★Sawyer Editions
Forming - Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation
In late fall of 2018, Ryan traveled to Valencia, California to meet with Michael for a weekend of informal conversations at California Institute of the Arts. Before Ryan returned home to Colorado, Michael gifted him a recently released recording of Teodora Stepančić, Assaf Gidron, and Martin Lorenz’s realization of Michael’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation, a recording that profoundly impacted Ryan and served as the impetus for this recording.
A thrumming monadic field; a constellation o…
Given
"The piece given may be characterized as a certain activity, a special kind of practice. We practice as a trio (two players and one producer), hoping that anything might emerge: we gather to share a beautiful time together, exchanging our hopes and longings, our suffering, and our pain. Why should there be music at all? Faced with this question and considering the state of our world, artists could often find themselves drawn toward a sense of meaninglessness. But this is not the end. In the face…
When you rub your eyes, you see things you can’t describe
"In the emergence of consonance out of vapor, in shapes slowly forming from static sounds, Szymon Wójcik’s music gestures toward the movement named in its title: the appearing of what cannot be described. We hear it in its porousness: despite the dense mist, the music retains a transparency, recalling Feldman’s image of a full glass that never spills, no matter how many pennies you add. We hear it in the free singing, which does not so much break away from harmonies in Just Intonation as reveal …
Any sense of where we were gone
Any sense of where we were gone is music obsessed with the infinite within the minute, with the mercurial, breakable, with shifting, sifting, cohering, and digressing. It is an improvisational framework in five parts for chamber ensembles, prepared piano, and electronics, written for and played here by my good friends. It steals inspiration from postmodern fiction, obscure geometry textbooks, and poems about time. This is a live recording of the first performance
“To do. To do something, to do g…
Perpetual Guest
For a few days at the end of July 2023, I curated a series of concerts and recordings in a few spaces in the historic, now-defunct Kreenholm Textile Factory in Narva, Estonia, a stone's throw from the Russian border. In Kreenholm's reverberant rooms, these sessions reflected on the layers of history, labor, conflict, and lives past and present that have shaped the factory and the constantly re-evolv- ing border city. A large and unexpected part of this project involved the restoration of an anti…
For Jack
For Jack was written in 2024 for pianist Jack Yarbrough. I was inspired by Jack’s many performances of my music; how he approaches my soundworld with a beauty of touch and an attention to pacing. This piece is approximately 50 minutes long and, with a few exceptions, it is extremely quiet and spacious. Many thanks to Jack for asking me to write this piece and for playing it so beautifully.
Jack Yarbrough is a pianist working in the fields of contemporary and experimental music. Largely devoted t…
Ascending Music
The pieces brought together here were assembled as the fruit of collaboration undertaken by Falzone and Evans-Weiler. Instrumentation is the strongly unifying element. The reed organ, once ubiquitous in the private music setting of the home as well as a default practice instrument for organists, is now regarded as something of a relic of the past. However, the instrument continues to afford certain distinct advantages, particularly with regard to dynamic variation by virtue of the player’s direc…
Simultaneous Contrast
After-Image traces composer Lila Meretzky’s exploration of memory, color, and time through chamber, vocal, and electroacoustic works, culminating in luminous studies for strings and percussion inspired by personal and historical narratives.
A lifetime of annotations
Feldman and Tobias Hume (performed by Luciana Elizondo and Guy Vandromme).
Melos
Melos is an ongoing series of site-specific works for organ and electronics. By merging sampled organ tones with sustained chords, it creates evolving, immersive textures unique to each venue. Each piece explores and expands the organ’s expressive limits through electronic means.
Intermissions
Feldman and Tobias Hume (performed by Luciana Elizondo and Guy Vandromme).
Exhaustion / Proliferation
Exhaustion and Proliferation, two pieces created in 2024 by Cyril Bondi and d’incise for the Insub Meta Orchestra, with the help of Ed Williams for the chord choices. Both rely on their ownprinciples, within a reduced esthetic and a guided timeline. While Exhaustion offers to musiciansmultiples choices of paths and interactions, Proliferation plays with the echo; fragments of thepiece being recorded and played-back via smartphones. The IMO's music, developed throughyears of experiences, deals wi…
Dissolution Seedlings
The members of House on Fire met Ben Richter in 2019 while we were all attending CalArts,and as our ambitions as a group grew, we wanted to work with someone who would engagethe latent, unexplored possibilities of our instrumentation. The piece sprawls - musically,temporally, physically. Each movement reconfigures the group around a spare set ofinstruments, in each permutation pulling out new composite sounds. Wells plays cello and bassmelodica simultaneously, Andrew tunes a C# drone, Richard pl…
enclosures
enclosures addresses issues of space, place, reverberation and resonance across five pieces. Anexercise in scale, each piece is a portal: a biome, containing its own environment, weather, sense of time. Featuring juxtaposed convolution reverbs that transport an ensemble through real and imaginary spaces, beatings between Just Intonation and Equal Temperament, a triptych of environmental portraits, an exercise in the musicalized resonance of the harp’s pedal mechanism, and finally, an exploration…
green
green is an album of quiet music for solo piano — music in which the atmosphere isserene, intimate, and elegant, with maximal time for reflection. These works, all by livingcomposers, provide opportunities to slow down in our fast-paced world and focus withina distraction-free environment. Feel less hurried. Suspend time. Appreciate the worldfrom a different perspective.Pianist Ashlee Mack has given recitals in Germany, Italy, Czechia, and across theUnited States. Specializing in contemporary mu…
Weathering
Ryan Seward is a musician, composer, and artist living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His work is situated within and across a number of forms, including composition, improvisation, installation, performance, phonography, photography, sculpture, and videography. Ryan’s work has most recently been performed by TAK ensemble, Filament, and Sam Wells, and his recordings have been released by Editions Glomar, emic rite, Marginal Frequency, and Sawyer Editions. Ryan holds the MA in Music from Wesleyan…
With love
Georgia Denham (b.1997) draws on anecdotal experience to create her music. She studied with Andrew Hamilton at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and now with Richard Causton at the University of Cambridge for her PhD. She lives with her husband, a theoretical computer scientist, and their many beloved plants. “This collection of chamber music from 2018–2022 wakes scores I thought were long since sleeping, where I first learned to write the delicate sounds I loved. With music written during my studi…
Supports & Surfaces
Paolo Griffin is a composer and curator based in Toronto/Tkarón:to whose music has been described as placing “… the listener in a kind of sonic microgravity” (PANM360) and as “…uncompromising and thoroughly engrossing.” (LvT). Paolo’s work involves ongoing research about the sounding and perception of microtonal rational intonation (Just Intonation) combined with a rigorous, process-based approach to sonic form and structure. The work he creates explores the creation of colour/shading/densities …
Ricercari for rainy days
Eden Lonsdale is a composer of acoustic music living and working between London and Berlin. His music focuses on exploring the various ways that movement and stasis can co- exist, as well as the inter-connectedness of harmony, timbre, melody and rhythm. Often using very limited materials, his dense and immersive sound-worlds attempt to draw the ear into the smallest details and hope to inspire the listener’s self-guided exploration into the music’s manifold layers. The three pieces from this alb…
Bodies of Water
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Gran…