Chattering Birds is a compact, carefully chosen selection of recent music for percussion, played by Leonie Klein, partly alone and partly in duo with Isao Nakamura as the ISANIE Percussion Duo. Seven works by seven composers range from a drum concerto reduced to one player to a piece for finger cymbals alone, and all but one are first recordings.

Klein plays the four solo works and arranged two of them herself for a single performer. Nakamura, born in Osaka in 1958, studied at the University of the Arts in Tokyo and at the Freiburg University of Music. Composers including Toshio Hosokawa, Klaus Huber, Péter Eötvös and Dai Fujikura have written works for him. The album is a co-production with Südwestrundfunk, SWR2, with the support of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg and the Dwight und Ursula Mamlok-Stiftung.

Klein plays her own solo version of Eötvös's percussion concerto Speaking Drums, four poems for percussion and orchestra, with the performer's voice joining the drums. In Vinko Globokar's Dialog über Erde the instruments are exposed to water, down to a small aquarium, in a subtle, elemental event. In Sara Glojnarić's Latitudes #2 the drumset enters a fierce duel with artificial rhythmic impulses on tape. Fujikura's title piece, for two percussionists, shows how much music is possible when the means are reduced to finger cymbals. Ursula Mamlok's Variations and Interludes, originally for four percussionists and again arranged by Klein for one, lets the form emerge between the groups of instruments.

The duo closes the album with two more works. Hosokawa's Windscapes plays vertical accented strokes against horizontal sweeping and scratching sounds. Uroš Rojko's Ritem kože (The Rhythm of Skin), after many changes of perspective, is a homogeneous virtuoso conclusion. The label opens the album with the observation that percussion, long at home in jazz and rock, is proving ever more suited to new music. The programme makes the case through variety: voice and drums, water, tape, tiny cymbals and skins.

CD, Wergo WER 7403 2, released in 2023, total time 74'08". All works except Dialog über Erde are first recordings.