★Another Timbre
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…
Summer
With Summer, James Weeks delivers an album notable for its lucid construction and poetic intent, inviting listeners into a gently unfolding auditory landscape where form and timbre intermingle with understated elegance. Across five chamber works assembled in sequence, Explore Ensemble provide clarity and nuance, playing with a palpable sense of presence that amplifies Weeks’ characteristic use of pared-down musical materials and intricate textural detail. The opening title track sets the tone wi…
Best that You Do This for Me
With Best that you do this for me, Jim O’Rourke delivers a composition that redefines the boundaries of chamber music with disarming directness and subtle complexity. Commissioned by Apartment House, the piece features violin, viola, and cello - played by Mira Benjamin, Bridget Carey, and Anton Lukoszevieze- whose voices, whistles, and hums artfully entwine with bowed harmonics. The suite is built on a flexible graphic score, affording the performers significant interpretative agency, and coaxin…
Muto Infinitas
In Muto Infinitas, Catherine Lamb extends her distinctive approach to microtonality and just intonation, crafting a forty-minute dialogue for quartertone bass flute and double bass performed by Rebecca Lane and Jon Heilbron. The recording, realized without electronic alteration, invites deep listening, unspooling at an unhurried pace in a luminous acoustic field. Lamb’s music here is uncompromising in its patience: the two musicians linger in the borderlands of pitch and timbre, carving out a sp…
Sculthorpe Studies
Sculthorpe Studies marks a thoughtful and searching entry from Josten Myburgh, situating contemporary ensemble practice within a deep engagement with Australia’s sonic environment and historical legacy. Drawing direct inspiration from the harmonic language of Peter Sculthorpe, himself known for invoking landscape and indigeneity in his music, Myburgh constructs a work for sextet and field recordings that is at once interrogation and homage. The piece unfolds in a sequence of episodes, each pairi…
Single Track
On Single Track, Michael Winter delivers an exercise in continuous transformation, realized by Liminar with a deftness that makes process audible without diminishing expressive intimacy. The work opens in a blur of kinetic string textures, mapping a single gestural arc that narrows and distills over the course of forty-six minutes. Through the canon form, what begins as a flurry of interconnected voices decelerates stepwise, granting each timbral shift and harmonic overtone maximum clarity. As …
Hlaholika
With Hlaholika, Adrian Democ offers a collection of chamber pieces unified by a focus on stillness and the unhurried unfolding of sound. Rather than chasing after overt drama, Democ’s writing reveals itself through the subtle layering of sonorities and stark, melodic lines, letting each instrument’s character shine. Apartment House brings sensitivity and patience to these recordings, allowing the music’s quiet radiance to emerge organically, rather than by force.
The album opens with “Ma fin est…