Ambient / Minimal / Drone
2248 products
06:55 Hatsuhinode
02:39 Agora
03:57 Ostinato
04:59 Hibari
06:55 Maya
04:40 Shizuku
04:07 Niwa
08:04 Tio
Pianist Masako Ohta and trumpet player Matthias Lindermayr are back on Squama with 'Nozomi', the follow-up to their 2022 debut 'MMMMH'. The Japanese title, which translates to ‘hope’, felt fitting, as the album was conceived during a time of personal loss for Ohta, during and after which music proved itself as a beacon of hope. The music on Nozomi unfolds gently, with Lindermayr’s airy tone and lyrical playing being wrapped in Ohta’s chordal backing that moves from tender to tense and back over the course of the album. While most tunes were written by Lindermayr, the only exception being an interpretation of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Hibari’, the arrangements are largely improvised, letting the duo’s intuition guide the course and build the form. Solemn slowness has become a signature trait of the Munich-based duo and it makes listening to their new record a healing retreat from the frantic chatter of the present.
あまりにも嬉しい〈Efficient Space〉からの奇跡のリプレス！オーストラリアに沸く現代ニューエイジの屈指の泉、Andras Fox = Andrew Wilsonが描くやすらぎ盤の第2章...
本作はAndrew "Wilson" 1人だけでなく、Not Not Funからデビューしたヴェイパーウェイヴ & AORの哀愁インスト紳士、あのEleventeen Eston = John "Tanner"とのプロジェクトです! メルボルンとパースの海辺や夕陽、都市の街なみをバックに想い想いのダンスでアンビエントなたけを演奏してきた彼ら。今作はその想い想いな部分が小さく小さく、空気やムードなレベルにまでおだやかに、しかしこれまでになく色濃い境地にまで達してます。Tannerのクラリネット、Wilsonのシンセが舞うA1 "Sun Room"からしてどうしましょう...
グラフィックと音楽が同じ土台でむすびつく、オーストラリアならではのアートワークもすばらしい。Emotional RescueやPalto Flats、Music From Memoryがそうしたように、数十年たっても語り継がれてほしいアンビエントの傑作です。
New "doom ambient" tape from Question Mark on Tax Free.
Seven years after their debut ‘Gulden Onversneden’, Klein Volk once again puts bread on the table with ‘In Weelde Verbrast’, a tribute to the important afterthoughts of everyday life in times of utter seriousness. Amidst the vestiges of things taken for granted, Klein Volk felt the need to take root and delicately tend to their kinds of whim and naïveté - all balanced out in a garden of opportunity, for seasons to come. Klein Volk is Marie Baeke, Timo Bonneure and Wesley Buysse.
SY3 (pronounced ‘sigh’) is a new project from LA-based Chinese-American artists Kelly Guan, Alex Ho, and Phil Cho. The trio started working on music together in 2023 after connecting over a shared love of Hong Kong New Wave cinema, Cantonese pop songs, r&b, and melody-driven dance music. Singer Kelly Guan aka Jia Pet has been independently releasing ‘bubbly’ pop music since 2022, and recently toured with the genre-bending indie artist Sasami. Multi-instrumentalists Ho (keyboards, saxophone) and Cho (guitar, bass) have collaborated frequently over the past decade, most notably on Ho’s 2021 debut album 'Move Through It' for Music From Memory. Lead single ‘Tell Me,’ the track that initially caught the ears of MFM's Jamie Tiller and Tako, nods to the hazy downtempo explored by Chinese pop stars like Faye Wong and Zhou Xun in the ‘00s, while also recalling Japanese producer Yoshinori Sunahara’s iconic album 'Lovebeat'. Beyond musical influences, SY3’s neon-drenched pop songs draw from a cinematic language, particularly y2k-era films like Made in Hong Kong and Suzhou River, which speak to a generation of disillusioned youth in an increasingly fast-paced world. Guan’s lyrics depict characters caught in bittersweet love affairs (‘dial tone, when I’m alone, you promised we’ll be in touch') forever looking towards an escape from their current realities (‘I know the walls are high, these graceless hands are slipping’). Title track ‘梦游 Sleepwalker’ features a Cantonese spoken-word story about a sleepwalking young girl who sits alone on a balcony wondering where she might have gone the night before. The drifting ambient production loosely references a traditional Chinese folk melody, and closes out the EP with a delicate, layered saxophone solo from Ho. Balancing intimacy with a wider emotional and visual language, SY3’s debut unfolds as a series of nocturnal pop vignettes shaped by memory, cinema, and place. Released digitally and on vinyl through Music From Memory on March 25th. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis.
In Osni the Flare, the second chapter of Tristan Allen's mythic trilogy, the composer, producer, and puppeteer follows a mortal’s transformation into deity through the discovery of fire. Recorded over four years using wordless vocals, organs, ocarinas, an arsenal of toy instruments, and intricate sound design, Osni the Flare unfolds the origins of flame and temporality across four acts. Weaving a creation myth that shifts between beauty, shadow, and wistful embers, Allen provides a portal to meticulously crafted, emotionally potent sound and story that echo through a fantastical realm.
The first collaboration between Japanese noise titan Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, iconic Brazilian drummer and producer Iggor Cavalera and forward-thinking Italian guitarist and sound designer Eraldo Bernocchi, 'Nocturnal Rainforest' terraforms a sonic landscape that's almost overpoweringly dense and disorienting, but never aggressive or chaotic. It's a fully immersive experience that re-contextualizes the trio's years of work in extreme experimental music by concentrating on texture, atmosphere and sensory overload. The noise itself is used to provoke a refined level of focus; 'Nocturnal Rainforest' is mediative in its own way, enveloping listeners with waves of distortion, phantasmic unmetered rhythms and perplexing processed field recordings, but it's not intended for passive listening. Made using a fusion of bespoke techniques the trio have been developing for decades, it exists in a raw and mystifying liminal zone between the organic realm and the digital world - a place that's too hauntingly familiar to be ignored. One of the world's most notorious and most prolific noise artists, Akita has release acclaimed genre-defining albums on labels as diverse as Relapse, Important Records, Tzadik, Cold Spring and Soleilmoon, and collaborated with a diverse spread of artists, from Keiji Haino and Mika Patton to Melt-Banana and Boris. Since 1979, he's released over 500 Merzbow records, including 1984's tape experiment 'Pornoise/1kg Vol.1', 1996's noise wall milestone 'Pulse Demon' and 2005's dubby 'Merzbuddha'. Meanwhile, Cavalera is best known for co-founding Brazilian metal act Sepultura, and since leaving the band in 2006, he's been constantly re-examining his relationship with underground experimental music, working alongside artists like Laima Leyton, Ninos Du Brasil, Raven Chacon, Linekraft, Petbrick, Pig Destroyer, Soulwax, Dwid Hellion, Shane Embury, amongst others. Bernocchi started his journey in the '70s playing in various punk bands, and came of age in the '80s when he co-founded post-industrial collective Sigillum S and making connections that stretched across the entire global underground. An active member of the influential illbient movement, he worked with some of the genre's crucial figures such as Spectre, Bill Laswell and DJ Olive, recording for WordSound as well as cult hip-hop imprint Rawkus. And Bernocchi has continued to innovate, working as SIMM with Grammy-winning grime MC Flowdan and recording with Harold Budd, Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie, Gaudi Nils Petter Molvaer, Hoshiko Yamane and many others. 'Nocturnal Rainforest' is a product of each artist's ongoing musical evolution, powered by extreme music but tempered by deep listening techniques that expect presence rather than dissociation. On 'Swietnenia Macrophylla', evocative humid soundscapes provide a precarious sense of security at first, blurred at the edges by purring oscillations that mimic the jungle's fauna. And that peace is quickly ruptured by percussive, foghorn-like distortions that mark out the scale of the trio's vision. Not just raw noise, the rougher elements are cut with subtle waves of billowing ambience and muggy low- end drones before the track launches into a symphony of computerized stutters. There's a constant push and pull between organic and artificial sounds - before there's been time to acclimatize to the DAW-corrupted noise, collaged tape saturations and slashed amplifier hum muddies the atmosphere, purposefully confusing the senses and obfuscating the sources. And the thought is continued on 'Ceiba Pentandra' when the trio follow the jungle's teeming sonics with growling, whirring electronics and dense interference. What starts as birdsong and an choir of insects mutates into a wall of deafening, transcendent full-spectrum texture that cracks open like a slow-moving storm over a shadowy wilderness.
Part of only a small and very much underground music scene in his hometown of Venice, Gigi Masin self released two modestly pressed LP's 'Wind' (1986) and 'Wind Collector' (1991) and appeared along side Charles Hayward for the Sub Rosa compilation LP "Les Nouvelles Musiques De Chambre Volume 2" (1988).
Having met with little commercial success in Italy at the time, Gigi Masin's solo albums remained for the most part totally unknown. His music has though in recent years, and seemingly by pure word of mouth, developed almost something of a cult following.
Gigi Masin's uniquely intricate and at times deeply emotive compositions take the listener into a realm of contemplation, a spellbound mind state where time and space appear to dissolve. His sparse and hypnotic often loop-based compositions seem to draw parallels with Detroit Techno's earliest beginnings, all at once conjuring those same feelings of both melancholic longing and ecstatic joy.
With access to Masin's large body of work, far greater than that of the handful of released recordings, Music From Memory's new compilation covers a period of over 30 years, from the mid 1980's up until recent works . Including seventeen compositions, most of which have remained unreleased or unavailable until now, 'Talk To The Sea' aims to shine a light on Gigi Masin's unique and heartfelt talent. This is electronic music from the soul."
XKatedral in collaboration with La Becque Editions are proud to present a new album release from Stephen O’Malley, co-founder of SUNN O))). This record contains two long-form compositions for pipe organ by Stephen O’Malley, which he performs alongside Kali Malone and Frederikke Hoffmeier.
The album was recorded on Les Grandes Orgues (Scherrer (1777), Walker (1867), Kuhn (1995)) at Église Saint-François, Lausanne, Switzerland, on Christmas 2021, initially composed by Stephen within a suite titled Les Sphères (effondrez-les) Phases I-V, for a collaboration with Belgian/Swiss choreographer Cindy Van Acker.
Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone and experimental music groups for over two decades – SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate being among his best-known creations. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity and multidisciplinary interests. It includes collaborations with a wide range of experimental artists, including Scott Walker, Kali Malone, Alvin Lucier, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, the authors Dennis Cooper and Alan Moore, Peter Rehberg, Fujiko Nakaya, Jim Jarmusch, Johan Johansson, experimental music research centers IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), EMS (Stockholm) and many others. O’Malley is also a vigorous live performer and has toured around the world since 2000. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism – sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.
The second beautiful album by the duo of Jessika Kenney — a vocalist known for her haunting timbral sense, as well as her profound interpretation of Persian vocal traditions, and Eyvind Kang — a violist for whom the act of music and learning is a spiritual discipline.
""Work of delicate beauty, as pristine as the surface of a lake at dawn on a summer's morning." —TheQuietus
"ujung jari balung rondhoning kelapa wineng kuwa sayekti dadya usada
The slender inner spine of the coconut leaf Binding together, becoming useful
The compositions on this album are about drawing the binary from the unary, like reflections from a mirror, and its inverse, the concealed unity. Listener/reader, translation/composition, memory/imagination- reflecting each other, they open up a current which flows in a sudden oscillation.
Here we have followed a geological image; in the expression of the face of the earth (from Pr. "rokh-e khåk"), a new spectrum of binaries is revealed. In the Classical Persian traditions, this can be found in the dynamic multiplicity exemplified by the term 'radif', used in both poetry and music, as both poeme and matheme.
We would invite the listener as reader, by making our "reading cards" in the insert, to become a participant in the creation of meaning, including translation processes which seek corresponding musical atmospheres, for example:
The Central Javanese Wangsalan is a kind of riddle(two lines, 12 syllables each, divided 4 and 8), sung by the female vocalist in the gamelan, often using images of natural phenomena alongside descriptions of human characteristics, invoking atmospheres of primordial knowledge, humor, heightened sensation, philosophy, with much hidden wordplay and reference.
Emily A. Sprague’s Cloud Time is an improvised ambient document of her long-awaited debut tour of Japan, recorded in autumn 2024. Compiled from over eight hours of live material captured in venues across the country, the album reflects a dialogue between performer, place, and moment, presented with no additional mixing and only minimal edits. Originally conceived as a journey rather than a traditional concert tour, Sprague approached each performance as an open exchange with her surroundings, redesigning her live setup to allow for real-time responsiveness and spontaneity. The result is a series of distinct, site-specific sound pieces shaped by intuition and environmental influence. Rather than follow a chronological order, the seven long-form tracks are sequenced to convey a narrative flow that mirrors the emotional arc of a full live set. Tracks like ‘Nagoya’, ‘Tokyo 1’, and the ten-minute ‘Matsumoto’ gently pulse with layered synthesis, embodying an ambient mode rooted in the ethos of kankyō ongaku and deep listening traditions. Cloud Time invites listeners into a reflective space where sound becomes a means of connection, stillness, and surrender—an offering from Sprague’s deeply personal and healing encounter with time, place, and presence.
Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jóhannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets—Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavík) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)—processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings.
“Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance—of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over its duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down—it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Jóhann Jóhannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening… but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother’s medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world—and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Jóhann’s death also kept making itself apparent.
For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Jóhann Jóhannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure—and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Jóhannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Jóhann’s music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Jóhann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.
The disappearing elegies of Afterlife Requiem are not so much music as they are the remains of music. In this way I always work towards the subtraction of meaning. The music is distant and smeared, damaged, ghost-like and haunted, only hinting like a half-forgotten memory of what once existed; a condensed depiction of decay and erasure. I have underlaid the whole of this new piece, from beginning to end, with these disembodied silences from Jóhann’s own work, space, and time. Now gone forever, his recorded silence remains; a monumental vacancy lost to the world. Throughout the piece, and especially in the ‘Memorial Environment’ sections, I also incorporate countless natural-world sounds, everything from volcanic lava to freight elevators to human blood flow to turbine hiss to suicide injections.
Artist Robert Smithson said decades ago: ‘It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found’. For me, this music also measures how time runs out. In fact, time already has run out. Eternity has already begun.”
– Matthew Patton (Those Who Walk Away)
Gak Sato & Tadahiko Yokogawa — RENGA. Inspired by the Japanese poetic form of linked verses, this 10-track journey spans ambient, jazz, breakbeats, electronica, environmental music, techno, cinematic, library music, musique concrète and somewhere in between, with artwork by Aoi Huber Kono. Limited Edition.
CD + text book featuring cellist Yuki Nakagawa, who has participated in the Duo project “KAKUHAN” with Koshiro Hino (goat, YPY) and the album “The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise” by the Australian unit “CS+Kreme”, featuring his cello and acoustic performance with a bow (a.k.a. Bach bow) that he made himself.
At the end of June 2025, the Krakow-based label Instant Classic will release the album "Bura" by Raphael Rogiński and the group Ružičniak Tajni, which includes Serbian artists: Svetlana Spajić, Marina Džukljev and Tijana Golubović. The album also features guest appearances by Piotr Zabrodzki (LXMP, Mitch & Mitch) and Mila Gavrilovič. Ružičniak Tajni is a unique meeting of Polish and Serbian musical traditions, the result of cooperation between artists seeking new forms of expression based on the cultural heritage of Central and Eastern Europe. The initiator of the project is Raphael Rogiński - a Polish guitarist, composer and researcher, known for his experimental approach to traditional music and his love of improvisation. In the project, he is accompanied by three outstanding Serbian artists whose work is a conscious combination of local traditions and modern expression: Svetlana Spajić – a renowned ethnomusicologist and singer, specializing in old vocal techniques and archaic song forms. Her interpretations combine authenticity of message with sensitivity to the contemporary context. Marina Džukljev – a pianist moving in the area of improvised and experimental music, known for deconstructing harmonic and rhythmic structures. Tijana Golubović – a violinist and vocalist, drawing from folk performance practice, while simultaneously exploring new sonic narratives. Their collaboration resulted in the album “Bura”, recorded in Serbia in November 2024. The title refers to the characteristic wind from the northern Balkans, symbolizing both the forces of nature and the cultural tensions shaping the identity of the region. The album is a musical encounter of traditional Serbian songs – reconstructed on the basis of oral traditions and archival materials – with modern means of expression. Another key element are Raphael Rogiński’s original compositions, inspired by Sufi poetry, which was translated into Serbian in the 19th century. The sound layer of the project is based on the dynamic interaction of voice, stringed instruments and piano. Spajić brings the depth of archaic vocal techniques, Golubović combines the violin idiom with the vocal one, Džukljev creates complex harmonic structures, and Rogiński transforms the guitar tradition, enriching it with microtonality and modality. The Ružičniak Tajni concert tour will take place in May and June 2025, covering five Serbian cities. The inaugural concert is scheduled for May 16 in Belgrade. The project was created with the support of the Polish Institute in Belgrade. The concert tour is carried out in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the cultural programme accompanying the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2025.
At the end of June 2025, the Krakow-based label Instant Classic will release the album "Bura" by Raphael Rogiński and the group Ružičniak Tajni, which includes Serbian artists: Svetlana Spajić, Marina Džukljev and Tijana Golubović. The album also features guest appearances by Piotr Zabrodzki (LXMP, Mitch & Mitch) and Mila Gavrilovič. Ružičniak Tajni is a unique meeting of Polish and Serbian musical traditions, the result of cooperation between artists seeking new forms of expression based on the cultural heritage of Central and Eastern Europe. The initiator of the project is Raphael Rogiński - a Polish guitarist, composer and researcher, known for his experimental approach to traditional music and his love of improvisation. In the project, he is accompanied by three outstanding Serbian artists whose work is a conscious combination of local traditions and modern expression: Svetlana Spajić – a renowned ethnomusicologist and singer, specializing in old vocal techniques and archaic song forms. Her interpretations combine authenticity of message with sensitivity to the contemporary context. Marina Džukljev – a pianist moving in the area of improvised and experimental music, known for deconstructing harmonic and rhythmic structures. Tijana Golubović – a violinist and vocalist, drawing from folk performance practice, while simultaneously exploring new sonic narratives. Their collaboration resulted in the album “Bura”, recorded in Serbia in November 2024. The title refers to the characteristic wind from the northern Balkans, symbolizing both the forces of nature and the cultural tensions shaping the identity of the region. The album is a musical encounter of traditional Serbian songs – reconstructed on the basis of oral traditions and archival materials – with modern means of expression. Another key element are Raphael Rogiński’s original compositions, inspired by Sufi poetry, which was translated into Serbian in the 19th century. The sound layer of the project is based on the dynamic interaction of voice, stringed instruments and piano. Spajić brings the depth of archaic vocal techniques, Golubović combines the violin idiom with the vocal one, Džukljev creates complex harmonic structures, and Rogiński transforms the guitar tradition, enriching it with microtonality and modality. The Ružičniak Tajni concert tour will take place in May and June 2025, covering five Serbian cities. The inaugural concert is scheduled for May 16 in Belgrade. The project was created with the support of the Polish Institute in Belgrade. The concert tour is carried out in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the cultural programme accompanying the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2025.
5-CD box set presenting virtually all of Morton Feldman'smusic for solo piano. Performed by Philip Thomas, who also writes a 52-page booklet that is included in the box (and a pdf of the booklet is included with download sales)
Artwork by David Ainley
Morton Feldman's three long pieces for flute, piano and percussion, played by the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys & George Barton) with Taylor MacLennan on flutes. Why Patterns? (1979) 30 minutes, Crippled Symmetry (1982) 90 minutes and For Philip Guston (1984) 280 minutes.
"The works contained in this box set occupy a special place within the context of Morton Feldman’s oeuvre, written as they were for Feldman’s ‘house ensemble’ at the University of Buffalo from the late 1970s onwards: Morton Feldman and Soloists. Flutes, piano/celesta and percussion is an idiosyncratic combination of instruments that Feldman came ultimately to favour. Indeed of Why Patterns? he said in 1983 “I never dreamt to write one of my most important pieces with that combination”; but in his last decade Feldman wrote multiple chamber works for identical forces only twice: the two string quartets, and the three trios presented here.
What a contrast – where the string quartet offers an abundance of woody timbres, this ensemble is glacial, dominated by simple, almost sine-tone-like sonorities. Percussion could be anything, but the pure metallic sounds of the vibraphone and glockenspiel dominate, with tubular bells and marimba introduced in Guston but rarely used. The ensemble seems almost an embodiment of Feldman’s spectacular statement from 1984’s The Future of Local Music “I’m not interested in colour”.
Yet in exploring the timbral etiolation this unusual trio affords, Feldman discovers an unexpected world of delicate tinctures where harmony and colour interact and become almost indistinguishable. Notably, immediately after stating “I’m not interested in colour,” Feldman continues by remarking on Schoenberg’s observations about the interaction between pitch and timbre: “he says that timbre is the prince of the domain, that the resulting timbre is to some degree more important than the pitch itself, as we think of pitch. That’s a very important idea.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that this ensemble, with its uniquely refined timbral combination, held the role of crucible for Feldman’s important compositional ideas in the transition into his fully-fledged late period.
For Philip Guston: The close friendship between Morton Feldman and the painter Philip Guston collapsed in 1970, an estrangement that would endure until the painter’s death in 1980. Four years later Feldman would dedicate this contemplative epic to his late friend and to their lost friendship; a work that conjures an emotionally complex world of hazy perceptions and hazier reflections.
As the hushed tones of piano, flutes, celeste and metallic percussion cluster in complex soft-focus rhythms, at some points cohering around snatches of melody, at others scattering to explore seemingly unrelated ideas, Feldman explores the limits of memory and half-recollection – traversing and re-traversing the same terrain, but with deceptively sure tread leading the listener towards a poignant, perhaps devastating, conclusion."
Young Anglo-German composer Eden Lonsdale returns to Another Timbre with this startling double-album, writing immersive, long-form experiments that question instrumentation, space and harmony in collaboration with Apartment House, Oerkal and Ensemble Ipse. RIYL Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman or Gavin Bryars.
There's a softly-spoken quality to Lonsdale's compositions that we identified immediately when we copped his brilliant debut, 'Clear and Hazy Moons', last year. He pares his sound back even further on 'Dawnings', that's conceptually rooted in its three string pieces: 'Aura' (for solo cello), 'Cloud Symmetries' (for four violins) and 'Shedding' (for seven violas). Each piece is minimal in its own way, but pushes the instrumentation to its limits by extending the harmonic versatility; 'Aurora', for example, is performed by (and written especially for) Anton Lukoszevieze and uses an experimental technique for a cello tuned in just intonation, where the player can extract resonant chordal sounds just by varying the pressure in their left hand. And for a solo piece it's strikingly rich, even when compared with the ensemble pieces, its fictile, scraped moans splitting the difference between archaic Northern European folk and intimate chamber music.
Lonsdale's motions are clearer though on 'Shedding', a collaboration with Brooklyn's Ensemble Ipse that queers a simple three note melody with microtonal alterations that create justly tuned intervals. It's clever stuff on a formal level, and to our ears just works so beautifully, widening the aspect ratio and deepening the sense of longing with its poignant, gentle phrasing and obscured harmonics. Lonsdale intersperses the string pieces with more varied orchestrations: 'Dawnings' (for clarinet and piano), and 'Constellations' (for organ, with flute, clarinet, percussion and strings). The latter is particularly startling; Lonsdale imagined the composition as a spacialized installation of sorts, with the players scattered in small groups around the venue. Even in stereo, the concept comes to live as he layers the various sounds, using the organ's powerful tones to anchor the additional instruments as they overlap and create distinct tonal clouds.
It's a magical listening experience, honestly - one that shows Lonsdale's full range as a composer and has our heads spinning. Quite how he manages to balance the drama and restraint without sounding repetitive or schmaltzy is a genuine achievement, it's music that prioritizes texture and space, but still sounds harmonically captivating.
A defiant new recording of one of Morton Feldman's most disarming compositions, Apartment House's 'Violin and String Quartet' captures the icy character of the instruments, melting time into fuzzed memory. When Feldman began producing durational works in the late 1970s, he managed to confound even his most dedicated friends and followers. Steve Reich famously lost touch with his cohort during this period, later regretting it when he gave the compositions time to sink in - he eventually conceded that 1985's 'Piano and String Quartet' was "the most beautiful work of his that I know." 'Violin and String Quartet' was written the same year, only two years before Feldman died, and evolves slowly, lasting two and a quarter hours. This fresh interpretation from Apartment House is different from previous recordings, close-miking each instrument to emphasize the tiny variations in sound: the little earthquakes that lend drama to the composition's watery flow. One of Feldman's prettiest pieces, it's aptly elevated by Apartment House's refined technique. If you heard the ensemble's rendition of 'Piano and String Quartet' from 2021, 'Violin and String Quartet' is a worthy follow-up. Their expertise with NYC minimalism is well documented at this point, and feeds into the effortlessness they exude while soldiering through the piece's duration. Billowing clouds of harmony replace any expected "vocal" themes, and the piece hangs in the air, reshaping time rather than commanding attention. Apartment House use microscopic magnification to help us perceive Feldman's original vision; the composer was obsessed with natural reverb and the physical decay of his instrumentation, and gave the composition plenty of negative space for these elements to bleed into the foreground. Here, Apartment House treat the pauses with reverence, leaving the echoes and traces to imprint themselves into the recording. Melodies and phrases twist into bubbling whirlpools of bowed fluctuations that appear and reappear throughout the piece, rhyming with previous segments and creating disarming pockets of sonic deja vu. Feldman asks us to reconsider the act of listening, lulling us into an elevated state. Apartment House give us the experience of hearing the music as if in the same room, concentrating on the bows on the strings and how they interact with the environment. It's a form of meditation that requires focus, but also an ability to release yourself from temporal concerns for a couple of hours - right now, that's never been more important.
Two Pianos and Other Pieces 1953-1969 collects the most experimental and beautiful works for multiple pianos from Morton Feldman’s formative years, exhuming scores rarely captured before - including “Two Pianos,” “Piece for Four Pianos,” “Piano Four Hands,” “Piano Three Hands,” and “Two Pieces for Three Pianos.” Led by pianists John Tilbury and Philip Thomas, the ensemble expands with strings, brass, and percussion, depending on the piece. This collection shines during passages of radical quietness, microscopic shifts in texture, and dramatically suspended time - hallmarks of Feldman’s search for an elastic music both shorn of narrative and dense in acoustic intrigue. Each piano work in the set privileges the instrument’s decay, color, and afterlife, using soft dynamics and open textures to lead performers into a phenomenological engagement, “as much about listening as playing.” Notes hover in limpid suspension; chords and clusters bloom and vanish in reverberant spaces. Feldman’s notational experiments with time - free durations, coordinated ensemble decay, unorthodox alignments - led him to invent forms where narrative is replaced by attention and depth is measured in the smallest changes of sound. Quietness is essential, but not the subject: the focus is on what sound does in space, how it transforms under touch, and how ensemble musicianship can dissolve boundaries between performer, score, and environment. The album stands as an essential addition to Feldman’s recorded legacy - a chamber adventure where collective listening, spectral nuance, and compositional radicalism shape every gesture. The performances are supremely sensitive, satisfying Feldman’s still-radical aims with restraint, clarity, and palpable intimacy. In these pieces, piano music reaches its apotheosis as exploration - of instrument, ensemble, and the outermost edge of musical time.