Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer, clarinetist, and central figure in the Wandelweiser collective, presents three recent chamber works—all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, with one piece featuring the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa. These compositions mark a significant evolution in Frey's aesthetic. As Ian Mikyska of the Prague collective explains, "Jürg is neither writing the music he used to write nor writing the music that anyone expects of him"—moving beyond both his earlier radical minimalism and his more Romantic-leaning pieces to explore new formal approaches concerning memory, time, and phrase structure.

The album features three pieces spanning 2022-2024: the title track Longing Landscape (35:57), The sound never has walls (19:42), and Fleetingness (12:33). The Prague Quiet Music Collective—formed in 2021 by musicians deeply immersed in reductionism, post-minimalism, and the Wandelweiser aesthetic—comprises Anna Paulová (bass clarinet), Ian Mikyska (electric guitar & viola da gamba), Milan Kárník Jakeš (violin), Luan Gonçalves (double bass), and Renata Raková (clarinet). On Fleetingness, they're joined by asamisimasa: Morten Barrikmo (bass clarinet), Tanja Orning (cello), Anders Førisdal (electric guitar), and Håkon Stene (percussion).

Longing Landscape, the album's centerpiece and longest composition, introduces a distinctive formal approach. The piece divides into three sections. The outer sections (A and C) employ what Mikyska calls a "list" structure: "Each instrument is presented with a set of vertically ordered materials that they can play at any time, but they must be played in order, in tempo, and without repetitions. As a player, you are simply asked to listen to the situation and place the sounds in time." A slow melody—a kind of cantus firmus—threads through this material, passed between instruments in section A and sustained by e-bow guitar in section C.

The middle section is perhaps the most remarkable. Built on a slow 13-bar loop, it creates what Mikyska describes as "tonal music that doesn't quite go anywhere." Each of the four instruments enters in succession with different material, then switches to new 13-bar phrases in a gradual, imperceptible cycle. Mikyska notes: "The loop is too long and too complex to really be perceived consciously, but it certainly has a perceptual effect; a slow, gradual realisation. It's similar to what happens with musical memory in some of the long Feldman pieces like Piano and String Quartet, but even more stretched out and with a lot more tonal variety."

The harmonic language throughout these pieces occupies what Mikyska characterizes as "a strange borderland between consonance and dissonance—as soon as you feel you've settled in to a familiar tonal landscape, there are new notes shifting you elsewhere."  The sound never has walls distills the "list" concept further, while adding new possibilities for interaction between the musicians' list-based playing and additions to the guitar's melodic material. Fleetingness, written for the combined eight-piece ensemble, expands the concept dramatically: instead of lists consisting of individual notes, entire pages of music serve as the basic unit, with each page playable by any instrument and repeatable (except page IV). This creates, as Mikyska puts it, "a larger and freer playing field, though still emphasising one's responsibility to the others."

The Prague Quiet Music Collective's formation story reveals their commitment to this repertoire. Founded by Mikyska in 2021 with longtime collaborators Jakeš and Gonçalves—both equally at home in jazz, free improvisation, and experimental music—the ensemble expanded with clarinetist Anna Paulová, a Mozart concerto soloist who is "genuinely just as happy riding in a packed car to play four notes in the space of an hour in an empty factory near Opava as she is being the star soloist in Europe's gilded halls." The ensemble's manager Nikola Štefková serves as what Mikyska calls "the heart and soul" of the group.

Mikyska recalls rehearsing with Frey: "In rehearsal, composers can frustrate musicians by either having an idea that's too clear or not clear enough. Jürg has a way of doing neither: of not really talking that much about how we're playing the piece, but rather of what the piece is about; what he imagined the piece could do and be... All this happens in quite abstract terms, and yet at the end, you feel like you've understood something and your being inside the piece starts to make more sense." He adds that when Frey did offer specific direction, it was often unexpected: "I remember a lot of phrases like 'faster and louder', 'swinging, like jazz', 'more in tempo, with a clear pulse.'"