★Another Timbre
Early To Late
Performed by Ensemble Grizzana, Jürg Frey (clarinet), Magnus Granberg (celesta, harmonica & stones), Angharad Davies & Mira Benjamin (violins), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Dominic Lash (double bass), John Lely (electronics, harmonica & stones), Richard Craig (flute & electronics), Philip Thomas (piano), Simon Allen (dulcimer & glass harp), Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (zither & electronics).
Chamber and Field Works 2015 - 2017
Performed by The Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble - a Tokyo-based group for new music with Wakana Ikeda, flute & harmonica, Yoko Ikeda, violin & viola, Masahiko Okura, clarinets, Taku Sugimoto, guitar & mandolin, Aya Naito, bassoon & voice, Hikaru Yamada, electronics - and by Taku Sugimoto (guitar)
Do Nothing
Electroacoustic and minimal studio composition for guitar and percussion performed by Clara de Asis. Six beautiful solo pieces developed over the course of 2017. “It’s the way I work now. To me, one of the differences between improvisation and composition is how I think about and experience time. Meaning the time within the piece itself, but also the time of my life in which I develop the piece, and how I live through that time. I believe that, as with any other activity, music is very mu…
Winter Music (1957)
John Cage’s 1957 composition in a visceral realisation for four pianos, played by John Tilbury, Philip Thomas, Mark Knoop and Catherine Laws.
“Chance procedures were used to assign each of the pianists five of the twenty pages of the score. The pianists agreed an overall duration of 40 minutes and prepared their parts independently. At the recording there was no rehearsal and the piece was played once only.” Winter Music was written in 1957 at a time when Cage was exploring different ways …
13 & 27
’13 & 27’ Two subtle works for the unique Swiss-based collective of 30/40 experimental musicians, co-ordinated and composed by d’incise and Cyril Bondi. “We started with the desire to invite as many musicians as possible to experiment with pieces and a very different approach that comes with a large ensemble….And from this moment onwards we had to deal with its potential and its limits.”
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Interview with Cyril Bondi
Tell us about th…
Untiled
a new untitled work for piano and organ by the highly-acclaimed Chicago-based composer-performer Olivia Block.“This suite was created over a span of several years. I developed techniques inside piano through rehearsals and performances, sketched the basic ideas out – the motives, physical materials etc, leaving a lot of room for improvisation between the composed bits.”
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Interview with Olivia Block
What is your musical background an…
Collection Gustave Roud
A double CD with five beautiful pieces that engage with the work of the extraordinary French-Swiss poet Gustave Roud. Performers include Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh and Jürg Frey himself.
“I think my process of work is similar to Roud’s: roaming with my sketchbook, taking a movement here, adding some notes there, following an impression, writing a little melody or a rhythmic constellation, deepening a feeling, extending a pitch, waiting and letting it happen…”
Interview with …
Ockeghem Octets
Antoine Beuger's 'Ockeghem Octets' are one of a long series of pieces, each one written for one more musician than the previous piece in the series, starting with the ‘dedekind duos’ and ending with the ‘ihwe tunings for twenty’. "My idea then was to create a series of musical situations in which all players do the same: play very long, very soft tones. So it is not their being different from each other, that primarily shapes the musical situation, but their number, their “be…
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
“Another Timbre has been contributing excellent recordings to the rapidly expanding universe of what might still be called “Classical” music, and nowhere more convincingly than in the shimmering beautiful tapestries woven by Morton Feldman. The label’s double set of Feldman’s earlier piano works would be an excellent place to begin for anyone wishing to slide into familiarity with his work, as it’s wonderfully performed by John Tilbury and Philip Thomas. Pianist Mark Knoop, violinist Aisha Orazb…
Ressac
Artwork [Cover Image By] – Véra Molnar. Piano, Composed By [Composition] – Melaine Dalibert. Recorded By – Antoine Pinçon (tracks: 1), Melaine Dalibert (tracks: 2): En abyme (2014) Ressac (2015)
Spinet and Violin
Recorded At Christoph Schiller's Atelier, Basel. Painting by Andrew Lutz. Recorded By – Christoph Schiller, Morgan Evans-WeilerSpinet – Christoph Schiller, Violin – Morgan Evans-Weiler
Places and Pages
The place could be an empty room; a quiet street corner; a fountain or waterfall; a huge echoey space. The sounds: reverberant cracks, lush organ drone, quiet whoosh of distant traffic, tapping and banging, whistles and squeaks, accordion chords, low, rough gurgling, high-pitched whining, fast chirruping, guitar and clarinet notes, footsteps and voices, ringing like an old telephone, ringing like a fire alarm. The durations: from three seconds to around 12 minutes. The volume: mostly quie…
Harmony
The fifth CD in the Canadian Composers Series is also the debut appearance on Another Timbre by the Jack Quartet. It features chamber music for strings by the Berlin-based composer Marc Sabat, whose compositions explore the world of Just Intonation. But, as Nick Storring argues in the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers Series of CDs, “to fixate upon this aspect of his music conceals at least half of what makes it so beguiling and beautiful. From an aural perspective, what is most salien…
During a Lifetime
The fourth disc in the Canadian Composers Series features the music of Chiyoko Szlavnics. The CD contains three works, two of which use sinewaves in conjuncton with acoustic instruments. The title track ‘During a Lifetime’ is written for sinewaves and saxophone quartet, an instrument on which Szlavnics herself used to perform. The final piece, ‘Reservoir’, is composed for sinewaves and an unusual instrumental octet, including two accordions, two flutes and two percussionists. The middle piece ‘F…
The Spit Veleta
The second CD in the Canadian Composers Series contains three recent works by the Toronto-based composer Martin Arnold, played by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Philip Thomas (piano). In his introductory essay to the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers CDs, Nick Storring quotes a comment that Arnold made about one of his earlier works, highlighting a quality which Storring feels applies to a large part of Arnold’s compositional output: "The piece is not intended to be demonstrative but rathe…
Drifter
The first in the Canadian Composers Series of CDs is a double album of chamber works by Linda Catlin Smith, who was born in New York, but studied in Canada and has lived in Toronto for over 25 years. The album ‘Drifter’ contains ten pieces dating from 1995 to 2015 played by Quatuor Bozzini and Apartment House. In his introductory essay to the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers CDs, Nick Storring says that “One of the primary tensions in Linda Catlin Smith's music is between its equal a…
Bow
The third CD in the Canadian Composers Series contains seven pieces by Isaiah Ceccarelli, a composer-percussionist who lives in Montreal. The music Ceccarelli composes falls broadly into two categories: timbrally-based music in which he himself performs, and through-composed pieces that focus on harmonic progressions. His CD ‘Bow’ presents both of these sides of his work: the title track, ‘Falsobordone’ and ‘Dunstable’ are compositions for string trio or quartet, while the ‘Oslo Harmonies’ and ‘…
Resonators
Four pieces from a residency in the Czech Republic by the trio of George Cremaschi (double bass and electronics), Irene Kepl (violin and electronics) and Petr Vrba (trumpet, clarinet and electronics). "We're concerned with using the acoustics of the resonant spaces we seek out as a sort of additional member of the group, composing with this interaction particularly in mind." Acoustic instruments and feedback devices combined in old stone spaces, such as the courtyard of a monastery, creating a r…
Appalachian Anatolia (14th Century)
A 40-minute solo piece for ‘modified guitar’ written by the Swiss composer d’incise for the Chilean guitarist Cristián Alvear.Perhaps more than a strict composition this piece is a conjunction of a technical frame and a conceptual input, and the own vision of the player. It works on tuning and de-tuning, a different set-up of the strings, on harmonics and pitch frictions and on the influences of music from very various origins and the transposition of gestures inside a reduced field of possibili…
Cantilena
Six chamber works by the Paris-based composer Giuliano d'Angiolini, following on from his exquisite album 'Simmetrie di Ritorno' on Edition RZ.
“A port in the storm, this. Giuliano d’Angiolini is a Paris-based Italian composer and ethnomusicologist who makes music of whispered, consolatory indeterminacy. He is probably best known (if he is known at all) for a 2011 album called Simmetrie di Ritorno, but I would argue that this new release is more sublime, or perhaps just more t…