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, textures, resonances, and accidents become central, and the performance environment itself infuses the music with ambient detail.​

Tracks like “a field, next to nothing” and “grade two” employ simple, sustained chords and narrowly-spaced intervals, allowing sound to emerge as miniature pulses or washes. Over the album’s 57 minutes, timbral shifts happen almost in slow motion - electronics blend with acoustic instruments, percussive artifacts glint amid sustained tones, and silence stretches long enough to become a field for focused listening. The ensemble’s sensitivity to both individual gesture and group sound traces the album’s intimate, conversational arc; each piece unfolds as a mutual act of attention, contingent and alive to the frailties of live performance.

Next to Nothing is music of thoughtful risk and gentle radicalism. Akama, Lash, and Duplant reject spectacle, summoning music from near-invisibility and the overlap of action with non-action. Listeners are invited not just to hear, but to inhabit and co-create meaning in the open spaces left by each gesture. The album stands as a testament to what chamber music can become: a meditation on presence, listening, and shared contingency, where texture and resonance mean more than melody or rhythm, and where nothingness proves quietly generative.