★Another Timbre
Another Timbre Bundle
Another Timbre presents five essential releases exploring the furthest reaches of contemporary composition and electroacoustic investigation. This special bundle brings together works that exist beyond conventional categories - music demanding patience, recalibrated listening, and willingness to encounter sound in its most essential states.
Jakob Ullmann - Solo I & Solo IV (at250)Marja Ahti - Visiting Cloud (Two Translations) (at247)Jürg Frey - Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre (at249)Eldr…
Duet
French cellist Martine Altenburger and British guitarist John Russell recorded this live performance at the Musique en Mouvement Festival in Jarny, France in November 2008. Altenburger, Toulouse-based and conservatory-trained, moves between performances of Cage and Scelsi and improvisation with sound explorers like Michel Doneda and Lê Quan Ninh (who mastered this session). Russell, a London hardcore improviser, brings decades of experience to this encounter.
One reviewer describes listening to …
An Account Of My Hut
Duo improvisations for shakuhachi and ney recorded in Ealing, west London, July and October 2007. Clive Bell (shakuhachi) and Bechir Saade (ney) - two deeply committed improvisers working at the intersection of traditional practice and contemporary exploration - unite for their first recording as a duo. An entirely acoustic affair. Both instruments are made of plants from the same grass family - the shakuhachi from bamboo, the ney from reeds - and share fundamental similarities in timbre, breath…
Solo I / Solo IV
In the quiet extremities of contemporary composition, few have ventured as far into the territory of disappearance as Jakob Ullmann. This release documents the simultaneous realization of two works from his remarkable series of Solo pieces - compositions that exist somewhere between notation and performance, between instruction and interpretation, hovering at the very threshold of audibility. Begun in the late 1980s as Ullmann sought to depart from strict Western notational conventions, the Solo…
Je Laisse à la Nuit son Poids D'Ombre
How does music inhabit the space between two worlds? Jürg Frey confronts this question directly in Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre, a composition for ten musicians that exists in deliberate suspension, refusing the security of solid ground. Commissioned by ensemble]h[iatus, the piece emerged from extended collaboration between composer and performers, particularly in navigating two specific challenges: the distinctive voice of Thomas Lehn's analogue synthesiser and the relationship between…
Songs
A suite of five pieces for acoustic instruments and electronics by Argentine-born composer Santiago Diez Fischer, who lives and teaches in France and whose work occupies a unique space between new music, experimental rock, and free improvisation. All five pieces were written specifically for Gyre Ensemble - Alejandro Oliván López (baritone saxophone), Stefanie Mirwald-Keiser (accordion), and Christian Streit Smith (percussion) - a trio whose particular combination of timbres and approaches has c…
Dead-Wall Reveries
How does a composer who spent years immersed in cultural theory and philosophy return to music-making? For Eldritch Priest - known to many through his provocative book Boring Formless Nonsense - the answer involves cultivating a compositional sensibility that appears offhanded while remaining rigorously structured, music that flirts relentlessly with ideas to blur distinctions between trivial regard and focused attention. This release documents three works spanning more than two decades, tracing…
Visiting Cloud
What happens when electroacoustic thought migrates into the physical realm of acoustic instruments? Visiting Cloud documents a three-year collaboration between Finnish composer Marja Ahti and Italian ensemble Blutwurst, where two of Ahti's electroacoustic works - Fluctuating Streams (from The Current Inside, 2019) and Chora (from Vegetal Negatives, 2018) - undergo radical transformation into acoustic versions that stretch, deepen, and reimagine their original forms. Initiated by Blutwurst in 202…
Drift
James Opstad is probably better known as the double bassist with Apartment House than as a composer. But this should change with this release—the first CD of his music as a composer. Five beautiful pieces tracking the evolution of Opstad's work as it moves from textural electro-acoustic music to pieces exploring the layering of instruments playing at slightly different tempi.
The album begins with "Nymphaea" (2020), performed by the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys, piano; George Barton, vibraphone), follow…
The Willow Bends and So Do I
This hour-long ensemble piece from 2024, recorded in Stockholm, marks the twelfth album by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg on Another Timbre. Granberg, born in Umeå in 1974, studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York, but is self-taught as a composer. He formed his ensemble Skogen in 2005 to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi. Apart from his ongoing work with Sk…
Bach Tunings
Bach's 3 Sonatas for Solo Violin, arranged by Marc Sabat for two violins using Just Intonation tunings, together with three short introductory pieces by Marc Sabat.
Blanca
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts, a founding member and artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels—a laboratory for experimental music and sound art—and co-director of the Oscillation festival. She received training as a classical viola player and worked in various ensembles and orchestras, including the National Orchestra of Belgium, before founding Q-O2 in 1995 with a few friends to play contemporary music and practice improvisation. Brussels ar…
Intermission 6
Morton Feldman's Intermission 6 (1953) is a sparse piano piece that typically lasts between 3 and 12 minutes in standard performances. Finnish experimental musician Antti Tolvi has created a radical 72-minute realization that extends the work's meditation on silence and resonance to an unprecedented duration. Tolvi discovered the piece through Philip Thomas's five-CD Feldman Piano box set on Another Timbre, becoming fascinated by Intermission 6 as "the piece which has the most silence in it, and…
Chamber Works 1943-1951
Apartment House presents seven works from John Cage's early period, before he began his systematic exploration of chance procedures. This repertoire captures a transitional moment when Cage had moved beyond traditional methods but before he devised new formal systems—a period when, as pianist Kerry Yong notes, he was "forced to be guided by their instincts and intuition" producing "extraordinary music."
The program balances what Yong calls "simply gorgeous / gorgeously simple pieces like 'Dream'…
Mine but for its sublimation
A 64-minute piano solo composed in 2021, performed by Jack Yarbrough. "'Mine but for its sublimation' is about resonance, register, and touch. It is about where we lead ourselves when we trust ourselves. It is experiencing trust as a chain of clearings, a sequence of becomings, openings, centerings. It is about letting go; othering; finding presence through evaporation. Obliteration." - Timothy McCormack
Homestead
Kory Reeder composed Homestead (2024)—a nearly hour-long string quartet in four movements with an interlude—during his residency as Artist in Residence at Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice, Nebraska in 2023. As he explains: "As a fifth-generation Nebraskan, growing up on the native lands of the Chatiks si chatiks people (Pawnee), this project is a part of my process of learning, listening, and developing a relationship with the land and its stewards in my home state: a beautiful pla…
Listening Time
A 45-minute piece from 2024 composed by Ferdinand Schwarz in collaboration with AREPO ensemble.
Dust Book
A 50 minute solo for viola d'amore played by Marco Fusi. The piece was composed in 2022-2023, and has six movements.
Penumbra
Morgan Evans-Weiler (violin & electronics) and J.P.A. Falzone (prepared piano & celesta) present four beautifully reduced duets—music that is, as the label describes it, "as delicate as a feather, but also as tough as nails." This is the duo's third Another Timbre release, following the double album Chordioid (2020)—which the label calls "one of the hidden treasures in the Another Timbre catalogue"—and Ascending Music (2021).
The duo's collaborative process involves jointly developing works that…
Longing Landscape
Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer, clarinetist, and central figure in the Wandelweiser collective, presents three recent chamber works—all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, with one piece featuring the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa. These compositions mark a significant evolution in Frey's aesthetic. As Ian Mikyska of the Prague collective explains, "Jürg is neither writing the music he used to write nor writing the music that anyone expects of him"—moving beyon…