★Another Timbre
Early To Late
Early to Late presents an inspired commission for Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey, inviting each to compose for Ensemble Grizzana using the same brief: build a new work from Renaissance fragments. Granberg’s “How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights?” draws on William Byrd’s choral music, transforming melodic kernels into shimmering, spectral textures. Ensemble voices - celesta, glass harp, dulcimer, violin, winds - float through cycles of open-form improvisation and carefully weighted silence. The res…
Chamber and Field Works 2015 - 2017
Bruno Duplant’s Chamber and Field Works is a double album that elegantly straddles the boundaries between composed and environmental sound. On disc one, the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble brings to life three works composed between 2015 and 2017: “all that I learned and then forgot,” “where our dreams get lost,” and “a place of possibilities.” Duplant’s music here is characterized by extended tones, elongated melodies, and the intricate balancing of classical instruments - string, wind, and subtle …
Do Nothing
Do Nothing distills the philosophy and craft of Clara de Asís into a series of luminous solo statements realized for acoustic guitar and percussion. Each piece - “Do Nothing,” “Know Nothing,” “Nothing lasts I,” “Say Nothing,” “Nothing lasts II,” and “Be Nothing” - explores a different approach to sparseness and resonance, with de Asís charting a path that is precise yet open to surprise. Repetition, ringing harmonics, subtle percussive gestures, and the careful arrangement of silence define the …
13 & 27
13 & 27, realized by The Insub Meta Orchestra and composed by Cyril Bondi & d’incise, unfolds as a double suite exploring the power and flexibility of the large electroacoustic ensemble. Recorded in Geneva with 32 musicians, each part is shaped by precise, minimalist instructions - players are limited to a handful of possible gestures, often just two sounds per person or long filaments of feedback. This framework, restrictive on the surface, opens a field of possibilities for dynamic interaction…
Collection Gustave Roud
Collection Gustave Roud is a double album presenting five quietly radiant works by Swiss composer Jürg Frey, each created in dialogue with the poet and photographer Gustave Roud. The pieces - realized by a remarkable ensemble including Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh, Regula Konrad, and others - parse the space between nature and imagination, fragment and wholeness. Frey’s music is intimately bound to Roud’s texts, which trace the passing of seasons, the mystery of the Haut-Jorat landsc…
Ockeghem Octets
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 pr…
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello marks the culmination of Morton Feldman’s late chamber writing, recorded at Henry Wood Hall in London in 2017 by a quartet comprised of Mark Knoop (piano), Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Bridget Carey (viola), and Anton Lukoszevieze (cello). The composition, premiered in 1987, unspools over seventy-five minutes as an unhurried expanse - a landscape where micro-variations bring fragile changes within near-stasis, and the weight of each chord, sustain, and silence is palpab…
Spinet and Violin
Spinet & Violin captures an extended, unedited improvisation by Christoph Schiller and Morgan Evans-Weiler, recorded at Schiller’s workshop in Basel during Evans-Weiler’s European tour. In this single-track work, the duo operates with rare intensity and mutual instinct, favouring gradual permutations of pitch and the slow revelation of timbre. Schiller’s prepared spinet, played with plucking, muting, and inside techniques, forms a delicate alloy with Evans-Weiler’s violin, which hovers between f…
Places and Pages
Places and Pages gathers fifty text scores from Ryoko Akama, performed by an ensemble comprising Akama herself, Cristian Alvear, Cyril Bondi, D’incise, Stefan Thut, and Christian Müller. Each miniature acts as a sonic experiment - many lasting under a minute, some stretching further - where single instructions (“strike one page,” “listen to the laces slowing down,” “roll a ball until it stops”) yield fragile, ephemeral performances. The project, realized in Switzerland, embraces open instrumenta…
Harmony
With Harmony, Berlin-based Canadian composer Marc Sabat presents three substantial pieces for strings, performed by Jack Quartet - Ari Streisfeld and Christopher Otto (violins), John Pickford Richards (viola), and Kevin McFarland (cello) - with appearances by Christopher Otto (violin) and Kevin McFarland (cello) in a duo. Sabat’s oeuvre stands at the forefront of contemporary explorations of pitch and tuning, weaving rigorous systems of just intonation into scores that privilege sensitivity, lyr…
During a Lifetime
During a Lifetime stands as a portrait of Toronto-born, Berlin-based composer Chiyoko Szlavnics, commissioning three major pieces: “During a Lifetime” (2015), “Freehand Poitras” (2008), and “Reservoir” (2006). Szlavnics’s music is marked by tender asceticism and an immersive approach to process - her scores privilege long sustained notes, slow pitch glissandi, and luminous combinations of sinewaves with wind and string ensembles.
The title piece features Konus Quartett (four saxophones) entwined…
Drifter
Drifter marks the beginning of Another Timbre’s Canadian Composers Series, assembling ten pieces from Linda Catlin Smith dating from 1995 to 2015. The album is a crossroads of chamber color, poised restraint, and poetic clarity - performed by members of Apartment House and Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini in a spirit of intimate collaboration. Smith’s writing privileges patient melody and delicate counterpoint, bridging tough compositional rigor with textures of shimmering mystery.
The double disc jou…
Resonators
Resonators documents a distinctive trio - George Cremaschi (double bass, electronics), Irene Kepl (violin, electronics), and Petr Vrba (trumpet, clarinet, electronics) - whose central aim is to use the acoustics of resonant spaces as a compositional force. Recorded in a monastery in Bechyne and a hall in Valdstejn Loggia, the album’s four tracks are colored by echo, mingling long droning tones, drifting feedback, and abrupt outbursts with the ambient noises of stone and air. The ensemble’s metho…
Cantilena
Six chamber works by the Paris-based composer Giuliano d'Angiolini, following on from his exquisite album 'Simmetrie di Ritorno' on Edition RZ.
“A port in the storm, this. Giuliano d’Angiolini is a Paris-based Italian composer and ethnomusicologist who makes music of whispered, consolatory indeterminacy. He is probably best known (if he is known at all) for a 2011 album called Simmetrie di Ritorno, but I would argue that this new release is more sublime, or perhaps just more t…
For Clarinet (And Piano)
Clarinet (and Piano) brings together Amsterdam composer Dante Boon and Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey for three works at the porous boundary of composition and improvisation. In the long opening duo “O’Hare,” Boon’s gentle piano arpeggios glow beside Frey’s quietly expressive clarinet, combining spiraling lyricism with stately stillness across nearly twenty-five minutes. The piece unfolds in a gradual arc, eschewing conventional development for the slow revelation of timbre and intervallic resonanc…
Dirt Road
Receiving the Approaching Memory, composed in 2011 for Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop, is among Bryn Harrison’s most celebrated works - an extended meditation on memory, recognition, and the evolving experience of musical time. The piece unfolds in five substantial sections, each built around networks of repetitive figures that spiral and shimmer, gradually reducing the pitch material from full chromaticism to only two common notes by the end. Rather than simply repeating, Harrison’s patterns m…
Dirt Road
Dirt Road stands as a milestone in Linda Catlin Smith's catalogue - a single work expanding over an hour, composed in 2005 and commissioned for dance. Performed by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Simon Limbrick (percussion), the piece moves through fifteen loosely connected movements, each open to interpretation and marked by Smith’s trademark transparency. The violin floats above sparse percussion gestures - wood, metal, vibraphone, and bowls - sometimes in suspended dialogue, sometimes drifting acr…
Volume
Illogical Harmonies is the collaborative project of Berlin residents Johnny Chang (violin) and Mike Majkowski (double bass). Their album Volume presents fifty-four minutes of highly focused, acoustic improvisation - five tracks, each marked by an almost ritual commitment to duration, a fascination with harmonic overlap, and an ongoing search for balance between individual and ensemble sound. Eschewing quick changes or dramatic gesture, Chang and Majkowski operate in a zone of gradual development…
Ffansïon | Fancies
Ffansion | Fancies, voted one of the year’s best albums by BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, documents the rare rapport between Welsh violinist Angharad Davies and Berlin-based pianist Tisha Mukarji. Realized as part of Another Timbre’s “Violin +1” series, the album paints a spacious landscape of improvised textures, blending prepared piano with close-miked virtuosic violin in St Catherine’s Church, London. Davies and Mukarji relinquish self-consciousness and allow the instruments to propose the musi…
Goldsmiths
Goldsmiths gathers a distinguished sextet into an evocative session at St James Hatcham Church, South London: John Tilbury (piano), Angharad Davies and Lina Lapelyte (violins, Lapelyte also on voice), Michael Duch (double bass), John Lely (objects, electronics, melodica), and Rhodri Davies (electric harp, melodica). Against a backdrop of rich acoustics, the album presents four pieces - three composed (Sarah Hughes’ "A Reward is Offered," John Lely’s "DawnChorus," Jürg Frey’s "Für sieben" for sep…