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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.
Seven beautiful, melancholic motets and a chanson by Renaissance composer Nicolas Gombert, arranged for instruments by James Weeks, who also composed the interludes. "One of the least expected and most beautiful records we are likely to hear this year." (Clive Bell) Gombert's music was renowned for the complexity of its polyphony, and these realisations, played by leading experimental ensemble Apartment House, emphasise the layered density of the music, while trying to take it as far away as possible from its origins as choral church music. The album is a personal project initiated by label owner Simon Reynell, a long-term fan of early music. Composer James Weeks also straddles the worlds of both early and contemporary music, and his 'media vita' interludes act as resting points between Gombert's intricate pieces. One of the bonus items which comes with the music is a pdf of an extended discussion about the project between Reynell and Weeks in which they discuss different approaches to the performance of early music, the brutal world of 16th century Europe from which the music sprung, and the ethics of promoting the music of a composer who did awful things. You can also read Clive Bell's excellent feature article about the album on another of the bonus items.
A 72-minute realisation of 'Intermission 6' (1953), one of the most open of Feldman's piano works. The piece was realised in October 2024 by Antti Tolvi.
The score consists of a single page with 15 events (chords or single notes) which can be played in any order, and can be performed by one or two pianists. Feldman writes that “The pianist, or pianists, begins with any sound on the page, will hold until barely audible, then proceed to whichever other sound he may choose. Sounds may be repeated.”
Most performances of 'Intermission 6' are between 4 and 10 minutes, but Antti Tolvi extends the piece to a duration more typical of Feldman's later music.
Catherine Lamb works at the boundary between perception and illusion. In Curva Triangulus (2018/21), the American composer takes Bridget Riley's geometric forms as starting point for "warping" Renaissance materials through geometric musical figures. The result is a 41-minute composition for eight instruments where the distinction between melody and harmony dissolves: one generates the other, rather than existing as separate entities. The score demands an exceptional ensemble. Bern's Ensemble Proton has access to extremely rare instruments: the arciorgano (Vicentino's 16th-century microtonal organ), a baroque triple harp (Barberini model), lupophone, contraforte, and clarinet d'amore. These combine with flute, cor anglais, bassoon, violin, and cello in an asymmetrical octet. The absence of piano and presence of the bellows-driven arciorgano subverts the ensemble's traditional balance, with the organ supporting the entire score from below. Lamb imagined a late Renaissance position of musical perception, warped by Riley's triangles and shapes in multidimensional space. Italian composer Zarlino hovers as phantom presence (with echoes of Marc Sabat's Gioseffo Zarlino surfacing), while Rameau's intuition about the sounding body remains just beyond the historical horizon. The baroque triple harp acts as "free flowing agent," articulating the progression of clearer contrapuntal triadic material in the foreground. Ensemble musicians alternate roles as active generators and passive harmonizers, always in relation to one another. In the revised version (completed winter 2020/21), these roles are distributed more evenly, adding timbral and intentional diversity. Richard Haynes introduces clarinet d'amore, while Elise Jacoberger contrasts bassoon and contraforte more distinctly. The ensemble includes Bettina Berger (flute, alto flute), Martin Bliggenstorfer (cor anglais, lupophone), Vera Schnider (triple harp), Coco Schwarz (arciorgano), Maximilian Haft (violin), and Jan-Filip Ťupa (cello). Recorded at Guebwiller Cathedral, France in May 2023 by sound engineer Ingo Schmidt-Lucas, Curva Triangulus is the latest in Lamb's extensive Another Timbre catalog, following parallaxis forma, Prisma Interius VIII, string quartets with JACK Quartet, and earlier works. Dusted Magazine notes the composition possesses "undeniable and immediate beauty" with "leisurely pace allowing room for experiments," offering both deep listening challenges and accessible pleasure.
Apartment House's latest set is a hypnotic rendition of Morton Feldman's towering late-period masterpiece, originally recorded in 1991 by Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi and here performed by Mark Knoop (piano), Mira Benjamin & Gordon Mackay (violins), Bridget Carey (viola) and Anton Lukoszevieze (cello). When Morton Feldman wrote "Piano and String Quartet" in 1985, only two years before he died of pancreatic cancer, he had Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi in mind, but the piece has been recorded many times since it was released in 1993, and has been endlessly influential, like much of Feldman's work. On this rendition, the dynamic range is tempered with piano and strings fluttering delicately like a whisper over a silence that feels omnipresent. When notes appear from the void, they do so with purpose, hanging like ghosts before slipping away into the aether. Anton Lukoszevieze, leader of Apartment House, explains why he chose to record the piece: "Piano and String Quartet, one of Feldman’s final works, is a seemingly simple work and yet it isn’t. As Philip Guston, a great friend of Feldman, wrote ‘Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.’ The length of the work (nearly 80 minutes) and the erasure of musical memory (What did we just hear?) is in fact its identity. Feldman makes simple statements, a piano arpeggio or a sustained string chord, holds these things and examines them over time. Gradually, as the sun’s light moves across a still life through the day, like a drawn out Morandi painting, the work evolves and indeed dissolves in some sense. Using different transformative processes, Feldman illuminates his basic material and achieves the miraculous, an extended work of great beauty and enigmatic wonder. There are ghosts there, tinctures of late Schubert, Brahms and even Janaček, where beauty is a signature of passing time and an ephemeral focus on hearing and disappearing."
Feldman’s late-style aesthetics distilled to their purest form in the chamber work Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello. A quiet labyrinth of abstraction, like an aural equivalent of abstract painting.
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."
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.
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.
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.