★Another Timbre
Temperament as Waveform
Temperament as Waveform is a transatlantic exchange in process and poetics. Between 2010 and 2012, UK-based sound artist Lee Patterson and Austin’s Vanessa Rossetto traded recordings, objects, and digital files by post - each response reshaping and folding the other's sonic worlds. The album merges four wide-ranging improvisational/concrète works, each combining manipulated field recordings with amplified objects, cassette fragments, instrumental events, and filtered signal noise.
Opener “Every…
Public private
Public Private assembles two improvising groups from divergent scenes: Barcelona’s Atolón and London’s Chip Shop Music. The album opens with “Public,” a 44-minute collective improvisation by Atolón: Ruth Barberán (trumpet/objects), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion/objects), and Ferran Fages (turntables/electronics). Their sound is tactile and elemental, privileging raw timbre - breathing through trumpet bells, scraping on glass, whirring turntable motors, hissing air, and the elemental processe…
Kolk
Kolk (Another Timbre) offers a rare encounter between Hamburg trumpeter Birgit Ulher and Swiss spinet innovator Christoph Schiller. Recorded in Hamburg in 2010, these five improvisations draw on the duo’s deep engagement with non-idiomatic sound: Ulher works with her trumpet as a physical resonator, channeling air, static, speaker hum, radio noise, and objects, while Schiller’s prepared spinet spills out fleeting melodic cells, clicks, muted thuds, and spectral overtone clouds. Their collaborati…
Unbalanced In (Unbalanced Out)
Unbalanced Out (Unbalanced In)'. A powerful, challenging 50-minute collaborative piece constructed over a year through file-sharing by a sextet of leading musicians across the world, with Barry Chabala (USA, guitar), Bonnie Jones (USA/Korea, electronics), Louisa Martin (UK, laptop), Tisha Mukarji (Germany, piano), Toshi Nakamura (Japan, no-input mixing board) and Gabriel Paiuk (Argentina, piano)
Chantier 1
Chantier 1 documents the first in a series of radical sound investigations by Pascal Battus(rotating surfaces, found objects), Bertrand Gauguet (amplified and acoustic saxophones), and Eric LaCasa (microphones), set directly within buildings under construction. More than conventional performance, their method is intervention: improvising amidst the ongoing labor of construction workers, letting the site dictate form, rhythm, and interruption. Sounds of drilling, hammering, and machinery aren’t f…
Pinna
Pinna presents Tim Blechmann and Klaus Filip, two key figures in European laptop improvisation, in a single uninterrupted set. Recorded in July 2010, the performance unfolds as a meditation on gradation and resonance - sound as a moving field of vibration and air. Both artists shape their output on laptops: Blechmann crafts slowly shifting waves, centralizing spatial detail and nuanced low-frequency motion; Filip brings a refined palette of microtonal sinewaves and pulses, structuring patterns t…
Droplets
Droplets brings together double bassist Dominic Lash with composer Eva-Maria Houben, Taylan Susam, and improvisers Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes. At its heart is Lash’s outdoor recording of Houben’s “nachtstück,” where fragile double bass lines merge with the unpredictable sounds of wind, rain, and the wider world. The bass’s deep resonance shares the soundspace with falling rain, creating a duo of musician and nature that is both visually and sonically evocative - every performance choice bec…
Caisson
Under the name Tierce, Jez riley French, Ivan Palacky, and Dan Jones assemble a sonic laboratory for their album Caisson. The lineup holds French’s broad toolbox - field recordings, salt, paper, contact mics, prepared zither, and electronics - alongside Palacky’s signature amplified knitting machine and Jones’s turntable setup. The result, a single extended live improvisation, is a display of ensemble subtlety and the tactile intrigue of ordinary instruments used in extraordinary ways. Recorded …
Grape Skin
Grape Skin is the focused outcome of a trio session between Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, and Christoph Schiller in a Zurich space, 2011. Doneda’s soprano sax curves and stirs in threadlike whispers, multiphonics, and percussive pops; Kocher’s accordion sustains microtonal clusters, gentle drones, or sudden detours; Schiller turns his spinet into a source of prepared sonorities, glancing harmonics, and tactile staccato. The approach is neither meditative minimalism nor crowded abstraction - it's …
Choices
The first meeting on disc between two of the finest and most innovative electroacoustic instrumentalists in Germany: Argentine-born, Berlin-based Lucio Capece (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, preparations, mini megaphone) and Hamburg-based Birgit Ulher (trumpet, mutes, radio, speaker). Recorded live on May 14th, 2010 at the Blurred Edges Festival in Hamburg, Choices documents three pieces that explore the expanded sonic possibilities of prepared wind instruments through extended techniques and…
Horsky Park
Horsky Park (Another Timbre) documents the refined improvisational encounter of Tiziana Bertoncini - an Italian violinist with deep classical and contemporary training - and Thomas Lehn, renowned for his mercurial analog synth work. The duo’s sound is shaped by the alchemy of their contrasting instruments: violin, with its centuries of tradition, meets the unpredictable surge and sizzle of live electronics. The two primary pieces, recorded in 2006 (Heidelberg) and 2010 (Milan), testify to a matu…
Pie and Mash
A duo improvisation between French trombonist Mathias Forge and Brussels-based improviser Olivier Toulemonde, recorded live in Sheffield in January 2010, with and without audience. Pie'n'mash – its title playfully referencing the traditional London working-class dish – documents the meeting of two remarkable musicians who were relative unknowns at the time but who have since been recognized as significant voices within post-reductionist improvisation.
Forge, a virtuosic young trombonist, demonst…
Giles U.
An improbable yet utterly compelling duo pairing tuba and spinet – two instruments rarely heard together in musical history, brought into dialogue by German tubaist Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Swiss spinet player Christoph Schiller. Recorded in Cologne in November 2009, Giles U. documents seven pieces that explore the sonic possibilities of this unconventional combination, creating what one critic aptly described as "the kind of thing you might hear if a steampunk novel became sound."
Hübsch, a major…
AD
A duo encounter between two of the most distinctive voices in European improvised music: Welsh violinist Angharad Davies and German trumpeter Axel Dörner. Recorded in December 2008 at a West London house, A.D. documents an intimate meeting between two musicians who share a profound commitment to extended technique and sonic exploration, creating music that transcends the conventional boundaries of their instruments.
Dörner has long been recognized as one of the most consistently innovative trump…
Crepuscular Rays
Norwegian guitarist Håvard Volden (12-string guitar, objects) and Japanese master Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board) recorded these two pieces in Norway in 2008, creating what one Norwegian reviewer calls "a timbre based album with some auditory surprises." The music is "slow and quiet, with contrasting elements. A cutting tone, a crackling flicker, or a deep bass tone gives the progress colour. It is exciting to listen to an expression that moves with this much unpredictability."
Norman…
Corgroc
Barcelona-based Ferran Fages is known both for his lyrical acoustic guitar playing (on solo discs such as Cançons a per un Lent Retard and Al Voltant d'un Para/'lel) and for hard-edged electronics (with groups such as Cremaster and Octante). His work in Ap'strophe—a duo with Athens-based zither player Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga—is an intriguing combination of these two sides of his music: there is plenty of resonant acoustic playing, but this is set against both the metallic textures of Lazari…
The cat from Cat Hill
Named after the slow loris—an animal beloved by Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes for its shy, gradual movements—this London trio creates music that moves at a similarly unhurried pace. Farmer (natural objects, e-bow snare, tapes), Hughes (chorded zither, piano, e-bow), and Daniel Jones (turntable, e-bow, piezo discs, electronics) recorded these three pieces at Middlesex University in 2009, producing what Richard Pinnell in The Watchful Ear describes as "a calm but invigorating massage of the eard…
Electricals
Few albums have been more accurately titled. Though Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn) and Ernst Karel (trumpet) come from acoustic backgrounds, analogue electronics dominate these five pieces, creating what Gino Robair termed "voltage made audible." The duo manages their modular synthesizers the old-school way—"by twisting knobs, flipping switches, yanking patch cords in and out, and sometimes using their own fingers as conductors between cables and instruments," as Bill Meyer describes in Dus…
Lunula
Barcelona's Octante—Ruth Barberán (trumpet, speaker, microphones), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion, objects), Ferran Fages (oscillators, pick-ups), and Margarida Garcia (electric bass)—create what one reviewer calls "a crackling and crunching kind of sound" that's "utterly condensed." The quartet has essentially become "one common music machine" where distinguishing individual instruments becomes nearly impossible. The two extended improvisations (each around 29 minutes) recorded in Barcelona …
Two
Trio improvisations recorded at festivals in Esslingen, Germany (2005) and Klagenfurt, Austria (2008). Axel Dörner (trumpet), Thomas Lehn (analogue synthesiser) and Phil Minton (voice) - TOOT's second album, following One on Sofa Records. Two extended collective improvisations finding three masters of European improvisation in absolutely fine form.
Dörner brings his trumpet deconstructions - brassy hisses, burred growls, sputtered flurries. Lehn provides warm analogue synth grit and oscillations…