★Another Timbre
Somatic Refrain
Somatic Refrain is a collection by Allison Cameron for varied chamber forces and ensemble, performed by Apartment House and the Allison Cameron Band. Her music combines delicate sound textures, unpredictable motifs, and hints of folk and experimental methods, rewarding attentive listeners with gentle surprises and new perspectives on instrumental color.
An Album
An Album by Tim Parkinson and Apartment House includes five works covering two decades of the composer’s creative evolution. From uncoordinated solo and ensemble pieces to re-imagined septets and violin-piano duos, the music is marked by matter-of-fact presentation, rhythmic independence, and a celebration of the mundane as fertile compositional ground.
Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two
Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two features three rarely encountered works by John Cage, interpreted by Apartment House. The album brings together the sparse, spatial interplay of “Two”, the poised transformations of “Thoreau Drawings”, and the hypnotic, layered repetitions of “Hymnkus” in performances marked by clarity, restraint, and ensemble sensitivity.
John Tilbury plays Terry Riley
Keyboard Studies presents pivotal works by Terry Riley as interpreted by John Tilbury. The performances offer a rare depth of touch and imagination, embracing the cyclical, improvisatory frameworks that define Riley’s minimalism and bringing to the fore Tilbury’s keen sensibility for architectural listening, color, and meticulous pacing.
Landmarks
Landmarks offers an immersive, contemplative collaboration between Katelyn Clark and Isaiah Ceccarelli, presenting a suite of works that draw from both ancient and contemporary sound worlds. The duo’s backgrounds in historical keyboard and percussion performance anchor the album, but the project transcends specific genres or traditions. Instead, it crafts a patient, ambient landscape shaped by resonance, modest gesture, and a shared reverence for the act of attentive listening. Throughout the al…
Hope Lies Fallow
Six pieces developed by Johnny and Keir from music by Hildegard van Bingen and Orlando de Lassus. Three violin duets, + three tracks for violins and the voice of Celeste Oram.
Tehran Dust
Tehran Dust reveals Klaus Lang at his most understated and evocative, presenting a pair of pieces that meditate on the porous boundaries between sound, space, and memory. Eschewing overt drama or visual spectacle, the album envelops the listener in a slow-form exploration of timbre and atmosphere, shaped by microtonal harmony and subtle shifts in instrumental color. What emerges is not simply a display of compositional technique, but an invitation to enter a suspended sonic landscape where each …
The Pankow-Park Sessions
The Pankow-Park Sessions Vol.1 is a striking documentation of collaboration between Ernstalbrecht Stiebler and Tilman Kanitz, offering a series of works that blur distinctions between composition and improvisation in an acoustic setting. These recorded sessions capture the artists’ shared sensitivity to resonance, duration, and the momentary emergence of musical events. Rather than foregrounding virtuosic display or dense structuring, the album cultivates a sense of spaciousness where tones, sil…
How Lonely Sits The City?
How Lonely Sits the City? by Magnus Granberg stands as a meditation on absence, fragility, and the slow unfolding of collective musical thought. Rather than foregrounding overt drama or sharp contrast, Granberg distills his process into an album-length work where every gesture feels both deliberate and spare, each silence thick with meaning. The piece finds an ensemble poised between composition and improvisation, where timbral detail, suspended harmonies, and gradual variation take precedence o…
Together on the Way
A concert-length work for pipe organ, piano and percussion, created by the composer and the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys and George Barton) at the recent Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Wonderfully brooding music, beautifully played.
Adjacent Sound
Adjacent Sound positions Gabriel Paiuk as a composer attuned to the phenomena of perception, proximity, and the thresholds where listening itself becomes the subject. Rather than presenting a collection of isolated pieces, the album unfolds as a unified exploration into how sound delineates and dissolves boundaries - between performers, between recorded and live presence, between the material and the ephemeral. Every aspect of the release is shaped by a careful questioning of what it means to li…
Discreet Angel
Discreet Angel brings to light the uniquely understated voice of Mark Ellestad, gathering three chamber works composed between the late 1980s and early 1990s. What unifies the album is its atmosphere of meditative quiet and fragile resilience, qualities honed through Ellestad’s focus on pared-down gesture and subtle shifts in form. Rather than presenting polished showpieces, these compositions favor modesty, restraint, and an honest vulnerability - traits that resonate strongly with listeners se…
Luft.Inneres
Luft.Inneres presents an introspective and rarefied journey through the musical world of Kunsu Shim, focusing on the delicacy and subtlety that mark his approach to sound and silence. The album is shaped less by linear progression or overt contrast than by the quiet shaping of atmosphere, touch, and internal resonance. Across its span, Kunsu Shim offers music that seems to hover at the threshold of audibility, gently probing the listener’s awareness of detail, space, and the interplay between in…
Piano and String Quartet
Piano and String Quartet is a luminous example of Morton Feldman’s ability to reshape the boundaries of chamber music, offering a listening experience rooted in patience, transparency, and quietly shifting texture. Rather than following standard models of interplay and development, Feldman crafts a world in which piano and strings inhabit parallel spaces, bringing into focus the ebb and flow of color and resonance across nearly an hour and a half of music.
This recording stands apart for how it …
September
Apartment House again, performing eight exquisite chamber works by the young UK composer Georgia Rodgers
Songs For a Shed
Songs for a Shed is a testament to the creative evolution and gentle inventiveness of Ryoko Akama, realized in close collaboration with the musicians of Apartment House. The album unfolds as an engaging exploration of timbre, space, and melody, moving with characteristic restraint and an ear for sonic nuance. Rather than leaning into complexity for its own sake, the music privileges clarity, attentiveness, and an affection for the understated beauty of ordinary sounds.
Central to the album’s ide…
Number Pieces
Number Pieces, the expansive four-disc set performed by Apartment House, presents a strikingly comprehensive exploration of John Cage’s celebrated late works. Composed in the twilight of Cage’s life, these pieces reflect a deep engagement with silence, time, and musical indeterminacy - a period often characterized by a profound calmness and openness, quite distinct from the composer's more angular early output. Apartment House, under the direction of Anton Lukoszevieze, approach the scores not s…
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
In the catalog of contemporary composition, Linda Catlin Smith occupies a luminous yet quiet space. Her music resists momentum in favor of presence, exploring the beauty of slowness and the porous borders between harmony and noise. Drawing on the lineage of Morton Feldman while affirming her own sensibility, she builds worlds where stillness and fragility become active forces. Each piece unfolds like a painting observed over time, the ear adjusting to small variations in tone and contour that ac…
Me Hollywood
With Me Hollywood, Oliver Leith continues to refine his idiosyncratic vocabulary, stretching the boundary between contemporary composition, performance art, and pop absurdism. The record unfolds as a study of spectacle and sincerity, as if filtering the bright unreality of stardom through a distinctly British sense of irony. Leith’s background in post-minimalist and experimental idioms converges here with a fascination for emotional transparency and artificiality, inviting the listener into a so…