MUSIC

John McGuire's Double String Trios presents three major late works for two string trios, composed between 2012 and 2021. His musical roots lie in the electronic studios of postwar Cologne, shaped through studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Krzysztof Penderecki, and grounded in the traditions of European serialism. Working with synthesizers capable of generating up to 1,800 pulses per second, McGuire developed a beautifully harmonious, crystalline music, shaped by the ear into a world of flowing continuities between one point and the next. Transferred to stringed instruments, that world becomes infinitely more complex-suffused with the richness and impurities of human players and their acoustic technologies. Conceived as two facing string trios in antiphonal dialogue, the music links studio spatial thinking with older split-ensemble traditions, unfolding through Fibonacci proportions, rotating tempi, shifting meters, and continual harmonic transposition.

Acclaimed Californian harpist Nailah Hunter unites with debuting theremin player Alia Mohamed for a hauntingly minimalist performance of Harold Budd's "The Pavilion of Dreams". The rendition concept was initially conceived and performed by the two musicians for the Nov 3rd 2024 edition of Leaving Records' seminal outdoor community concert series Listen to Music Outside in the Daylight Under a Tree in Los Angeles California. Nailah Hunter writes: "It was such a blissful experience getting to play in the golden light of the park that afternoon with Alia. We’d been exploring this piece together for a few years prior to the performance. The uniquely curious and misty quality of the piece is what initially drew me in and the bold and imaginative changes voiced in the harp part are what kept me coming back for more. It felt euphoric to finally get to share our sonic vision with folks we knew already appreciated the original work."

Acclaimed Californian harpist Nailah Hunter unites with debuting theremin player Alia Mohamed for a hauntingly minimalist performance of Harold Budd's "The Pavilion of Dreams". The rendition concept was initially conceived and performed by the two musicians for the Nov 3rd 2024 edition of Leaving Records' seminal outdoor community concert series Listen to Music Outside in the Daylight Under a Tree in Los Angeles California. Nailah Hunter writes: "It was such a blissful experience getting to play in the golden light of the park that afternoon with Alia. We’d been exploring this piece together for a few years prior to the performance. The uniquely curious and misty quality of the piece is what initially drew me in and the bold and imaginative changes voiced in the harp part are what kept me coming back for more. It felt euphoric to finally get to share our sonic vision with folks we knew already appreciated the original work."

Point/Wave represents a rare confluence of precision and open inquiry, as Catherine Lamb’s composition for Cristián Alvear translates the enigmatic condition of sound into tactile experience. Commissioned by Alvear and realized on Another Timbre, Lamb’s score meditates on her signature just intonation, deploying the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer to generate four environmental chords that breathe around the guitar’s modally tuned strings. The electronics hum and fade - reflecting timbral shifts from the ambient world even as their cycles remain unpredictable to the performer. What takes shape is both spectral and grounded. Lamb’s deliberate exclusion of fifth-based harmonics yields a palette unrecognizable to most ears: intervals built from the 3rd, 7th, 11th, and 31st harmonics inhabit the margins of conventional tonality, producing subtle microtonal undulations. The guitar, tuned to ratios outside standard temperaments, carves out harmonies less from assertion than from emergence, as each elongated cycle hints at an absent fundamental, which may manifest only in the mind of the listener. The score directs Alvear through open-string harmonics and sparse fretted notes, creating a microtonal lattice whose contours morph subtly with every gesture. Interaction with the electronics - sometimes sourced from processed field recordings - ensures that each performance is unique, anchored in dialogue with the environment. The result is a form Lamb calls “the long introduction,” reminiscent of alap in Indian classical music, yet in Point/Wave, there is no destination - only continuous unfolding. Produced by Giacomo Fiore and Lanier Sammons in a San Francisco studio, the recording prioritizes live interaction, using amplifiers to really make the electronics vibrate in space. Listeners are drawn into a quietly radical exploration: time dilates, the ear adjusts, and focus deepens as acoustic detail and ambient drift intermingle. Point/Wave stands thus as a testament to Lamb and Alvear’s devotion to the possibility that, as form recedes from necessity, attention alone can become an instrument of transformation.

Gondwana Records is pleased to announce ‘Interlude’, the second album from Estonian-born, London-based composer and pianist Hanakiv. Showcasing an expanded sound, the compositions trace a journey of overcoming the past, unfolding into a seductively unconventional style imbued with hope and a therapeutic quality. Existing in a liminal space between genres, Interlude , the second album from composer, pianist and now singer Hanakiv is as mysterious as it’s seductively unconventional, with piano, often prepared, only one of its elements, both analogue and electronic. First inspired by “those crystallised moments where time almost stands still, pain hasn’t yet fully set in, and happiness is still just a glimpse,” it provides, all the same, “a sense of hope that standing still is part of living.” Interlude’s range is further intimated by its contributors, including Portico Quartet’s Milo Fitzpatrick, who, as well as playing double bass throughout, co-wrote the refreshed long-term live favourite, ‘Intro’, and the eloquent closer, Stillness’. Also present are saxophonist Pille-Rite Rei, cellist Joanna Gutowska, violinist Gabriel Green, and PIKE on drums, helping capture the instances Hanakiv calls “in-betweens”. Unpredictable, unfathomable, candid and carefree, Interlude embodies flaws embraced as well as senses regained. This record is a product of creative and personal revelation, earned only when one’s true self.

J.P.A. Falzone and Morgan Evans-Weiler have been working together since 2016 in the famous ensemble "Ordinary Affects" of the Weindelweiser school. A 2-CD set containing the feature films composed individually by each is released from the famous place ! In January 19 at the Wesleyan University Memorial Chapel at the Liberal Arts University in Middletown, Connecticut, by Luke Damrosch, who is known for engineering works around Van der Weiser and co-writing with Alan Sondheim and José James. A recorded work. Both the string drone minimalist Morgan Evans-Weiler side, which accelerates isolation in the void, the melancholy piano and violin, and the JPA Falzone side, where the pointillistic sound of the vibraphone gives off a dull beauty. A very enigmatic chamber music work that makes you feel even the taste of Japanese loneliness while suppressing the number of sounds. It's ridiculously wonderful!

Viola Torros is more than a historical reference - it is an ongoing collaboration between Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang, centered around the research, arrangement, and interpretation of fragments attributed to the mysterious composer Viola Torros. While the project suggests an archaeological recovery of lost medieval works filtered through Arabic, Byzantine, and Indian modal traditions, the underlying narrative is a playful fiction - Torros herself appears to be a fictional construct, allowing Lamb and Chang to chart their own creative lineage and methodology. The first disc showcases intricate viola duets, blending drone-infused textures and sparse melodic snippets. These “augmentations” are designed to evoke the feeling of ancient music without directly imitating historic forms. Lamb and Chang’s approach is analytical but open-hearted: they highlight the simultaneous existence of cohabiting tones, shifts in intonation, and the delicate emergence of melody from within constrained harmonic frameworks. Supporting musicians - including Bryan Eubanks, Rebecca Lane, Annie Garlid, and others - add subtle color via electronics and voice, dissolving the boundary between composition and arrangement. The second disc steps into contemporary territory: Johnny Chang’s “Citaric Melodies III” is performed by Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, an octet that blends winds and strings in a gentle network of sustained tension and release. Catherine Lamb’s “Prisma Interius VI for v.t.” completes the set with an immersive harmonic field shaped by her secondary rainbow synthesizer, cello, and layered viola resonance. Throughout the project, Lamb and Chang’s capacity for patience and depth comes to the fore. Their music is slow-moving but never static, alive to the spectral richness of just intonation and the performative possibilities of friction, resonance, and shared listening. By inventing and inhabiting the world of Viola Torros, they offer a model for reconstructing musical heritage - one that values poetic intuition over scholarly certainty and uses creative fiction to generate genuinely new musical experience.

Bach's 3 Sonatas for Solo Violin, arranged by Marc Sabat for two violins using Just Intonation tunings, together with three short introductory pieces by Marc Sabat.

"Ever since I first played solo Bach on my violin, I've been fascinated by how changing colours of differently tuned harmonic intervals shape and transform the music. In my compositions I make music using intervals found amongst the natural harmonic partials, an approach sometimes called just or rational intonation (JI). These are sounds that can be accurately played by ear, by carefully listening to how very small differences of pitch create beating, resonance, fusion, and reinforce combination tones. These subtle psychoacoustic interactions are at the heart of experiencing harmony, which is what my work is about.

As I came to work this way, I was curious if the approach I use in my own compositions could also be applied to Bach in a strict way, by composing the fine shadings of intonation according to JI intervals. Over the past 25 years, I kept coming back to this work, but it was the ongoing collaboration with Sara Cubarsi, beginning with a first meeting in Cat Lamb's studio in Berlin a decade ago, that led me to write and us to record the realisation documented on this disc.

I have added a second violin part to Bach's solo violin sonatas, music that began as sustained harmonic drones on mostly open strings and harmonics, but which gradually evolved into a kind of personal take on harmonic counterpoint, and became a gentle conversation between my own music and Bach's, finding my way by ear. It was very inspiring to collaborate with a composer who invented so many ways of exploring harmony, and to revisit the old question whether music that moves freely through many tonal regions needs a "well tempered tuning", or if it can also work in a microtonal re-interpretation using many different shadings of pitch.

Each of the three Bach "tunings" are preceded by a short prelude from my cycle "Streams barely in winter" (2019). These miniatures focus on particular intonations of the piece to follow." (Marc Sabat, May 2025)

Bryn Harrison writes music that deliberately disorients. The British composer—obsessed with "time, memory, and cyclic structures"—follows Feldman's lead, creating perceptual labyrinths where past bleeds into present and nothing stays quite where you expect. Towards a slowing of the past, a 45-minute tour de force for two pianos and electronics, achieves disorientation through sheer density: a whirlwind of notes that somehow maintains "delicacy and deftness of touch."

Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick—both veterans of Harrison's intricate demands—navigate this terrain with staggering precision. The piece descends inexorably, dropping two octaves over its duration while decelerating to half its original tempo. Pre-recorded electronic sounds (originally conceived as live electronics) run backwards, pitch-shifted and speed-adjusted, evoking what Harrison calls "feelings of immobility, redundancy or even complete stasis." Midway through, everything halts: a two-minute sustained chord in the electronics, a startling caesura that "changes everything while changing nothing save perception."

Marc Medwin, writing for Dusted Magazine, compares it to Radigue's droning palimpsests or Schoenberg's third orchestral piece: "The music teems with sonic undercurrent in a superficially static frame." Each note, he observes, is "suffused with color, each sonority a frequency kaleidoscope." Off Shelf notes how the music "hits different on each listen—and sometimes doesn't hit at all," making more sense as you sit with it, "much like the emotions it conveys."

Harrison explains his title's seeming contradiction: "Music is well placed to create distortions of memory or to confuse our sense of presentness, pastness and futurity. I particularly like titles that contain a sense of contradiction or impossibility." The work demands what Medwin calls "the encapsulation of concentric occurrence framing and framed by the static multidirectionality of memoried experience."

Knoop and Chadwick spent years preparing. "With a work like this, the devil's in the detail," Harrison notes. "The writing is highly textual and requires clarity and precision and a special kind of touch." They devised strategies for accented grace notes—gauging stress and emphasis across registers—and slightly off-kilter rhythms. The result, recorded at St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, is what Another Timbre calls "extraordinary, virtuosic work"—music like "being caught up in a whirlwind, swirled round and round."

Medwin's conclusion: "The best way to come to terms with it all is to listen again."

Catherine Lamb captivates with three works for voice and strings, ascetically focussed on timbral thizz and overtones with minimalist but radiant results. Lamb is a noted composer and has collaborated with Eliane Radigue, Julia Holter and Phill Niblock among many others. ’parallaxis forma’ is Lamb’s first solo release since 2021’s ‘Muto Infinitas’ for Another Timbre, and features three works performed by Explore Ensemble and Exaudi Music Ensemble, under the direction of Nicolas Moroz and James Weeks, respectively. All works derive a certain sensuality from her personalised process working with layered phonemes, alternately set to string quartet, a mixed septet of wind, tuned glasses and electric guitar, and more simply layered and left floating in air. Her use of overtones is eerily spellbinding and sure to snag more curious ears. ‘color residua’ pitches a string quartet in asymmetry to Exaudi Music Ensemble’s voices - Juliet Fraser (soprano), Cathy Bell (mezzo-soprano), Michael Hickman (baritone) - in a four part movement where composite melody emerges between the singers and strings. The other work for voice and instruments, ‘parallaxis forma’ (2016) is more tentative - underlining the haunting overtones produced by Berlin-based Australian singer Lotte Betts-Dean. Although ‘pulse/shade’ (2014) sounds like a piece for multiple voices, it features Betts-Dean clear, solo enunciation of the phonemes layered into the release’s most enchanting piece, free like ambient music but with an ascetic rigour key to its appeal.

Ockeghem Octets continues Antoine Beuger’s radical series of ensemble pieces, starting from intimate duos and building incrementally to groups of twenty. In this installment, eight performers - including Ryoko Akama (melodica), Kate Halsall (harmonium), Ecka Mordecai (cello), Leo Svirsky (accordion), Seamus Cater (concertina), Sarah Hughes (e-bow zither), Harriet Richardson (flute), and Kathryn Williams (alto flute)- join in a practice of sustained listening and collective restraint. Beuger’s process asks all players to articulate very long, very soft tones, shifting the expressive weight from individuality to ensemble number: it’s their “being eight” that generates the music’s distinct acoustic field. The score divides into fifty pages; the recording captures twenty-five, each a sequence of subtle, indivisible harmonies. The ensemble’s progression is marked by gradual change: balances and colors move so gently that the music feels both static and breathing. Tones intertwine, overlay, and recede, the beautiful monotone occasionally breached by new instrument color or an especially tender inflection. Silence plays as crucial a role as sound, allowing sustained tones to bloom or fade on their own terms. Rather than pursue drama, the music investigates mutual attention, collective tuning, and a sense of coexistence in present time. Beuger’s aesthetic - deeply influenced by reductionist and Wandelweiser traditions - values the ineffable over the exclamatory, proposing that simple means can yield profound effects. Ockeghem Octets unfolds as both a meditation and a social practice, creating a sonic architecture for healing, listening, and non-hierarchical being. Simplicity here is abundant: the piece offers space in which musicians and listeners alike can encounter the fullness of musical experience - its balance, calm, and restorative power.

Harmony is a collection of works in which Marc Sabat — a dedicated explorer of just intonation — probes the very essence of harmony through the most simple yet profound medium: the string quartet.

John Also Bennett (JAB)’s Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2 compiles two volumes of minimal music conceived as infinitely looping and morphing compositions for “save rooms” - temporary safe spaces within video game maps. The compositions primarily stem from a week spent at work in a former military barn in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco, spurred on by multimedia artist and Bennett’s frequent collaborator Peter Burr (for whom a handful of the pieces on these albums were initially composed). Consumed with the idea of music that could create an effortless sense of stasis, yet never exactly repeat itself, Bennett spent days alone in the remote, empty barn composing endless loops, experimenting with phasing techniques, and melding with the surrounding ambience. The groundwork was laid for over 11 compositions, a few of which at that time were finished. But in early 2020, faced with a pandemic-canceled tour and non-refundable plane tickets, Bennett digitally released a premature version of Music for Save Rooms containing two finished ‘Save Room’ pieces plus various unreleased odds and ends - a synthesized version of Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”, “Still Inside the Deku Tree”, an alto flute piece and live staple referencing Koji Kondo’s classic score for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and “Utopia and Oblivion”, a work for a virtual just intonation piano & DX7. Bennett presents here a definitely mixed, mastered, and expanded version of Music for Save Rooms (now Music for Save Rooms 1), alongside Music for Save Rooms 2, a fully realized album of new music stemming directly from those original sessions in Marin County. Composed almost exclusively for a Yamaha DX7, Roland D-50 and JV1080, Music for Save Rooms 2 differs from its predecessor - instead of a collection of disparate works centered around the theme of stasis, the album presents a more cohesive narrative, with shorter tracks relative to its predecessor’s more long-form pieces. Opener “Sky Music'' contains as much silence as it does sound - effortless chords float into view and then sizzle into nothingness. “Power Plant”’s glissando vocal pads and deep percussion hits seem to create a regenerative space, while “Out Back” and “Ambling'' both hint at some distant, foggily recollected liminal place. “Glass Castle” is perhaps more explicit with its imagery, combining the sounds of a glass harmonica and fragile vocal pads with alternatively gorgeous and dissonant piano motifs that utilize a tuning system developed by Iannis Xenakis. Boiled down over years to only its essential parts, Music for Save Rooms 2 is a tour through the mind’s eye of an artist searching for an elusive place, somewhere deep in the open world of our collective consciousness.

Featuring Xavier Charles, Angharad Davies and more, this long-unheard score by drone master and guru of Tibetan-electronic synthesis Eliane Radigue (1932–) finally resurfaces after six decades. Written in 1963–64 and produced by Rhodri Davies, the work received its long-awaited premiere at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2023. Based on graphic notation derived from the Fibonacci sequence, the score is interpreted by strings, winds, harp, and guitar, summoning Radigue’s signature deep drones without the use of electronics. Layers of sound unfurl with subtle fluctuations and spiral resonances, offering an experience at once hushed and cosmic in scope. A prophetic precursor to her later Occam series, and an elemental masterpiece that awakens a prayer-like focus at the very source of Radigue’s art.

Petre Inspirescu returns with a four-part suite of mesmeric, long-form compositions. Spanning two 12" records, each track occupies a full side - unfolding with the patience and precision of serialist structures. Drawing from minimalism and contemporary classical traditions, this is introspective electronica in its most refined form - hypnotic, elegant, and quietly expansive.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.

The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.

“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”

The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.

Where will the improvisation take place?

How will that space shape the sounds being made?

How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?

How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?

Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?

For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.

Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.

Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.

Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”

On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.

That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.

In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.

The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.

The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.

“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.

Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.

Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.

And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.

A 4-disc box-set with Apartment House playing all of John Cage's 'number pieces' for mid-size ensembles (from 'Five' to 'Fourteen', with 'Four5' as an added extra, along with alternative versions of three of the pieces). These extraordinarily beautiful works were all composed in the last 5 years of the composer's life, as Cage approached his 80th birthday. These recordings by Apartment House are the first recordings for 15 years of almost all of the pieces. An essential release of wonderful but somewhat neglected music. Downloads include a pdf of the 44-page booklet with extensive notes about Cage's number pieces, and the cover artwork

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce a reissue of Chico Mello and Helinho Brandão’s self-titled release from 1984, the first return to vinyl of this classic of Brazilian experimental music with its original cover art and complete track listing. An under-recognised figure whose work inhabits a singular terrain where radical new music techniques and music theatre meet musica popular brasileira, Mello has lived and worked in Berlin since the late 1980s. A student of Dieter Schnebel, Mello played in the 90s iteration of Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings alongside compatriot Silvia Ocougne, with whom he produced a radical and hilarious deconstruction of MPB classics on Musica Brasileira De(s)composta (an early and rather atypical release on Edition Wandelweiser). On this release, his only recording predating his move to Europe, Mello works with the alto saxophonist Helinho Brandão, who appears to be otherwise unknown outside Brazil. The record’s six tracks range from solo saxophone improvisation to densely layered ensemble works bridging minimalism, acoustic sound art and a plaintive melodic sensibility that calls up Edu Lobo or Milton Nascimento. Beginning with a dramatic, dissonant wind and string surge from which emerge ominously pounding piano chords, opener ‘Água’ slowly builds in intensity, a halo of clustered vocal harmonies gradually closing in on Brandão’s squealing sax until the piece opens up to reveal a gorgeous passage of melodic singing. The piano accompaniment reduces to tolling bass notes as the voice begins a repeated incantation, suggesting a ritualistic atmosphere reminiscent of parts of Xenakis’ setting of Oresteia. Dissonant, sawing tremolos on the strings climb to a crescendo before disappearing into the sounds of water being poured and splashed into metal vessels, presented not as a field recording but as a percussive element performed by the ensemble. A child’s voice then appears, singing to piano accompaniment the same melody heard earlier in the piece. After a brief solo alto improvisation from Brandão, working with the guttural pops and fleeting melodic gestures of Braxton or Roscoe Mitchell, the remainder of the first side is dedicated to the leisurely unfolding of ‘Baiando’ over the course of twelve minutes. A trio for Brandão on soprano saxophone, Mello on a very period-appropriate phased nylon string guitar and Edu Dequech on bongos, the performance eases its way hypnotically through subtle variations on a set of rhythmic and melodic patterns, almost derailed at points by Brandão’s wild forays into extended technique but held together by Mello’s droning guitar notes. The second side opens with another multi-part epic for a larger ensemble, ‘Matraca’, which makes use of strings, electric guitars and a wide range of South American percussion instruments. Rasping violin harmonics hover as drum hits, repeated guitar notes and triangle accompany a slowly descending bass glissando. A sudden change in direction introduces a thrumming, incessantly repeated bowed bass tone, beginning a series of episodes of minimalist phasing and pattern variation, the combinations of electric guitars and orchestral instruments giving the ensemble an ad hoc charm like the early Penguin Café Orchestra but with more percussive drive. Eventually the piece is overrun by a cacophony of the titular matracas (a kind of ratchet/cog rattle). Following a lyrical trio improvisation by Mello, Brandão and Gerson Kornin on bass, the final ‘Danca’ focuses entirely on Mello’s layered acoustic guitars and vocals, using this restricted palette to build up a haunting piece of almost orchestral density, reminiscent of the 70s work of Egberto Gismonti in how it thickens a folkish ambience with harmonic sophistication. Arriving in a starkly beautiful gatefold sleeve and sounding better than ever in its new remaster, one might call the stunning music contained on Chico Mello/Helinho Brandão ahead of its time. But what (other than some of Mello’s own work) produced in the years since its initial release has really touched the organic fusion of minimalism, free improvisation, radical instrumental technique and popular song achieved here? Forty years after its first release, Chico Mello/Helinho Brandão remains music of the future.

This hour-long ensemble piece from 2024, recorded in Stockholm, marks the twelfth album by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg on Another Timbre. Granberg, born in Umeå in 1974, studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York, but is self-taught as a composer. He formed his ensemble Skogen in 2005 to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi. Apart from his ongoing work with Skogen and other ensembles, he has increasingly been writing music on commission for musicians like Nate Wooley, andPlay, Apartment House, Ordinary Affects, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Insub Meta Orchestra and Dramaten, and has collaborated regularly with Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies and Jürg Frey.

The Willow Bends and So Do I was written in spring 2024 and consists of four large pools of materials ordered into ten cycles of approximately six minutes each. As Granberg explains: "Each pool consists of individual sounds, a number of short phrases (each containing two to seven different sounds) as well as an eighteen bar melody in slightly shifting meters from which the performers can choose what and when to play in accordance with a set of guidelines which accompany the individual parts." The phrases are derived from tiny rhythmic modules in simple note values and their augmentations and diminutions, while "the tonal materials all are derived from a few bars from a song by American jazz and film music composer Johnny Mandel called 'A Time for Love', from which the piece also borrows its title."

Granberg first heard the song in his mid-teens on Alone, a solo piano album by jazz pianist Bill Evans recorded in the late 1960s, which was one of the very first CDs he bought in the late eighties. True to his compositional method, Granberg uses other music as inspiration for his own without copying other composers' work—the sources of inspiration are not at all obvious in the finished piece. There is actually more raw material that he wrote at the time but didn't use for this piece, intending it for what might eventually become a small family of pieces for various settings and ensembles.

This particular version of Skogen is all Swedish, featuring longtime members alongside relative newcomers. The nonet includes Anna Lindal (violin), Eva Lindal (violin—Anna's sister), Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Finn Loxbo (acoustic steel string guitar), Stina Hellberg Agback (harp), Magnus Granberg (prepared piano), Erik Carlsson (percussion), Henrik Olsson (objects, contact microphones, thumb piano), and Petter Wästberg (contact microphone, mixing board, loudspeaker).

As Granberg notes: "I think the main reason for writing for this comparatively large ensemble was quite simply that I wanted to gather all the Swedish friends and members of the ensemble, including those players who started to play with Skogen during the pandemic... with the addition of guitarist Finn Loxbo whom we and I also had worked with on a couple of different occasions lately. But it's of course also a question of really enjoying writing for and playing with a relatively large ensemble of this kind, of being part of a musical environment consisting of so many different voices, movements, timbres and temperaments and the particular sense of fulfilment which it brings."

Eva Lindal and Stina Hellberg Agback have been playing with Skogen since the pandemic—both appeared on How Lonely Sits the City? (2021)—and are "such great and versatile musicians with experiences from so many different fields of music, including early and new music as well as improvised and experimental musics of various kinds." Guitarist Finn Loxbo first worked with Granberg on the double album Night Will Fade and Fall Apart (Thanatosis, 2022), and also joined Skogen for the music Granberg wrote for director Karl Dunér's production of The Persians and The Women of Troy at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 2023. As Granberg says: "Finn is a wonderful and very exciting musician (for example with his brilliant ensemble Kommun) whose playing I have admired for a number of years, so I'm very happy to have him with us."

As one reviewer notes, with Granberg's compositions "no further information is necessary to know that this album will provide many hours of listening pleasure."

"The idea for Homestead came in 2023 during my time as Artist in Residence at Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice, Nebraska, in whose archives I found the materials referenced in the titles of the movements, as well as the images on this album. As a fifth-generation Nebraskan, growing up on the native lands of the Chatiks si chatiks people (Pawnee), this project is a part of my process of learning, listening, and developing a relationship with the land and its stewards in my home state: a beautiful place with a rich history that is as much a part of me as it is part of the settler-colonial project of displacement and genocide through the Homestead Acts". Kory Reeder, March 2025

The images on the cover were kindly provided by the Homestead National Historical Park from the Reynolds family archive.

Muto Infinitas (2016/18) is an hour-long duo for quartertone bass flute and double bass, composed by the US-born Catherine Lamb, who is now resident in Berlin. It was recorded by Adama Asnan at Andreaskirche, Berlin Wannsee in 2019.

Cover artwork by Rebecca Lane

Compilation of our favorite Arvo Part pieces. All sparse and beautiful arrangements. Some solo piano pieces, some duets with piano, violin cello and viola and one string quartet. The pieces on this record are all unique to the style of Arvo Part – deceptively simple compositions that force you to live in the moment you are listening to them. A Part quote from the back of the record – “You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free—you can choose. In art everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.”

Extended Field unites Horse Lords and Arnold Dreyblatt for the eighteenth volume of FRKWYS, an intergenerational collaboration of adventurous musicians drawn to the sonically radiant world of just intonation—an ancient tuning system in which scale intervals are derived from whole-number ratios. Dreyblatt first immersed himself in this approach in New York during the 1970s, while Horse Lords began exploring and applying its possibilities nearly four decades later. Together, they create a vibrant harmonic environment, fueled by a shared devotion to rhythm, achieving a marriage of discreet but related aesthetics for the ages.

"Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba hails from three decades in the past, yet the simple profile of its abstract/ambient/cutup collage makes it a record that sits quite comfortably in our IDM-informed future. In 1988, Plux Quba was a primal dark horse in the world of pants-forward electronic music -- an obscurity issued with little explanation from the laid-back west coast of Europe: Portugal, of all places! -- though the casual listener could hardly know that from an examination of the LP jacket. The vanguard of electronics in late-80s Europe was being pushed by organizations like Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, HNAS -- and yet, when Christoph Heemann came across this recording, it struck his ears and the ears of fellow listeners like nothing before. Plux Quba was handed around between the principles of the early '90s A-Musik scene: Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert, Georg Odijk, plus interested fellow travelers like Jim O'Rourke, to the intense curiosity of all. To ears that were already saturated with all things kraut, the dark corners of prog and the frontline of experimental and improvised music, it proved elusive. Not simply in how it sounded and how that sound was achieved, but in where it was coming from -- like later Robert Ashley at times; certain stretches of melody recalled some of Eno's ambient pieces -- but mostly, it was a completely alien soundscape! And who was it? Was the band called Plux Quba? The record? The label? These sorts of mysteries are at the heart of records that require close listening and re-listening. As it was absorbed, it grew to be an influence on the Köln sound -- Mouse On Mars, Lithops, and Heemann's many and varied projects -- as well as O'Rourke, Fennesz and many others. Music and sound of this nature have for many years been made available by bands like Autechre, labels like Mille Plateaux -- but for the first ten years of its existence, Plux Quba was rarely heard. O'Rourke reissued it as the first record on his Moikai label in 1998, and it had a good run through around 2005 before the last of the print parts were filled. It's been almost a decade since Plux Quba was available, which is way too long considering that we live in an era where it is necessary to have an LP of this on hand for your contemporary listening distractions. And so, Drag City has stepped in to reissue the Moikai reissue of Nuno Canavarro's classic Plux Quba."