★Another Timbre
Dirt Road
Dirt Road stands as a milestone in Linda Catlin Smith's catalogue - a single work expanding over an hour, composed in 2005 and commissioned for dance. Performed by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Simon Limbrick (percussion), the piece moves through fifteen loosely connected movements, each open to interpretation and marked by Smith’s trademark transparency. The violin floats above sparse percussion gestures - wood, metal, vibraphone, and bowls - sometimes in suspended dialogue, sometimes drifting acr…
Ffansïon | Fancies
Ffansion | Fancies, voted one of the year’s best albums by BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, documents the rare rapport between Welsh violinist Angharad Davies and Berlin-based pianist Tisha Mukarji. Realized as part of Another Timbre’s “Violin +1” series, the album paints a spacious landscape of improvised textures, blending prepared piano with close-miked virtuosic violin in St Catherine’s Church, London. Davies and Mukarji relinquish self-consciousness and allow the instruments to propose the musi…
Tocando fondo
Tocando Fondo is the result of a year’s deep collaboration between Vienna-based electronics artist Klaus Filip and Argentinian trumpeter Leonel Kaplan, recorded in Buenos Aires in 2014. The album gathers two extended improvisations, both unfolding at the intersection of air, sinewaves, and architectural space. Filip’s contribution is a world of tuned sinewaves - clear, oscillating, sometimes trembling at the edge of instability - while Kaplan’s trumpet weaves arcs of breath, attack, and fragile …
Assigned #15
Assigned #15 continues James Saunders’s trajectory of modular, context-sensitive composition. Derived from his long-term project #[Unassigned], this work is scored for seven musicians - violin, viola, cello, percussion, melodica, chamber organ, and objects - each participant given bespoke instructions drawn from Saunders’s accumulated material. Apartment House’s performance (recorded at St Paul's, Huddersfield) embodies Saunders’s philosophy: structure and interpretation are reconfigured for eac…
Grizzana And Other Pieces 2009-2014
Grizzana features Swiss composer Jürg Frey at his most introspective, realized by Ensemble Grizzana - Frey (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Richard Craig (flute), Emma Richards (viola), Philip Thomas (piano), Seth Woods (cello), and Ryoko Akama (organ & electronics). The work, together with companion pieces on the double CD Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014(Another Timbre), marks a deep engagement with sonic transparency, tension, and the delicate equilibrium found in Morandi’s painting. Ea…
Extinguishment
Extinguishment documents the chamber dialogue between Billy Gomberg (bass guitar, electronics, recordings) and Anne Guthrie (French horn, electronics, recordings), working as Fraufraulein for Another Timbre. Recorded over several months in 2014, the album pursues a shared language of improvisation - each piece constructed from discrete performances, then woven with a common thread of minimalism, private lyricism, and environmental observation.Field recordings, manipulated live, are inseparable f…
Whitewashed With Lines (Common Objects)
A double CD featuring two extended live performances by the electroacoustic quartet of John Butcher (sax), Angharad Davies (violin), Rhodri Davies (harps) & Lee Patterson (amplifed devices)
Sometimes we all disappear
Sometimes We All Disappear documents the enduring collaboration between Canadian artists Jamie Drouin (suitcase modular synth, portable radio) and Lance Austin Olsen (amplified objects, audio cassettes). Recorded in Victoria, West Canada, shortly before Drouin’s move to Berlin, the album stands out for its sonic restraint, embracing environmental ambiance and field sound as active partners in music-making. Working with long takes and casual edits, the duo divides and rearranges their source impr…
The Harmonics of Real Strings
Four realisations of John Lely's simple but brilliant composition 'The Harmonics of Real Strings', which is basically a very slow glissando along the full length of one bowed string. Anton Lukoszevieze plays one realisation on each string of the cello, following the harmonic transformations as they occur and producing an extraordinary example of 'the virtuosity of restraint'. John Lely originally composed the piece in 2006, and it was recorded in April 2014. "When I'm composing I'm learning, ask…
Two pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969
Two Pianos and Other Pieces 1953-1969 collects the most experimental and beautiful works for multiple pianos from Morton Feldman’s formative years, exhuming scores rarely captured before - including “Two Pianos,” “Piece for Four Pianos,” “Piano Four Hands,” “Piano Three Hands,” and “Two Pieces for Three Pianos.” Led by pianists John Tilbury and Philip Thomas, the ensemble expands with strings, brass, and percussion, depending on the piece. This collection shines during passages of radical quietn…
Roananax 1999 / Obliq 2014
The Roananax / Obliq split chronicles two generations of Berlin’s radical improvisers in dialogue. On the first half, Annette Krebs (electro-acoustic guitar, mixing board), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Robin Hayward (tuba), and Andrea Neumann (inside piano, mixing board) realize five nearly motionless improvisations from 1999. Their sound world is scoured of excess: silence reigns, interrupted only by microscopic events - clicks, whispers, friction, muted resonance, and breath become the core vocabula…
Luv / Kopfuberwelle
Luv / Kopfüberwelle unfolds in two halves, each radiating the signature sensitivity of Sabine Vogel. “luv,” a nearly thirty-minute solo piece, sits at the intersection of field recording, flute improvisation, and subtle electronic manipulation. Vogel’s work with the Landscape Quartet shapes her approach, drawing not just on musical material but on a careful listening to site - birdsong, wind, water, and distant activity form a natural acoustic tapestry into which the flute dissolves and emerges.…
Chamber Works 1992 - 2009
Chamber Works 1992–2009 showcases the breadth and quirks of British composer Laurence Crane over fourteen pieces for chamber ensemble, composed across nearly two decades and interpreted by Apartment House. Crane’s language thrives on the surface simplicity of steady rhythms and legible harmonies - progressions often cycle between just two chords, melodies unfold in minimal, singing arcs. But beneath the façade, odd details and playful subversions quietly destabilize any sense of predictability: …
F23M-12: Field With Figures No. 1 - 4 / Rush!
F23M-12: Field With Figures No. 1–4 / Rush! is a distinctive entry in Another Timbre’s Berlin Series, sharing two worlds of experimental practice. In the first half, Christian Kesten and the late Mark Trayle create four pieces for voice and electronics. Kesten’s sound art blurs the line between vocal utterance and language: inhaled whispers, fricatives, murmurs, and spectral vowel shapes figure as events on a mutable sound field. Trayle’s electronics situate these gestures within shifting archit…
Pneuma
Pneuma presents five distinctive pieces by British composer Martin Iddon, performed by specialist new music ensembles. The set includes “pneuma.sarx” for Trio Atem (flute, voice, cello), “pneuma.kharis” (flute, cello, voice), “Danaë” (solo piano, Catherine Laws), and two works for larger instrumentations. Iddon’s music occupies unique territory, weaving together sparse, breathy textures and sudden shifts in color and gesture, drawing frequent reference to medieval and early Renaissance models - …
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…
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, …