★Another Timbre
Scrub
A duo improvisation recorded in an exhibition space with several of Max Eastley's sound sculptures, and next door to a park where a firework display was taking place...
A Life Saved By A Spider And Two Doves
Three extended improvisations recorded at the church of St. James the Great, North London, September 2007 - the first convocation of this unexpected quartet crossing different generations and playing styles. Max Eastley (arc - electro-acoustic monochord), Graham Halliwell (computer & electronics), Evan Parker (soprano saxophone) and Mark Wastell (tam-tam, metal percussion & harmonium) document a meeting of three generations of London free improvisation.
Parker has had a venerable presence as bot…
Endspace
Duo improvisations recorded at Goldsmiths College, London, July 2007. Angharad Davies (violin) and Tisha Mukarji (inside piano) - two of the most distinctive young improvisers on the UK scene - unite for their first recording as a duo. An entirely acoustic affair impossible to ignore the heritage that goes before such a recording of piano and violin: the slow pace of Feldman and the New York School, the grey austerity of the Wandelweiser collective echo through these five improvisations.
Davies …
Hum
Quartet improvisations recorded at London's Red Rose in June 2007. Rhodri Davies (harp & objects), Matt Davis (trumpet & electronics), Samantha Rebello (flute) and Bechir Saadé (bass clarinet) unite for intimately detailed collective sound explorations mining the lower boundaries of dynamics and densities. Davies and Davis are well-established improvisers; Rebello is a new name; Saadé is a member of the Lebanese improv scene along with Sharif Sehnaoui, Christine Sehnaoui, and Mazen Kerbaj.
It's …
Tasting
Recorded live at the June 2006 Jazz à Poitiers festival, this gem pairs two extraordinary musicians in an unusual and very welcome configuration. Phil Minton - the legendary British vocalist with decades of experience exploring the outer possibilities of the human voice - meets Sophie Agnel, one of the most interesting and original voices on today's scene, though still largely undiscovered given her small discography. Her approach to piano is truly surprising: a mysterious and fascinating mixtur…
Wanderer
Wanderer assembles eight sophisticated chamber pieces from Linda Catlin Smith, rendered by the ever-inventive Apartment House ensemble. Across this collection, Smith’s distinct voice emerges through piano, strings, winds, percussion, and brass, revealing an uncompressed sense of time and patience. Philip Thomas’s solo piano work offers gentle resonance and poised silence, while duos and quintets - performed with Mark Knoop, Mira Benjamin, Anton Lukoszevieze, Heather Roche, and others - bring nua…
Mouth To Mouth
Four compositions by the US-Chinese composer:
'Of Monsters' - Ingrid Lee, piano Merima Kljuko, accordion'Cells' - Ingrid Lee & Rowan Smith, amplified snare drums'Bead Spit' - Ingrid Lee, piano, Max Kutner, electric guitar, Tony Gennaro, percussion'Another' - Eric KM Clark & Andy Studer, violins, Heather Lockie, viola, Meldoy Yenn, cello, Jake Rosenzweig, bass & Tony Gennaro, vibraphone
Spiral Inputs
Four beautifully crafted improvisations by an exceptional European trio: French pianist Sophie Agnel, French saxophonist Bertrand Gauguet, and German sound artist Andrea Neumann. Recorded between 2008 and 2010 at various locations in France – La Filature in Mulhouse, La Maison de la Musique in Le Garric, and Bibliothèque Grand'Rue in Mulhouse – Spiral Inputs documents performances using a spatialized sound system developed by Benjamin Maumus, which had the effect of troubling the musicians' sens…
The Middle Distance
Trio improvisations for two pianos and double bass
And We Disappear
The Sealed Knot—Burkhard Beins (percussion, objects), Rhodri Davies (pedal harp, e-bow), Mark Wastell (double bass, bow, beaters)—are what Clive Bell in The Wire calls "one of the great free improvisation groups, comparable to the classic 1980s SME line-up of John Stevens, Nigel Coombes and Roger Smith for edge-of-your-seat attentiveness and sheer inter-group telepathy." This single 40-minute piece, recorded live at the Ear We Are Festival in Biel, Switzerland in February 2007, captures the trio…
Empty Matter
Lucio Capece (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, preparations, sruti box) and Lee Patterson (CD players, pick-ups, e-bowed springrods, springplate, hazelnuts) recorded these eight pieces in what Norman Records describes as "absolutely beautiful music" where "two masters of tiny sounds meet up." Capece approaches his reeds "more as tubes for breath than as traditional 'instruments,'" while Patterson uses all sorts of sound processes—including amplifying burning hazelnuts.
Nick Cain in The Wire not…
Arethusa
Wade Matthews (software synthesis, manipulated field recordings) and Stéphane Rives (soprano saxophone) recorded these four pieces in Madrid in July 2008, creating music that speaks to transformation, identity, and the improviser's paradox. The album takes its name from Ovid's tale of Arethusa—a nymph fleeing the river god Alpheus who, in attempting to escape change, becomes water itself. As Matthews writes in his liner notes, "in her quest to remain herself, she has become exactly what she fled…
Maniera
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…
Distant Musics
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…
shades
Boston-based composer Nomi Epstein makes her debut on Another Timbre with this portrait album featuring three chamber works composed between 2011 and 2023. Influenced by the New York School, Fluxus, Pauline Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, and the Wandelweiser collective, Epstein has developed a distinctive compositional voice centered on sonic fragility and textural subtlety.
The album opens with the title piece shades, a 20-minute string quartet written specifically for Apartment House in 2023. T…
Things that Happen Again
Things that Happen Again offers a panoramic entry point into the lucid, evolving world of Paul Newland. Recorded by Apartment House at Goldsmiths in 2023, the album presents compositions written across a fourteen-year span. The title alludes to Newland’s fascination with recurrence and reworking - tracks such as “Difference is Everywhere (altered again)” or “Things That Happen Again (again)” are not only marked by repetition but by acts of subtle reinvention, echoing Newland's habit of dismantli…
Screens
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 History of Musical Pitch
This album contains three works by Seamus Cater, including his creative response to the work of Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), who presented a paper 'The History of Musical Pitch' to the Royal Society in 1880. Ellis was a mathematician, collector, philologist and musical enthusiast, who spent a lot of time measuring the exact frequencies of contemporary and ancient musical instruments, and so is remembered as one of the founders of comparative musicology. Two of the pieces on the disc are 're…
parallaxis forma
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…
Translucent Harmonies
New York-based duo andPlay – violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson – present two extended works exploring the sonic possibilities of just intonation tuning systems. Both pieces were commissioned for andPlay's concert series Translucent Harmonies and premiered in 2018.
Catherine Lamb's Prisma Interius VIII (Melodic Duo) (22 minutes) strips her Prisma Interius series down to its bare essence, removing the electronic spectral resonance of earlier versions. Here, violin and viola plot …