Composition / All styles

“Another Timbre has been contributing excellent recordings to the rapidly expanding universe of what might still be called “Classical” music, and nowhere more convincingly than in the shimmering beautiful tapestries woven by Morton Feldman. The label’s double set of Feldman’s earlier piano works would be an excellent place to begin for anyone wishing to slide into familiarity with his work, as it’s wonderfully performed by John Tilbury and Philip Thomas. Pianist Mark Knoop, violinist Aisha Orazb…

Performed by Ensemble Grizzana, Jürg Frey (clarinet), Magnus Granberg (celesta, harmonica & stones), Angharad Davies & Mira Benjamin (violins), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Dominic Lash (double bass), John Lely (electronics, harmonica & stones), Richard Craig (flute & electronics), Philip Thomas (piano), Simon Allen (dulcimer & glass harp), Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (zither & electronics).

Three compositions exploring breath as a musical regulator

British composer Frank Denyer presents seven beautiful chamber works dating from 1974 to 2018, opening a door to his unique soundworld. Released by Another Timbre in November 2019, The Boundaries of Intimacy features sublime, unexpected pieces of delicate intimacy performed by a variety of artists including Luna String Quartet, Juliet Fraser, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenberg and Nobutaka Yoshizawa. "Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listeni…

This CD offers the first recording of Frank Denyer's extraordinary hour-long piece for large ensemble The Fish That Became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed), composed between 1991 and 1996. The ensemble includes a huge number of home-made percussion instruments made from discarded materials, as well as obscure instruments such as eunuch flutes, ocarinas and crumhorns. The album comes with a booklet with notes by Frank Denyer and an essay by Michael Turnbull.Musicians include:Octandre Ensemble …

Eventless Plot is the collective name for three musicians from Thessaloniki, Greece, who compose together. Vasilis Liolios, Aris Giatis and Yiannis Tsirikoglou have been collaborating in this way since they met as students 20 years ago. They bring in other musicians from Greece and Holland (where Yiannis now lives) as their compositions develop. The CD presents three of their recent and most compelling chamber works. "The title reflects the basic idea of the composition. There is a contradiction…

"The four pieces on the CD cover a broad time span. The first piece, which is the most recent, is a clear example of the kind of entwinement between technologies, affect, space and listening that I’ve been working on for a while. This piece plays with the role of different conditions of sound production in shaping the way we pay attention to sound - how we engage in listening to it. In its live version the piece involves other layers which are not present in the recording. This entails both the …

Six improvisations by Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (piano) and Tilman Kanitz (cello), recorded towards the end of Stiebler's life in Kanitz's Berlin studio.Interview with Tilman KanitzCould you tell us how and when your duo with Ernstalbrecht came about?At a festival for North Indian Classical music in Calcutta I was impressed by the extensive “tuning up” process of the musicians. I thought of Ernstalbrecht and wrote to him, suggesting that he should write a cello piece for me. A couple of months late…

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

"Maybe I'm like a still life painter," Linda Catlin Smith says, "looking at the same objects again and again over the years." Yet this survey of chamber works—spanning 1986 to 2024—shows a composer whose perspectives continually shift, finding something fresh in each iteration. Hers is "a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty." The Guardian awarded five stars, placing it #3 in their Top Classical Releases of 2024. Apa…

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 Pro…

Ian Antonio discovered Jürg Frey via algorithm. About 15 years ago, SoundCloud kept leading him to the same piece, maybe Circular Music No. 2. "I wouldn't notice the piece starting but then realize I was in fact listening to it closely," he recalls. "The stillness and closeness and warmth were somewhat new to me." At the time, Antonio played "a lot of very loud and often very fast music" with groups like Wet Ink, Talujon, Zs, and Yarn/Wire. Frey's music was "very much the opposite." This double …

American composer Paul Paccione makes a welcome return to recording with this portrait album featuring five chamber works originally composed between 1980 and 1990, all performed by the acclaimed Apartment House ensemble. Born in New York in 1952, Paccione studied with legendary minimalist pioneer Harley Gaber and later at the University of Iowa, developing a distinctive voice deeply influenced by Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Anton Webern. The album includes Exit Music for string trio, Gridwor…

With yet another striking and forward-thinking work of contemporary composition, Another Timbre returns with “Maniera”, their second outing with the Italian composer, Marco Baldini, following on from last year's brilliant “Vesperi” which sold out within weeks. Comprising seven works for various configurations of string ensemble, masterfully executed by Apartment House, that nod across time toward Italian polyphonic compositions of the 16th and early 17th centuries, the diverse history of Minimal…

British composer Frank Denyer (born London, 1943) presents an extraordinary collection of five works spanning nearly fifty years of creative activity, performed by the Octandre Ensemble conducted by Jon Hargreaves. This release, recorded at the Menuhin School in Surrey in September 2022, serves as a landmark document of one of the most original voices in contemporary music. The album includes Broken Music (1990) featuring a bewildering array of instruments including flute, piccolo, crow call, me…

A portrait CD of UK composer Paul Newland's music, with five pieces dating from 2009 to 2023, all recorded by Apartment House in 2023. A rich variety of music, ranging from string quartet, two different trio combinations, a short work for solo piano, and a score for open instrumentation, realised in this recording by a septet.Cover artwork by Paul Newland

A 51-minute journey through sound that Swiss composer Jürg Frey describes as "a (maybe even perfect) balance between anonymity and personality." Originally commissioned by Concertgebouw Brugge and premiered at the 2019 SLOW Festival, this String Trio underwent extensive revision before Apartment House brought it to its "final destination" in this first recording. Frey's compositional process defies system – everything emerges slowly through what he calls "a slow but natural process which I can't…

Three vocal works recorded between 2014 and 2020 reveal the Berlin-based American composer's singular approach to voice as spectral instrument. Lotte Betts-Dean, Explore Ensemble, and Exaudi navigate Lamb's radiant harmonic language where phonemes replace text, vowel sounds emphasize overtone clusters, and the human voice blends seamlessly with bowed strings shifting between pure tone and noise. color residua opens with four sections where composite melodies emerge through slow hocket between si…

Sound Pieces is a collection from Pauline Oliveros performed by Apartment House. The album spans seven works from 1975 to 1998, comprising both open text scores and a structured seven-movement composition, "Tree/Peace." The ensemble channels Oliveros’ philosophy of deep listening and interpretive openness, delivering performances full of nuance, attentive silence, and subtle interplay.

Three chamber pieces by the Austrian composer Klaus Lang, plus two arrangements by Klaus of early music by Johannes Ockeghem and Pierre de la Rue. Played by Trio Amos with Klaus Lang

The first piece composer Catherine Lamb has written specifically for acoustic guitar was commissioned by Chilean guitarist Christián Alvear. Extending concepts from an installation piece titled Secondary Rainbow with Bryan Eubanks, Lamb employs electronics over an infinite cycle of four "environmental chords" which overlap and resonate with one another.

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 Sk…

Ying Wang’s RE:Wilding presents five works shaped by sonic precision, cultural awareness, and political urgency. Acoustic instruments and electronics coexist without hierarchy, exposing noise, fragility, and quotation as structural elements. Rather than fixed messages, the music offers a field of tensions—between gesture and abstraction, control and collapse, presence and disappearance. References to social injustice, ecological crisis, and cultural memory are articulated through sharply drawn c…

1990 release ** "Arditti", presents a typically challenging Arditti programme, beginning with Beethoven's Grosse Fuge (1826), which comes over well from their modernist standpoint. Conlon Nancarrow's String Quartet No. 3 (1987) comes next - Nancarrow had said that the Grosse Fuge was the only music he would want his quartet to follow, and they make an illuminating pairing. Ruth Crawford Seeger's magnificent String Quartet (1931) has had several fine recordings, and this one is one of the best - …

First-time reissue of Willem Nyland's rare private-press piano improvisations. The Dutch chemist-turned-Gurdjieff disciple recorded these spiritual teachings on specially tuned piano in 1960s upstate New York

Dietmar Bonnen (b. 1958) is a German composer, pianist and singer whose music moves between the cornerstones of art rock, chamber music, blues, and new music. He has extensively collaborated with a large numbers of musicians in his hometown Cologne as well as internationally. "Fries" (German for frieze) was previously released on CD on Bonnen's own label Obst Music and is presented here on vinyl for the first time. Bonnen states that the piece's structure is "visually inspired by the wall frieze…

Stiebler is one of Germany's most consistent explorers of sustained tones and minimal structures - his work hovers in that magical space between sound and silence. Here paired with Kanitz for an intimate dialogue. Patient, luminous, endlessly rewarding listening. Music that demands - and rewards - your full attention.

A 42-minute composition for improvising sextet by Austrian double bassist and composer Werner Dafeldecker. The score divides six players into two virtual trios, shifting constellations every three minutes - one player always serving as "dynamic leader" whose volume the others cannot exceed. A structure that forces deep listening without curtailing individual qualities. Conceptually rigorous, sonically stunning!

2023 Stock An essential selection of the poetry of one of the most important twentieth-century creative movements. Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it’s hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of…

* Limited Edition Green vinyls + insert *  Ars Subtilior (14th century) and the Noise: the two inspirations of Christophe Guiraud which are like two rivers which are woven in a writing of great power. The French young composer is the link between the most accomplished scholarly music and some radical aspects of noise. Born in Toulouse mid-seventies, he settles in Brussels - which becomes the crossroads of a continuous creation. Currently works and has been collaborating since several years with …

The piano recital/album sans retour forms the concluding part of Croene's 'Trilogy of Hopelessness' (Cortizona). Conceived as a single, Beethovenian composition, Croene once again demonstrates the wide range of sound palettes a piano can produce. The common thread is a melody based on the 'Dies Irae', which takes six different forms to embody the in memoriam concept.

*2025 stock* "The latest album by innovative Slovak composer, Barbora Tomášková, offers a unique suite of sounds, where boundaries between acoustic traditions and exploratory electronics dissolve. The Slovak composer and performer’s practice revolves around innovative use of ’objets trouvé’ and western classical instruments via hefty electronic manipulations and many extended techniques. Taking its name from both the less common and stable form of DNA and the Slovak term for “from the bottom”, Z…

Absolutely beautiful LP of intimate drifting lo-fi piano nostalgia from Hokkaido’s Mashu Hayasaka on the store's own imprint.

This very special CD Book presents John Zorn’s evocative musical setting of the Biblical love poem The Song of Songs, with singer/conductor Barbara Hannigan and film director/actor Mathieu Amalric narrating. Featuring extensive notes, the full text of Jeremy Fogel’s passionate new translation (commissioned expressly for this project), and 35 illustrations by Zorn himself, this limited edition one-of-a-kind CD Book is an absolute treasure.

*Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes* Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers litt…

A Dark Flaring marks the Signum Quartett’s impressive return to ECM’s New Series after debuting for the label with striking performances on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s acclaimed chamber music recording Lost Prayers (2020). Here, the quartet has put together a unique programme dedicated to six South African composers, born in the 20th century, whose works for string quartet are united by the way they blend respect for the past with an instinct for the future in a wide-flung idiomatic scope. Whether writing…

zeitkratzer director Reinhold and his ensemble present new compositions, grounded on Domenico Scarlatti's piano sonata F-minor K.466. Commissioned by the dance company Rubato and dedicated to Mario Bertoncini (1932-2019).

In the Understage area of the Alexandra Trianti Hall, the musical saw in the hands of Nikos Giousef, and accompanied by piano, samplers and analog synthesizers, is transformed into a voice. 'An otherworldly child's voice', 'a Siren's voice' or 'a castrato voice', as it has been described, it easily climbs to tonic heights that the human voice can only reach with great effort. The pieces chosen for the program reflect this criterion, with works such as the aria 'Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott' from the …

The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks…

Three early compositions (1968-1970) by Steve Reich, one of the most prolific exponents of minimal music, in stunning interpretations by the critically acclaimed Ensemble Avantgarde. Available on vinyl (180gr, gatefold sleeve incl. download code) for the first time ever!