In Muto Infinitas, Catherine Lamb extends her distinctive approach to microtonality and just intonation, crafting a forty-minute dialogue for quartertone bass flute and double bass performed by Rebecca Lane and Jon Heilbron. The recording, realized without electronic alteration, invites deep listening, unspooling at an unhurried pace in a luminous acoustic field. Lamb’s music here is uncompromising in its patience: the two musicians linger in the borderlands of pitch and timbre, carving out a space where minute inflections suddenly gain expressive weight.
Written over several years specifically for Lane and Heilbron - both accomplished interpreters of spectral and microtonal repertoire - the piece distills Lamb’s characteristic focus on harmonic interplay, difference tones, and modal drift. Unlike her more lush ensemble works, Muto Infinitasoperates within an intentionally restricted pitch space: the instruments at times seem to hover in place, their lines weaving and splitting, producing subtle beating patterns and spectral resonances that evoke a sense of stilled movement. Lamb’s compositional method encourages each performer to shape the harmonic environment with extraordinary restraint, drawing attention to the moments when silence is breached, or a new interval blooms on the margins.
The music’s starkness does not preclude expressive color. Instead, the limited instrumentation and pitch range invite the listener to focus intently on shifting nuances and the play of psychoacoustic phenomena. The result is a piece that balances abstraction and intimacy, the harmonic field “containing the musicians inside a rarefied environment, a world that can define its own passing of time”. Despite its apparent austerity, the recording resonates with a faint folkish trace and gentle lyricism, offering moments of peculiarly affecting warmth, particularly in the unique sonorities of the bass flute and double bass in just intonation.
Muto Infinitas embodies Lamb’s ongoing fascination with the infinite within the finite, using modest materials to create a vast perceptual landscape. This is music less for casual background than for attentive immersion. In a world intoxicated by immediacy, Lamb’s composition asks for - and amply rewards - slowness and receptivity. These qualities, together with the performance’s sensitivity and the natural acoustic setting, distinguish the album as a compelling testament to the contemporary search for new forms of resonance, intimacy, and shared listening.
