On Da lontano the trombonist Mike Svoboda casts sidelights on four figures of new music. Late pieces by Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) and Luigi Nono (1924-1990) sit beside derivations from major works by John Cage (1912-1992) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), and each is moved into a new space by Svoboda's reading, on trombone, tuba and voice.

Svoboda is joined in the Nono piece by Holger Stenschke, who handles the live electronics. The disc is a coproduction with Deutschlandfunk. Svoboda was born on Guam in 1960, grew up in Chicago and worked with Stockhausen for twelve years. That link goes back a long way: the composer discovered him as a young musician, and from the start Svoboda was associated with the trombone role of Lucifer in the opera cycle LICHT.

Scelsi did not see himself as the author of Mantram, canto anonimo (1987), the five-minute opening track: by his own account he received the music from other spheres and acted as an intermediary between two worlds. The piece was not written for any particular instrument or voice, and Svoboda gives it shape close to speech, in a declamatory pattern of breath, voice and sound. Solo for Sliding Trombone (1957-58) comes from Cage's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Svoboda made a version for eight trombones and plays all of them himself, and the multiplied solo part opens up a great variety of sound and silence over fifteen minutes. Signale zur Invasion, I (1993), here for solo trombone, belongs to LICHT, Stockhausen's cycle of seven operas, in which Lucifer is represented by a trombonist.

Nono invented the genre of the post-prae-ludium, a music that plays “after” and “before” at once, gradually piling up sound events into a hovering presence. In Post-prae-ludium per Donau (1987) Svoboda's tuba actions are multiplied and rearranged by the live-electronics sound designer, creating a continuous spatial polyphony. At almost fourteen minutes it closes a disc of 45 minutes, whose Italian title means “from afar”.

CD, Wergo WER 6744 2, released in 2012.