*2025 stock* Noam Bierstone’s debut album, Mountains move like clouds, features three works for solo percussionist by composers Hanna Hartman, Pierluigi Billone, and Zeynep Toraman. Each work presents a unique and evocative environment built upon the rich sonic potential of unconventional playing techniques and instruments.

In Message from the Lighthouse, Bierstone assumes the role of an exciter or prober of sounds, drawing out sounds unheard from a flowerpot contraption holding antique stainless steel knives, the granular rub of chamotte bricks, the sticky attacks of congas prepared with double-sided tape, and the low rumble of a bass drum, all deftly integrated into the textured nature of Hartman’s pre-recorded material.

Mani. Δίκη is a physical and creative journey through the sound world of metal, a celebration of the richness and quality of its sonic environments that organically emerge from the manipulation of metal-to-metal contact, the unique shapes and dimensions of the instruments, and the explosive and sometimes volatile effects of movements and velocities.

Toraman’s mountains move like clouds, written for Bierstone in 2019, shifts the ears from being the locator and perceiver of worldly sounds into a place where unworldly sounds are to be found. The work captures fleeting hums, resonances, and noises—the buzzing of snares, the emerging ripples and vibrations of the skin—and feeds them back into the bodies of the instruments. The performer is situated in this self-reflexive, self-feeding universe, in which electronic sounds function both as an uncanny doubling and as a paratext. Musical material occurs and recurs in repetition and in variation: cells make and remake themselves, until they are forgone, but never decomposing.