Another Timbre Special
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…
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…
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…
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…
Muto Infinitas
In Muto Infinitas, Catherine Lamb extends her distinctive approach to microtonality and just intonation, crafting a forty-minute dialogue for quartertone bass flute and double bass performed by Rebecca Lane and Jon Heilbron. The recording, realized without electronic alteration, invites deep listening, unspooling at an unhurried pace in a luminous acoustic field. Lamb’s music here is uncompromising in its patience: the two musicians linger in the borderlands of pitch and timbre, carving out a sp…
Early To Late
Early to Late presents an inspired commission for Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey, inviting each to compose for Ensemble Grizzana using the same brief: build a new work from Renaissance fragments. Granberg’s “How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights?” draws on William Byrd’s choral music, transforming melodic kernels into shimmering, spectral textures. Ensemble voices - celesta, glass harp, dulcimer, violin, winds - float through cycles of open-form improvisation and carefully weighted silence. The res…
Jankélévitch Sextets
Jankélévitch Sextets brings together Antoine Beuger’s reductionist poetics and the responsive intelligence of Apartment House, resulting in a recording defined less by overt drama than by its expansive sense of space and attentive musicianship. Over the span of sixty-four minutes, Beuger crafts a patient tapestry for violin, viola, double bass, bassoon, bass clarinet, and accordion. Each instrument enters as if in dialogue, their lines arising not from thematic contrast but from a shared willing…
Parallel Words
With Parallel Words, Eventless Plot compose as a true collective, crafting an album that drifts at the intersection of chamber music, electroacoustic experimentation, and subtle jazz inflections. The trio - Vasilis Liolios, Aris Giatas, and Yiannis Tsirikoglou - devise sound worlds marked by contradiction and hybridity. Across the album’s three substantial tracks, instrumental timbres and electronics run alongside each other, oscillating between a sense of tranquil detachment and mounting intens…
The Boundaries of Intimacy
British composer Frank Denyer presents seven beautiful chamber works dating from 1974 to 2018, opening a door to his unique soundworld. Released by Another Timbre in November 2019, The Boundaries of Intimacy features sublime, unexpected pieces of delicate intimacy performed by a variety of artists including Luna String Quartet, Juliet Fraser, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenberg and Nobutaka Yoshizawa.
"Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listeni…
During a Lifetime
During a Lifetime stands as a portrait of Toronto-born, Berlin-based composer Chiyoko Szlavnics, commissioning three major pieces: “During a Lifetime” (2015), “Freehand Poitras” (2008), and “Reservoir” (2006). Szlavnics’s music is marked by tender asceticism and an immersive approach to process - her scores privilege long sustained notes, slow pitch glissandi, and luminous combinations of sinewaves with wind and string ensembles.
The title piece features Konus Quartett (four saxophones) entwined…
Places and Pages
Places and Pages gathers fifty text scores from Ryoko Akama, performed by an ensemble comprising Akama herself, Cristian Alvear, Cyril Bondi, D’incise, Stefan Thut, and Christian Müller. Each miniature acts as a sonic experiment - many lasting under a minute, some stretching further - where single instructions (“strike one page,” “listen to the laces slowing down,” “roll a ball until it stops”) yield fragile, ephemeral performances. The project, realized in Switzerland, embraces open instrumenta…
Dethick
In Dethick, three singular voices - Angharad Davies (violin), Rie Nakajima (sound objects), and Alice Purton (cello) - trace the edges of collective improvisation and material inquiry. The project began from a shared fascination with resonance: how certain preparations and actions could invigorate stringed instruments and inanimate objects alike, blurring the distinction between music, sound art, and noise. Each musician brings a distinct lexicon - Davies known for extracting spectral sonorities…
H
H documents the intersection of Japanese composer Taku Sugimoto and Chilean guitarist Cristián Alvear, realized in an unassuming but luminous live performance. Originally written for Sugimoto’s duo project ‘Songs’ with Minami Saeki, the piece was rearranged for two guitars when Sugimoto and Alvear came together in Tokyo. The composition’s title signals its creator’s ongoing departure from elaborate naming conventions - only single letters, roman numerals, or numbers. For H, this stripped-down fo…
Temperament as Waveform
Temperament as Waveform is a transatlantic exchange in process and poetics. Between 2010 and 2012, UK-based sound artist Lee Patterson and Austin’s Vanessa Rossetto traded recordings, objects, and digital files by post - each response reshaping and folding the other's sonic worlds. The album merges four wide-ranging improvisational/concrète works, each combining manipulated field recordings with amplified objects, cassette fragments, instrumental events, and filtered signal noise.
Opener “Every…
Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two
Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two features three rarely encountered works by John Cage, interpreted by Apartment House. The album brings together the sparse, spatial interplay of “Two”, the poised transformations of “Thoreau Drawings”, and the hypnotic, layered repetitions of “Hymnkus” in performances marked by clarity, restraint, and ensemble sensitivity.
Echo Stane
Nine solos for Hardanger fiddle that trace a fascinating journey between tradition and experimentation, composed and performed by Sarah-Jane Summers, a virtuosic Scottish musician based in Norway. With Echo Stane, Summers employs the Hardanger fiddle – the national instrument of her adopted country – as a bridge across the North Sea, connecting the musical heritage of the Scottish Highlands with Norwegian folk traditions while pushing both toward the avant-garde.
Summers grew up in rural Inverne…
Things that Happen Again
Things that Happen Again offers a panoramic entry point into the lucid, evolving world of Paul Newland. Recorded by Apartment House at Goldsmiths in 2023, the album presents compositions written across a fourteen-year span. The title alludes to Newland’s fascination with recurrence and reworking - tracks such as “Difference is Everywhere (altered again)” or “Things That Happen Again (again)” are not only marked by repetition but by acts of subtle reinvention, echoing Newland's habit of dismantli…
shades
Boston-based composer Nomi Epstein makes her debut on Another Timbre with this portrait album featuring three chamber works composed between 2011 and 2023. Influenced by the New York School, Fluxus, Pauline Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, and the Wandelweiser collective, Epstein has developed a distinctive compositional voice centered on sonic fragility and textural subtlety.
The album opens with the title piece shades, a 20-minute string quartet written specifically for Apartment House in 2023. T…