★Another Timbre
The Fish That Became the Sun
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 …
The Boundaries of Intimacy
The Boundaries of Intimacy foregrounds works that are very restrained and quiet, but as always with Frank Denyer, there is a sense of tension or danger in the air that occasionally explodes and cuts across the music."Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listening level, think of the musicians as being just over the other side of the room in which you are listening, rather than in another grander space. Imagine them performing intimately, witho…
Žiadba
Žiadba consists of five chamber compositions by the young Slovak composer Adrián Democ, who is currently teaching music at a school in Spain, as he says it is practically impossible to survive as an experimental composer in Eastern Europe. Democ's music is very varied: some of his pieces are quiet and restrained, while others are bursting with life and vigour. His Kvarteto begins with an intricate and fast-moving canon movement, brilliantly played by Apartment House and Ostravska Band / fama Q.
Dial 45-21-95
Dial 45-21-95 is a series of nine pieces composed by Ryoko Akama based on objects and fragments she discovered while conducting research at the Krzysztof Kieslowski Archive in Poland. The series was commissioned by Another Timbre with the only stipulation being that they should be pitch-based pieces. They were realised for the first time and recorded by Apartment House in June 2019.Anton Lukoszevieze: cello - Mira Benjamin: violin - Simon Limbrick: vibraphone & percussion - Heather Roche: clarin…
Puma Court
Puma Court is a project initiated by Australian born instrumentalist and composer Jon Heilbron, who now lives in Berlin. The CD consists of two pieces both scored for two double basses and two hardanger fiddles – violins with extra sympahetic strings, which are most frequently used in Norwegian folk music. The performers are Heilbron himself and Hakon Thelin (double basses), and Helga Myhr and Rasmus Kjorstad (hardanger fiddles).
Morton Feldman Piano
The Morton Feldman Piano box set is the most extensive survey of Feldman’s piano music to date. Released exactly 20 years after John Tilbury’s long unavailable 4-CD set, the new box includes several pieces which weren’t included there, and has three works which have never been released on disc before.Philip Thomas has been playing Feldman’s music for 25 years and is one of the foremost interpreters of his work with an extraordinary gentle touch. He and John Tilbury combined forces to produce the…
Among the Tarnished Stars / Quatuor pour la fin du temps
The UK ensemble Apartment House performs two works: Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du Temps in six movements, and Linda Catlin Smith's Among the Tarnished Stars, taking a fresh modern approach to the Messiaen, drawing out its experimental character, and the sense of drama and intricate gradations of sonority in Smith's rich and mysterious work.
Point/Wave
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.
Breaths
Three works from Italian composer and pianist Federico Pozzer in his "breathing" series, compositions where the musicians follow the concept of inhaling, exhaling, and pausing, set against certain fixed actions or interactions as they devise their own musical actions."My first 'breathing pieces' were written at the end of 2016... I was looking for a solution that could overcome both the players' freedom in decision-making and the strictness of the score. What I wanted was to lead musicians towar…
Awirë
Cyril Bondi, Pierre-Yves Martel and Christoph Schiller formed a trio in 2017 and recorded a set of studio pieces which became the CD Tse, which was released on Another Timbre in 2018. The CD was very successful and has nearly sold out. On the back of that CD, the trio did a brief tour of Europe in October 2018, and played at Cafe OTO in London together with violinist Angharad Davies. The trio played a set, followed by a solo by Angharad, and then for the final piece the trio joined forces with A…
Windfell
James Weeks’ major work for singing violinist, Windfell, has been released on the leading British experimental music label Another Timbre. Written for and performed by Canadian violinist Mira Benjamin, Windfell debuted in October / November 2017 at concerts in London and in Durham University’s Klang series. Lasting almost an hour, Windfell arose from ‘an image of the violin surrounded by space and open air: on top of a hill, high-up and remote, played only by the wind. On this ‘wind fell’ the br…
Femenine (Apartment House)
Apartment House give new life to Julius Eastman’s irrepressible ensemble piece from 1974. Unbounded energy and clarity of sound. Unmissable. Read the following interview with the Apartment House's director, cellist cellist Anton LukoszeviezeWhen did you first play Julius Eastman's music, and when had you become aware of it?I first performed Eastman's music in 2016, which was a revelation for me, as the extant scores are rather fragmentary and incomplete, some are even just transcriptions from ar…
Dethick
Another church, another country, and another unique collaboration. Angharad Davies combines with Japanese sound artist Rie Nakajima and the virtuoso cellist from Distractfold ensemble, Alice Purton, in a series of explorations in the small church in the Derbyshire village of Dethick. The trio improvised, then developed and refined ten short pieces across two days, producing music which is as good as improvisation gets.
Beissel
A collaboration between Austrian composer Klaus Lang and the ensemble Golden Fur (James Rushford, Judith Hamann & Samuel Dunscombe). Together they developed a piece in the abbey at Sankt Lambrecht in Austria, using music by the eighteenth century religious composer Johann Beissel, who developed a compositional system which he claimed to have received from angels, and which has been described as a very early precursor of serialism. The result is an extraordinary piece of music: fragility blown th…
Nun, Es Wird Nicht Weit Mehr Gehn
A really beautiful new release from Skogen, taking a song from Winterreise as its starting point, but transformed in Magnus Granberg’s usual magical way into a shifting, shimmering ocean of sounds.
Viola Torros
4 compositions from violist/composers Catherine Lamb & Johnny Chang, the 1st focusing on the mysterious compositions of Vedic-era composer Viola Torros, exploring monady, melody and harmony; the second, one composition each from Chang performed with the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, and from Lamb using the secondary rainbow synthesizer she developed with Bryan Eubanks..The summer I arrived in Berlin, I began meeting with Johnny around music-related things and he started mentioning a composer he w…
Un Lloc entre Dos Records
Submerging the listener into the immediacy of pure perception through the economy of materials and atemporality, Catalan guitarist Ferran Fages presents the 3rd piece of his trilogy for guitar and sinteones, referencing Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier and Chiyoko Szlavnics as he specifies tunings for the guitar accompanied by pure resonating sinetones used as memory vehicles or shadows.
Aftermaths
Works for solo piano by Mark R Taylor, beautifully played by Teodora Stepancic, the first CD release by a remarkable but neglected English composer whose piano works present a metrically rhythmicized exploration of a generative spectrum, here featuring works dating between 1979 and 2018 and performed by Serbian pianist Teodora Stepancic.
Lines and Tracings
Two compositions, one by composer Michael Pisaro and performed by the electroacoustic ensemble "Ordinary Affects" including violinist Morgan Evans-Weiler, then an acoustic composition from Evans-Weiler himself performed with violin, clarinet, cello, harpsichord and piano; both exquisite works that draw out tone and time in patiently unfolding fluidity.
Momentary Encounters
Finally the second batch of CDs in the highly-acclaimed Canadian Composers Series is here.Momentary encounters(5) (2015) by Heather Roche (clarinet). Any three players (2016) by John Lely (melodica), Simon Limbrick (vibraphone), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello). A grey, bent interior horizon (2016) by Cristian Alvear (guitar), Distributed tourism (2014/17) by Mira Benjamin (violin), Simon Limbrick (vibraphone), Heather Roche (clarinet), Nancy Ruffer (flute), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello).Four fine, delic…