Amplified Imagination is a portrait of Sarah Nemtsov built from five works of 2013 to 2015 in which amplification, effect pedals, a loop station and a groovebox sit inside the chamber ensemble. Her music layers sound into a dense, many-sided vision of urban life, confusing, energetic and at times nerve-wracking. In her words, it has to do with "the tension between consequence and chaos". All five works are first recordings.

Nemtsov was born in Oldenburg in 1980. She studied composition in Hannover with Nigel Osborne and Johannes Schöllhorn and then in Berlin with Walter Zimmermann, and also trained as an oboist. She has composed full-time since 2007, has taught composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg since 2022, and is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Three groups share the disc: Ensemble Adapter, the Sonar Quartett and members of ensemble mosaik, with the composer herself on Electribe SX. It is a coproduction with Deutschlandfunk.

The centrepiece is Zimmer I-III (2013), a layering for eight musicians: amplified harp, kaoss pad, amplified bass flute, bass clarinet, laptops and amplified string quartet. Here Nemtsov moves between an "aesthetic of fragility" and "the courage to be ugly", using analogue effect devices and theatrical gestures. Three chamber pieces of 2014 extend the Zimmer series, with electronics acting as an "inherent counterpoint". The title work, for flute, headphones, Electribe SX and tape, sets layers of acoustic reality against each other. Drummed Variation, for "no drum set" and kaoss pad, evokes the patterns of techno-like music, and Implicated Amplification puts a bass clarinet through three effect pedals and a looper into manic worlds of repetition.

The disc opens with White Eyes Erased (2014/15) for keyboard and drum set, fourteen and a half minutes in which Schott hears a flood of energy reaching far beyond the academic propriety of much new music. At over twenty minutes, Zimmer I-III closes the programme in four sections. Nemtsov's later work moved to larger stages: her opera OPHELIA was premiered at the Saarländisches Staatstheater in 2023, and her tetralogy TZIMTZUM in Essen the same year, with the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Peter Rundel.

CD, Wergo WER 7366 2, released in 2018, a coproduction with Deutschlandfunk.