★Another Timbre
A Moonbeam is Just a Filtered Sunbeam
An extended solo work by the California-based composer/instrumentalist Andrew McIntosh, using field recordings and electronics, alongside violin, viola, piano, bowed wine glasses and slate – all played by the composer. Wonderful music produced during the year of lockdown
September
Apartment House again, performing eight exquisite chamber works by the young UK composer Georgia Rodgers
Songs For a Shed
A series of six beautiful works for piano and instruments, realised by Apartment House and pianist Siwan Rhys, with great cover artwork by Maxwell Doig
Sapindales
Four clarinet-based works, brilliantly played by Heather Roche, with Juliet Fraser, Anton Lukoszevieze and James Opstad. Music with intricate, interweaving lines, the title piece is a mesmerising work for multi-tracked clarinets and field recordings
Number Pieces
A beautifully produced 4-CD box set of John Cage's 'Number Pieces', played by Apartment House. With 44-page booklet and CDs in individual card wallets with original artwork by Arvinda Gray. These extraordinarily beautiful works were all composed in the last 5 years of the composer's life, as Cage approached his 80th birthday. These recordings by Apartment House are the first recordings for 15 years of almost all of the pieces. An essential release of wonderful but somewhat neglected music.
In th…
Dark Heart
Four fascinating and detailed compositions from Canadian composer and painter Lance Austin Olsen, each work giving the performers space to collaborate on the results, using graphic scores and Cage-like elements from recordings; performers include Terje Paulsen, Gil Sanson, Ryoko Akama, Isaiah Ceccarelli, Katelyn Clark, Patrick Farmer and Apartment House.
Verses
Another Timbre presents Verses, five chamber and solo works by the Canadian composer Barbara Monk Feldman. "I have been thinking about what is inside and what is outside. The everyday life and tragedy of what goes on around you, and the fact that to accomplish anything you need the isolation in the studio - I think about this moral issue. And then on another level, I think about an inside and an outside for art itself, and how ephemeral that is.... What I am looking for is a way to notate the mo…
Ballad
Two pieces for cello and piano by Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, both performed by Anton Lukoszevieze (cello) and Kerry Yong (piano). "In Ballad (45 minutes in duration) I was extending myself into a longer work; I wanted to make a work that could be the entire concert, that could unfold over a longer time. With Through the Low Hills (10 minutes), I was working with a very restricted vocabulary in a process of constrained variation, working and re-working just a few elements. I felt like …
Me Hollywood
Another Timbre presents Me Hollywood by Oliver Leith. 5 chamber works by UK-based composer Oliver Leith, performed by Explore Ensemble. Cover drawing by Susan Te Kahurangi King. ‘Me Hollywood’ sees a hired ensemble soundtrack their patron's evening. He is hoping, or, knows even, that the music will elevate each banal gesture. Films will eventually be made about him, so he’s just making it happen now, his life is filmic, it just needs a score, he drinks, he sings, he plays the piano, he cares for…
Summer
5 chamber works by James Weeks, beautifully performed by Explore Ensemble. An album of interlinked pieces that form a sequence. James Weeks says "I was aware of tying the pieces together as a set, by continuing and extending certain poetic ideas, ways of using and combining instruments, and ways of thinking about material....Things like the use of mixed instrumental duos, which comes from Violet-Violute, the use of a slow-moving or static background harmonic layer, which comes from Summer, the o…
Best that You Do This for Me
A 50-minute composition for string trio by the Japan-based musical pioneer and experimentalist. Commissioned by Anton Lukoszevieze of Apartment House, who perform it beautifully.
Brief interview with Anton Lukoszevieze
Why did you choose to commission a piece from Jim O'Rourke for Apartment House, and how did you know his work?
I have known of Jim for a long time, mainly through his work with Merce Cunningham’s dance company, who I also performed with at the very end of their time. But I had n…
Muto Infinitas
An extended duo for double bass and quartertone bass flute by Catherine Lamb, another US-born composer now resident in Berlin, whose previous discs include ‘Point-Wave’ and the Viola Torros double CD with Johnny Chang.Exquisitely played by Rebecca Lane and Jon Heilbron.
Sculthorpe Studies
Wonderful engaged and engaging music by the young Western Australian composer Josten Myburgh. ‘Sculthorpe Studies’ combines harmonies taken from the work of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe with field recordings made in Whadjuk Noongar in Western Australia.
Jet Kye Chong, percussion Jameson Feakes, electric guitar Djuna Lee, double bassStuart James, piano & electronics Kirsten Smith, flutes Josten Myburgh, alto saxophone & electronics
Single Track
An extraordinary 7-part canon, which starts fast and gradually slows down across its 45 minute duration. Composed by the Berlin-based US composer Michael Winter, and performed by the leading Mexican new music ensemble Liminar.
Interview with Michael Winter
Single track is a really arresting piece that appealed to me immediately. At one level it’s obvious what’s happening – a 7-part canon that starts out fast and gradually slows down. But what else can you tell me about it?
In a way, the gradual …
Hlaholika
Four chamber works by the Slovak composer Adrián Demoč, whose previous CD ‘Ziadba’ was extremely well-received. Apartment House again on three of the tracks, with one piece played by a Czech ensemble. The title track is the third of Another Timbre’s quarantine commissions. Stunningly beautiful music.Interview with Adrián Demoč by Lukáš Borzik:
Let’s start at the end of the disc, with the final track – the duo for violin and double bass, because I know you’re particularly fond of it. What is i…
Days Collapse
Four pieces for cello & electronics by Judith Hamann. The second of Another Timbre’s ‘quarantine commissions’, this was produced in lockdown from Covid-19 in spring 2020 on the island of Suomenlinna in Finland. "Since I started the project I have been thinking a lot about collapse as an idea, and it’s become a really important means of thinking with and through certain ideas and experiences. Collapse in the sense of this album refers to a buckling of structure, of multiple layers suddenly witho…
Jankélévitch Sextets
Apartment House play Antoine Beuger’s exquisite hour-long piece from 2004. Wonderfully immersive and absorbing sounds that feel as if they are touching eternity.
The way to go out
Three mysterious, shimmering chamber works by the Australian composer Newton Armstrong, performed by Plus Minus Ensemble and Séverine Ballon (cello) "In 1990 I was studying composition at university. I basically wanted to be Stravinsky. Chris Mann took an interest in me and I started spending a lot of time at his house, drinking tea and talking. He changed my mind about a lot of things and introduced me to people who were making music that excited me. The Melbourne experimental scene was thrivin…
Stain Ballads
Four chamber works by the Toronto-based composer Martin Arnold, whose previous album ‘The Spit Veleta’ sold out last year. Beautifully played by Apartment House. "There are number of ways that the word 'ballad' could be applied to a lot of the music I make - clearly, I'm devoted to lyrical (if endlessly meandering) melodies, slow melodies that invoke a kind of vague, indistinct sentimentality. But it's significant to me that the word 'ballad' comes from the from Old French balade, from Provençal…
All English Music is Greensleeves
Five pieces by the radical young Belgian composer, Maya Verlaak, impeccably performed by Apartment House, and the soloists Sarah Saviet (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano)"Subversion has destructive connotations. However, subversion can also mean reversing a current standard: being subversive can be anything that challenges an existing system. My approach to subversion doesn’t destroy current standards, but it uses the standards to create, while developing solutions to its own characteristics and p…