★Another Timbre
Mine but for its sublimation
A 64-minute piano solo composed in 2021, performed by Jack Yarbrough. "'Mine but for its sublimation' is about resonance, register, and touch. It is about where we lead ourselves when we trust ourselves. It is experiencing trust as a chain of clearings, a sequence of becomings, openings, centerings. It is about letting go; othering; finding presence through evaporation. Obliteration." - Timothy McCormack
Homestead
Kory Reeder composed Homestead (2024)—a nearly hour-long string quartet in four movements with an interlude—during his residency as Artist in Residence at Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice, Nebraska in 2023. As he explains: "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 pla…
Listening Time
A 45-minute piece from 2024 composed by Ferdinand Schwarz in collaboration with AREPO ensemble.
Dust Book
A 50 minute solo for viola d'amore played by Marco Fusi. The piece was composed in 2022-2023, and has six movements.
A Pauper's Guide To John Cage
2011 release ** Packaged in oversize paper sleeve. "A Pauper's Guide to John Cage, on the budget Another Timbre Byways imprint, originally intended to feature lesser-known musicians. Across its 44 minutes, it features two compositions by Anett Németh played by the composer herself alone on a range of instruments and equipment. The album opens with the brilliantly-named title piece, which has an underlying drone/hum (maybe produced by "domestic electronics") over which Németh plays well-spaced pi…
Penumbra
Morgan Evans-Weiler (violin & electronics) and J.P.A. Falzone (prepared piano & celesta) present four beautifully reduced duets—music that is, as the label describes it, "as delicate as a feather, but also as tough as nails." This is the duo's third Another Timbre release, following the double album Chordioid (2020)—which the label calls "one of the hidden treasures in the Another Timbre catalogue"—and Ascending Music (2021).
The duo's collaborative process involves jointly developing works that…
Longing Landscape
Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer, clarinetist, and central figure in the Wandelweiser collective, presents three recent chamber works—all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, with one piece featuring the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa. These compositions mark a significant evolution in Frey's aesthetic. As Ian Mikyska of the Prague collective explains, "Jürg is neither writing the music he used to write nor writing the music that anyone expects of him"—moving beyon…
O a | F g
Teodora Stepančić writes "music that doesn't try to draw attention to itself." The Serbian-born, Brooklyn-based composer describes her aesthetic simply: "How much do I need to add to everything that I hear?" These two chamber works for Ordinary Affects—written five years apart, yet fitting together with eerie logic—make a persuasive case for restraint.
OA (2018) and FG (2023) share surface features with Wandelweiser repertoire: low volume, generous silences, slow pacing. But unexpected elements …
G o m b e r t
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
Towards a slowing of the past
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 Chad…
Zamat
Adrián Demoč writes "gentle and soft, non-violent music." The Slovak composer, based in Spain, reduces chamber music down to near-monody—single melodic lines articulated through subtle timbral shifts and microtonal deviations. Zamat, his fourth Another Timbre release, presents three chamber works where Apartment House navigates music that moves "back and forth on the spot between a handful of notes." The title track—zamat means "velvet" in Slovak—deploys clarinet, bass clarinet, viola, and cello…
Flowers of Emptiness
"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…
Dawnings
Anglo-German composer Eden Lonsdale returns to Another Timbre with an ambitious double album that represents his most mature and expansive work to date. Following the critical success of Clear and Hazy Moons, Lonsdale presents five major compositions that explore the boundaries of chamber music through rigorous formal constraints, microtonal explorations, and an extraordinary attention to harmonic metamorphosis.
The first disc, performed by the acclaimed Apartment House, features three pieces fo…
Curva Triangulus
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…
Outermost Melodies
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 …
Holde Träume, kehret wieder!
"Sweet dreams, come back!" The title, the last line of Matthäus von Collin's poem set by Schubert in 1825 as Nacht und Träume, suggests longing for night's return upon waking. Magnus Granberg's 2021 composition takes Schubert's song as departure point, fragmenting its rhythmic phrases into tiny cells and extracting tonal structures to create a new modal framework. The result exists at the intersection where composition meets improvisation, realized here in two versions across this double album.
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Control And Its Opposites
“Eighty minutes of trumpet/electronics and alto sax. Here, the length works in its favor. An advantage, oddly, to listening at home (and reading the back of the sleeve): You know it's 80 minutes long so you "read" it as such, as it's happening, sitting back a bit, seeking a wider focus. Wright gets nicely strident here and there, Coleman generally staying with breath tones early on, getting more vociferous later, Kasyansky hither and yon, doing a fine job integrating and coloring. There's a brea…
Meshes
2009 release ** "Two improvisations-one live, one without audience-by an Anglo-French trio of new voices from trombonist Forge, electronics artists Julian and cellist Papapostolou. The music is quiet and spacious....there is a wonderful sense of slowness to the music that suggests each sound, every contribution comes only after careful consideration."
Loiter Volcano
The excellently titled Loiter Volcano was a constant source of somewhat surprising pleasure the first time I listened. "Surprising" because the general attack leans a bit more toward efi (I suppose "post-efi" has been appropriate for a good while) than I normally care for. But this mix of electronics, percussion and cello simply filled the space in a manner that held me rapt throughout. As with the other release featuring Dumont, it's partially about the textures and their creative deployment bu…
Centre Of Mass (For Cymbal And Resonant Objects)
Solo improvisation for cymbal and rotating objects