★Another Timbre
For Clarinet (And Piano)
Clarinet (and Piano) brings together Amsterdam composer Dante Boon and Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey for three works at the porous boundary of composition and improvisation. In the long opening duo “O’Hare,” Boon’s gentle piano arpeggios glow beside Frey’s quietly expressive clarinet, combining spiraling lyricism with stately stillness across nearly twenty-five minutes. The piece unfolds in a gradual arc, eschewing conventional development for the slow revelation of timbre and intervallic resonanc…
Dirt Road
Receiving the Approaching Memory, composed in 2011 for Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop, is among Bryn Harrison’s most celebrated works - an extended meditation on memory, recognition, and the evolving experience of musical time. The piece unfolds in five substantial sections, each built around networks of repetitive figures that spiral and shimmer, gradually reducing the pitch material from full chromaticism to only two common notes by the end. Rather than simply repeating, Harrison’s patterns m…
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…
Volume
Illogical Harmonies is the collaborative project of Berlin residents Johnny Chang (violin) and Mike Majkowski (double bass). Their album Volume presents fifty-four minutes of highly focused, acoustic improvisation - five tracks, each marked by an almost ritual commitment to duration, a fascination with harmonic overlap, and an ongoing search for balance between individual and ensemble sound. Eschewing quick changes or dramatic gesture, Chang and Majkowski operate in a zone of gradual development…
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…
Goldsmiths
Goldsmiths gathers a distinguished sextet into an evocative session at St James Hatcham Church, South London: John Tilbury (piano), Angharad Davies and Lina Lapelyte (violins, Lapelyte also on voice), Michael Duch (double bass), John Lely (objects, electronics, melodica), and Rhodri Davies (electric harp, melodica). Against a backdrop of rich acoustics, the album presents four pieces - three composed (Sarah Hughes’ "A Reward is Offered," John Lely’s "DawnChorus," Jürg Frey’s "Für sieben" for sep…
Awareness about
Four recent pieces by Berlin-based instrumentalist, composer and improviser,Lucio Capece, all focusing on the process of listening. One piece performed by Konzert Minimal, the others all solo performances, including Lucio's extraordinary piece at the Halle des Expositions in Evreux, France, using speakers hanging from helium balloons and location recordings through cardboard tubes.
Guitarist Alone
Jurg Frey - guitarist, alone played by Cristian Alvear. A double CD featuring all of Jurg Frey's music for solo guitar, beautifully interpreted by the Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, including a new piece written specially for Cristian. “Not one for the impatient listener, this softly entrancing double-disc set contains all the solo guitar music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey – and that means an awful lot of silence and not a huge number of notes. The first piece, Abendlied, contains exactl…
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…
How Deep Is The Ocean, How High Is The Sky?
Swedish composer Magnus Granberg (Skogen) places baroque instruments alongside prepared piano, objects and electronics in an exquisite 60-minute piece performed with an excellent set of performers including Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Eric Ruffing, Christoph Schiller, &c.
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…
Whispers
Whispers is a cycle of five idiosyncratic works spanning 2010–2014, composed and directed by Frank Denyer and performed by The Barton Workshop (with Denyer, Kiku Day, Juliet Fraser, Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenburg, Pepe Garcia Rodriguez, Dario Calderone, Bob Gilmore, Jamie Man, and others). The title track, “Whispers,” is a procession of seventeen short vocal meditations: Denyer’s own whispered, murmured, and muttered sounds traced by rare instrumental gestures- muted…
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…
Would Fall From The Sky, Would Wither And Die
Skuggorna och ljuset is a quintet featuring Magnus Granberg (clarinet, composition), Anna Lindal (violin), Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Kristine Scholz (prepared piano), and Erik Carlsson (percussion). Their sole album, Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die, departs from Granberg’s larger ensemble Skogen. Without electronics, the sound is more chamber-like, each gesture and note given time to settle, bloom, and fade in a gently hypnotic field.
The work transforms the harmonic material o…
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…
Next to Nothing
Next to Nothing brings together Ryoko Akama (VCS3 synthesizer), Dominic Lash (double bass, clarinet, laptop), and Bruno Duplant (percussion, tone generator) for four works devised as text scores. Recorded in Sheffield, the album explores the hyper-minimal edges of sound, asking what music remains when nearly everything is removed - when process, gesture, and form are pared to their limits. The trio’s approach is not about the absence of activity, but about amplifying the tiniest events: tones, t…
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…