Bradley (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Andrea Stewart (cello), Bob Gilmore (keyboard), Seth Woods (cello), and others. Glover’s process-based music explores the transformation of simple harmonic patterns - major and minor thirds, triads, pure intervals - over extended time. Rather than evoke drama, each work layers tones and intervals into evolving cons…
Radi d'or
A composed piece for small ensemble of instruments and live electronics. ÔRadi d'Or' uses shifting sinetones alongside sustained sounds from the acoustic instruments to create a shimmering music that unfolds slowly with gracefully. Composed in 2010, this recording is of the first public performance by the Ferran Fages Ensemble, which took place in Barcelona in February 2011: Olga Abalos (flute and alto saxophone), Lali Barrière (sinetones), Tom Chant (soprano and tenor saxophones), Ferran Fages …
Variable formations
Variable Formations documents a singular sextet in action: Johnny Chang (viola), Angharad Davies (violin), Jamie Drouin (analogue synth, radio), Phil Durrant (electronics), Lee Patterson (amplified objects/processes), and John Tilbury (piano). Presented at Café OTO in 2013, the performance opens with a series of two-note piano phrases by Tilbury, setting the stage for a slow, luminous convergence of acoustic and electronic gestures. Unlike free improvisation, the piece was designed so that each …
Rows
Rows marks a unique entry in the Skogen ensemble’s catalog: instead of ensemble founder Magnus Granberg, the composer’s role is assumed by Anders Dahl. The album’s nine movements - each titled as a numbered row - are written out on paper using a systematic twelve-tone approach, but with a radical twist: the focus is on simplicity and the avoidance of expressive gesture. Instead, each musician is asked to plan their individual material before recording, striving to stay within their own predesign…
Variations
Variations (Another Timbre) showcases Swiss composer-performer Christoph Schiller at the spinet, piano, and with a select arsenal of amplified objects. Across seven “variations,” Schiller explores a unique hybrid of structured improvisation and predetermined material, recording pairs of pieces for spinet, objects, and piano, then layering them in sequence - a “chain fashion” that blurs identity and authorship. The result is not conventional variation form, but a process of emergence, immersion, …
Inframince / Immensity
Inframince / Immensity spotlights two pairs of improvisers at the root of Berlin’s experimental scene. “Inframince” finds Michael Thieke and Olivier Toulemonde submerged in analog exploration: Thieke’s clarinet curls and pulses in slowarcs, sometimes phrased, sometimes breathy and indefinite, while Toulemonde’s acoustic objects - whisks, plates, springs, marbles - flicker between percussion and mechanical sound, never quite settling into simple gesture. The deliberate pacing of their forty-three…
Temperament as Waveform
Temperament as Waveform is a transatlantic exchange in process and poetics. Between 2010 and 2012, UK-based sound artist Lee Patterson and Austin’s Vanessa Rossetto traded recordings, objects, and digital files by post - each response reshaping and folding the other's sonic worlds. The album merges four wide-ranging improvisational/concrète works, each combining manipulated field recordings with amplified objects, cassette fragments, instrumental events, and filtered signal noise.
Opener “Every…
Oltreorme
Oltreorme stands apart in Osvaldo Coluccino's chamber output—a suite performed entirely using acoustic objects, with no conventional musical instruments. Created between August and December 2012 and recorded in the composer’s own Italian home, the four lengthy tracks chart a path through realms of near-silence: rustling, brushing, scraping, knocking, and the smallest resonant shifts unfold as if nature and human hand have fused. Coluccino’s process is sculptural - each sound is revealed, layered…
Public private
Public Private assembles two improvising groups from divergent scenes: Barcelona’s Atolón and London’s Chip Shop Music. The album opens with “Public,” a 44-minute collective improvisation by Atolón: Ruth Barberán (trumpet/objects), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion/objects), and Ferran Fages (turntables/electronics). Their sound is tactile and elemental, privileging raw timbre - breathing through trumpet bells, scraping on glass, whirring turntable motors, hissing air, and the elemental processe…
Kolk
Kolk (Another Timbre) offers a rare encounter between Hamburg trumpeter Birgit Ulher and Swiss spinet innovator Christoph Schiller. Recorded in Hamburg in 2010, these five improvisations draw on the duo’s deep engagement with non-idiomatic sound: Ulher works with her trumpet as a physical resonator, channeling air, static, speaker hum, radio noise, and objects, while Schiller’s prepared spinet spills out fleeting melodic cells, clicks, muted thuds, and spectral overtone clouds. Their collaborati…
Unbalanced In (Unbalanced Out)
Unbalanced Out (Unbalanced In)'. A powerful, challenging 50-minute collaborative piece constructed over a year through file-sharing by a sextet of leading musicians across the world, with Barry Chabala (USA, guitar), Bonnie Jones (USA/Korea, electronics), Louisa Martin (UK, laptop), Tisha Mukarji (Germany, piano), Toshi Nakamura (Japan, no-input mixing board) and Gabriel Paiuk (Argentina, piano)
Chantier 1
Chantier 1 documents the first in a series of radical sound investigations by Pascal Battus(rotating surfaces, found objects), Bertrand Gauguet (amplified and acoustic saxophones), and Eric LaCasa (microphones), set directly within buildings under construction. More than conventional performance, their method is intervention: improvising amidst the ongoing labor of construction workers, letting the site dictate form, rhythm, and interruption. Sounds of drilling, hammering, and machinery aren’t f…
Ist Gefallen In Den Schnee
Ist Gefallen In Den Schnee documents a landmark collaboration between Swedish composer Magnus Granberg and his ensemble Skogen. Recorded in November 2010, this nonet features an expanded lineup including Angharad Davies (violin), Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board), and Granberg himself on piano. The title, borrowed from Schubert’s “Winterreise” (“Wasserflut”), signals the work’s reflective engagement with song cycles and memory. Granberg structures the piece using rhythmic and formal mod…
Thread
Thread, realized between Berlin in 2008 and 2009, brings together three like-minded experimentalists - Annette Krebs, Magda Mayas, and Anthea Caddy - with backgrounds in duo collaboration but fresh as a trio. Krebs’ prepared guitar, tapes, and mixing desk act as both generator and disruptor, her playful use of vocal fragments and sampled sounds adding surreal charge. Mayas’ piano - a hybrid of acoustic and prepared techniques - delivers hammered harmonics, inside-string tremors, and pulses of su…
Pinna
Pinna presents Tim Blechmann and Klaus Filip, two key figures in European laptop improvisation, in a single uninterrupted set. Recorded in July 2010, the performance unfolds as a meditation on gradation and resonance - sound as a moving field of vibration and air. Both artists shape their output on laptops: Blechmann crafts slowly shifting waves, centralizing spatial detail and nuanced low-frequency motion; Filip brings a refined palette of microtonal sinewaves and pulses, structuring patterns t…
Atto
Atto is a radical investigation of object music by Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino. In five works spanning thirty-eight minutes, Coluccino transforms domestic things - metal, wood, plastic, paper - into singing instruments through manipulation alone. His method is restless: resonant objects are never left in stasis or forced into their function, but provoked, bent, and recombined until an unexpected “new side” emerges. The result is a chamber palette closer to sonic sculpture than conventiona…
Droplets
Droplets brings together double bassist Dominic Lash with composer Eva-Maria Houben, Taylan Susam, and improvisers Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes. At its heart is Lash’s outdoor recording of Houben’s “nachtstück,” where fragile double bass lines merge with the unpredictable sounds of wind, rain, and the wider world. The bass’s deep resonance shares the soundspace with falling rain, creating a duo of musician and nature that is both visually and sonically evocative - every performance choice bec…
Caisson
Under the name Tierce, Jez riley French, Ivan Palacky, and Dan Jones assemble a sonic laboratory for their album Caisson. The lineup holds French’s broad toolbox - field recordings, salt, paper, contact mics, prepared zither, and electronics - alongside Palacky’s signature amplified knitting machine and Jones’s turntable setup. The result, a single extended live improvisation, is a display of ensemble subtlety and the tactile intrigue of ordinary instruments used in extraordinary ways. Recorded …
Grape Skin
Grape Skin is the focused outcome of a trio session between Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, and Christoph Schiller in a Zurich space, 2011. Doneda’s soprano sax curves and stirs in threadlike whispers, multiphonics, and percussive pops; Kocher’s accordion sustains microtonal clusters, gentle drones, or sudden detours; Schiller turns his spinet into a source of prepared sonorities, glancing harmonics, and tactile staccato. The approach is neither meditative minimalism nor crowded abstraction - it's …