★Another Timbre
Atto
Atto is a radical investigation of object music by Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino. In five works spanning thirty-eight minutes, Coluccino transforms domestic things - metal, wood, plastic, paper - into singing instruments through manipulation alone. His method is restless: resonant objects are never left in stasis or forced into their function, but provoked, bent, and recombined until an unexpected “new side” emerges. The result is a chamber palette closer to sonic sculpture than conventiona…
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…
Music For Shakuhachi
Four works spanning two decades document an extraordinary musical collaboration between British composer Frank Denyer and shakuhachi master Yoshikazu Iwamoto. They met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1974, where Denyer was a doctoral student in ethnomusicology and Iwamoto artist-in-residence in the World Music programme. What emerged is a folio of compositions that run like a vein through Denyer's output - a body of work unique in contemporary music.
Denyer was not interested in east-we…
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…
For Hugh Davies
Extraordinary homage to pioneering instrument-builder and improviser Hugh Davies (1943-2005), recorded in January 2008. Adam Bohman (prepared balalaika & amplified objects), Lee Patterson (amplified objects) and Mark Wastell (cello) - three improvisers heavily influenced by Davies's work - improvising alongside solo recordings Davies made in the 1970s. A virtual quartet where one voice is fixed, unable to respond.
Davies - who worked as Karlheinz Stockhausen's assistant in Cologne in the mid-60s…
...de la piedras
Trio improvisations recorded at the Eremita de la Anunciada, Urueña, Spain, August 2007. Esteban Algora (accordion), Alessandra Rombolá (flute and tiles installation) and Ingar Zach (percussion) - three Madrid-based improvisers creating music where the room became a fourth member of the group. An entirely acoustic affair. The title, taken from a poem by Pablo Neruda, suggests the use of the space where the recording was made - an old stone church where the instruments amplify and extend the pote…
Dun
Trio improvisations recorded at the Church of St. James the Great, Friern Barnet, north London, November 2007. Matt Davis (trumpet & field recordings), Matt Milton (violin) and Bechir Saade (bass clarinet & flute) - three improvisers following that strain of British improv interested in amplifying the quiet and concentrating on minute gestural nuance. An entirely acoustic affair meets electronics in reverberant sacred space.
The music opens with "a spectrum of Saade's bass clarinet multiphon…
The contest of pleasures - Tempestuous
Late-night improvisation captured on a stormy November evening in an old church during the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. John Butcher's soprano and tenor saxophones intertwine with Xavier Charles' clarinet and Axel Dörner's trumpet across 51 minutes of remarkable sustained exploration that stands as one of the defining documents of contemporary European improvised music.
Tempestuous moves between the poles of calm and urgency that the setting might suggest, with the trio navigat…