★Another Timbre
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…
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…
Jankélévitch Sextets
Jankélévitch Sextets brings together Antoine Beuger’s reductionist poetics and the responsive intelligence of Apartment House, resulting in a recording defined less by overt drama than by its expansive sense of space and attentive musicianship. Over the span of sixty-four minutes, Beuger crafts a patient tapestry for violin, viola, double bass, bassoon, bass clarinet, and accordion. Each instrument enters as if in dialogue, their lines arising not from thematic contrast but from a shared willing…
The way to go out
The Way to Go Out offers an absorbing journey through three interconnected pieces by Newton Armstrong, exploring themes of repetition, layering, and shifting musical focus inspired by visual art and landscapes. Performed by the Plus Minus Ensemble alongside Séverine Ballon, the album balances textural nuance and structural rigor, weaving together acoustic and electronic sounds with a fluid, measured pace that invites deep listening. Armstrong's fascination with the "in-between" moments - where l…
Stain Ballads
There is something disarming about the world conjured in Stain Ballads. Martin Arnold creates music for Apartment House that settles into the ear with an air of deceptive simplicity: four extended works - “Lutra,” “Stain Ballad,” “Trousers,” and “Slip” - move in slow, off-center arcs, each clothed in a soft-edged lyricism that never quite settles into resolution. Arnold’s notion of a “stain” isn’t merely suggestive of the accidental, but proposes a form where contour and color are indivisible. H…
Parallel Words
With Parallel Words, Eventless Plot compose as a true collective, crafting an album that drifts at the intersection of chamber music, electroacoustic experimentation, and subtle jazz inflections. The trio - Vasilis Liolios, Aris Giatas, and Yiannis Tsirikoglou - devise sound worlds marked by contradiction and hybridity. Across the album’s three substantial tracks, instrumental timbres and electronics run alongside each other, oscillating between a sense of tranquil detachment and mounting intens…
Monument of Diamonds
With Monument of Diamonds, Kraig Grady offers a singular entry in the field of microtonal composition, crafting a sound world as immersive as it is otherworldly. The piece, composed in 2020 and realized for a small orchestra of specially built or adapted brass and woodwinds, is structured around the Meta-Slendro tuning - a 17-pitch scale pioneered by Erv Wilson. This tuning infuses the entire work with a crystalline, unfamiliar resonance, letting every phrase and chord shimmer with a sense of sp…
Repetition of the Same Dream
Repetition of the same dream emerged from collaboration under unusual circumstances: during the early Covid-19 lockdown, Clara de Asis and Mara Winter found themselves together in Basel, using both a local church and a midnight tunnel to explore the limits of breath, resonance, and intuition. The album, spanning five works for flute, percussion, and electronics, is shaped as much by its resonant spaces and spontaneous method as by pre-composed material. The duo dissolves rigid lines between comp…
Hyazo
A new album from the trio who released Tse in 2016, and - along with violinist Angharad Davies - Awire in 2018. Three compositions of quiet and delicate beauty, two by Christoph Schiller, and the title track by Cyril Bondi.Cyril Bondi: Indian harmoniumPierre-Yves Martel: viola da gambaChristoph Schiller: spinet
Antifona
Following on from the wonderful "Cantilena", four new chamber works by the Paris-based Italian composer Giuliano d'Angiolini. Performers include Apartment House, Manuel Zurria, Mark Knoop and the composer.
Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost
Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost marks another chapter in Magnus Granberg’s ongoing exploration of the borderlands between improvisation and quietly radical chamber composition. Granberg draws from his background in saxophone and deep engagement with traditions spanning classical, folk, and the avant-garde, establishing a musical language marked by reserved urgency and gentle abstraction, performed by his dedicated ensemble Skogen.
The recording is structured to allow strings, clarinet, piano, …
Fűr Biliana
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s Für Biliana unfolds as a quietly powerful study in sustained resonance and tactile silence, brought to life with understated virtuosity by Biliana Voutchkova and her collaborators. Across four compositions - including the eponymous solo piece and “Glissando,” both written for Voutchkova, as well as “Duo 4 / Parallelen” and “Extension für Streichtrio” - Stiebler investigates the possibilities of sonority, repetition, and space in chamber music. His distinctive architectur…