★Another Timbre
Awareness about
Four recent pieces by Berlin-based instrumentalist, composer and improviser,Lucio Capece, all focusing on the process of listening. One piece performed by Konzert Minimal, the others all solo performances, including Lucio's extraordinary piece at the Halle des Expositions in Evreux, France, using speakers hanging from helium balloons and location recordings through cardboard tubes.
Guitarist Alone
Jurg Frey - guitarist, alone played by Cristian Alvear. A double CD featuring all of Jurg Frey's music for solo guitar, beautifully interpreted by the Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, including a new piece written specially for Cristian. “Not one for the impatient listener, this softly entrancing double-disc set contains all the solo guitar music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey – and that means an awful lot of silence and not a huge number of notes. The first piece, Abendlied, contains exactl…
Tocando fondo
Tocando Fondo is the result of a year’s deep collaboration between Vienna-based electronics artist Klaus Filip and Argentinian trumpeter Leonel Kaplan, recorded in Buenos Aires in 2014. The album gathers two extended improvisations, both unfolding at the intersection of air, sinewaves, and architectural space. Filip’s contribution is a world of tuned sinewaves - clear, oscillating, sometimes trembling at the edge of instability - while Kaplan’s trumpet weaves arcs of breath, attack, and fragile …
Assigned #15
Assigned #15 continues James Saunders’s trajectory of modular, context-sensitive composition. Derived from his long-term project #[Unassigned], this work is scored for seven musicians - violin, viola, cello, percussion, melodica, chamber organ, and objects - each participant given bespoke instructions drawn from Saunders’s accumulated material. Apartment House’s performance (recorded at St Paul's, Huddersfield) embodies Saunders’s philosophy: structure and interpretation are reconfigured for eac…
How Deep Is The Ocean, How High Is The Sky?
Swedish composer Magnus Granberg (Skogen) places baroque instruments alongside prepared piano, objects and electronics in an exquisite 60-minute piece performed with an excellent set of performers including Cyril Bondi, d'incise, Eric Ruffing, Christoph Schiller, &c.
Grizzana And Other Pieces 2009-2014
Grizzana features Swiss composer Jürg Frey at his most introspective, realized by Ensemble Grizzana - Frey (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Richard Craig (flute), Emma Richards (viola), Philip Thomas (piano), Seth Woods (cello), and Ryoko Akama (organ & electronics). The work, together with companion pieces on the double CD Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014(Another Timbre), marks a deep engagement with sonic transparency, tension, and the delicate equilibrium found in Morandi’s painting. Ea…
Whispers
Whispers is a cycle of five idiosyncratic works spanning 2010–2014, composed and directed by Frank Denyer and performed by The Barton Workshop (with Denyer, Kiku Day, Juliet Fraser, Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenburg, Pepe Garcia Rodriguez, Dario Calderone, Bob Gilmore, Jamie Man, and others). The title track, “Whispers,” is a procession of seventeen short vocal meditations: Denyer’s own whispered, murmured, and muttered sounds traced by rare instrumental gestures- muted…
Extinguishment
Extinguishment documents the chamber dialogue between Billy Gomberg (bass guitar, electronics, recordings) and Anne Guthrie (French horn, electronics, recordings), working as Fraufraulein for Another Timbre. Recorded over several months in 2014, the album pursues a shared language of improvisation - each piece constructed from discrete performances, then woven with a common thread of minimalism, private lyricism, and environmental observation.Field recordings, manipulated live, are inseparable f…
Would Fall From The Sky, Would Wither And Die
Skuggorna och ljuset is a quintet featuring Magnus Granberg (clarinet, composition), Anna Lindal (violin), Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Kristine Scholz (prepared piano), and Erik Carlsson (percussion). Their sole album, Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die, departs from Granberg’s larger ensemble Skogen. Without electronics, the sound is more chamber-like, each gesture and note given time to settle, bloom, and fade in a gently hypnotic field.
The work transforms the harmonic material o…
Whitewashed With Lines (Common Objects)
A double CD featuring two extended live performances by the electroacoustic quartet of John Butcher (sax), Angharad Davies (violin), Rhodri Davies (harps) & Lee Patterson (amplifed devices)
Sometimes we all disappear
Sometimes We All Disappear documents the enduring collaboration between Canadian artists Jamie Drouin (suitcase modular synth, portable radio) and Lance Austin Olsen (amplified objects, audio cassettes). Recorded in Victoria, West Canada, shortly before Drouin’s move to Berlin, the album stands out for its sonic restraint, embracing environmental ambiance and field sound as active partners in music-making. Working with long takes and casual edits, the duo divides and rearranges their source impr…
Next to Nothing
Next to Nothing brings together Ryoko Akama (VCS3 synthesizer), Dominic Lash (double bass, clarinet, laptop), and Bruno Duplant (percussion, tone generator) for four works devised as text scores. Recorded in Sheffield, the album explores the hyper-minimal edges of sound, asking what music remains when nearly everything is removed - when process, gesture, and form are pared to their limits. The trio’s approach is not about the absence of activity, but about amplifying the tiniest events: tones, t…
The Harmonics of Real Strings
Four realisations of John Lely's simple but brilliant composition 'The Harmonics of Real Strings', which is basically a very slow glissando along the full length of one bowed string. Anton Lukoszevieze plays one realisation on each string of the cello, following the harmonic transformations as they occur and producing an extraordinary example of 'the virtuosity of restraint'. John Lely originally composed the piece in 2006, and it was recorded in April 2014. "When I'm composing I'm learning, ask…
Two pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969
Two Pianos and Other Pieces 1953-1969 collects the most experimental and beautiful works for multiple pianos from Morton Feldman’s formative years, exhuming scores rarely captured before - including “Two Pianos,” “Piece for Four Pianos,” “Piano Four Hands,” “Piano Three Hands,” and “Two Pieces for Three Pianos.” Led by pianists John Tilbury and Philip Thomas, the ensemble expands with strings, brass, and percussion, depending on the piece. This collection shines during passages of radical quietn…
Roananax 1999 / Obliq 2014
The Roananax / Obliq split chronicles two generations of Berlin’s radical improvisers in dialogue. On the first half, Annette Krebs (electro-acoustic guitar, mixing board), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Robin Hayward (tuba), and Andrea Neumann (inside piano, mixing board) realize five nearly motionless improvisations from 1999. Their sound world is scoured of excess: silence reigns, interrupted only by microscopic events - clicks, whispers, friction, muted resonance, and breath become the core vocabula…
Luv / Kopfuberwelle
Luv / Kopfüberwelle unfolds in two halves, each radiating the signature sensitivity of Sabine Vogel. “luv,” a nearly thirty-minute solo piece, sits at the intersection of field recording, flute improvisation, and subtle electronic manipulation. Vogel’s work with the Landscape Quartet shapes her approach, drawing not just on musical material but on a careful listening to site - birdsong, wind, water, and distant activity form a natural acoustic tapestry into which the flute dissolves and emerges.…
Chamber Works 1992 - 2009
Chamber Works 1992–2009 showcases the breadth and quirks of British composer Laurence Crane over fourteen pieces for chamber ensemble, composed across nearly two decades and interpreted by Apartment House. Crane’s language thrives on the surface simplicity of steady rhythms and legible harmonies - progressions often cycle between just two chords, melodies unfold in minimal, singing arcs. But beneath the façade, odd details and playful subversions quietly destabilize any sense of predictability: …
F23M-12: Field With Figures No. 1 - 4 / Rush!
F23M-12: Field With Figures No. 1–4 / Rush! is a distinctive entry in Another Timbre’s Berlin Series, sharing two worlds of experimental practice. In the first half, Christian Kesten and the late Mark Trayle create four pieces for voice and electronics. Kesten’s sound art blurs the line between vocal utterance and language: inhaled whispers, fricatives, murmurs, and spectral vowel shapes figure as events on a mutable sound field. Trayle’s electronics situate these gestures within shifting archit…
Pneuma
Pneuma presents five distinctive pieces by British composer Martin Iddon, performed by specialist new music ensembles. The set includes “pneuma.sarx” for Trio Atem (flute, voice, cello), “pneuma.kharis” (flute, cello, voice), “Danaë” (solo piano, Catherine Laws), and two works for larger instrumentations. Iddon’s music occupies unique territory, weaving together sparse, breathy textures and sudden shifts in color and gesture, drawing frequent reference to medieval and early Renaissance models - …
LL
LL (Another Timbre at70) chronicles the collaborative project Partial - namely, Chicago experimentalists Noe Cuellar and Joseph Clayton Mills. Commissioned as part of a site-specific installation at Pilsen Vintage and Thrift, the album uses only the sound materials found in the store’s crowded basement: toys, tools, clocks, broken dishes, odd bits of furniture, and personal relics - each object transformed into a sonic protagonist. Across “Marcel” (24:35), “Paul” (15:46), and the miniature “a si…