On Single Track, Michael Winter delivers an exercise in continuous transformation, realized by Liminar with a deftness that makes process audible without diminishing expressive intimacy. The work opens in a blur of kinetic string textures, mapping a single gestural arc that narrows and distills over the course of forty-six minutes. Through the canon form, what begins as a flurry of interconnected voices decelerates stepwise, granting each timbral shift and harmonic overtone maximum clarity. As the sequence of seven variations unfolds, the sense of motion slows so gradually that the change often feels imperceptible, yet this slowness draws out fine distinctions in articulation and sonority usually hidden by musical momentum. Liminar’s interpretation holds a tightrope balance between analytic transparency and a tangible sense of internal energy, maintaining acute focus even as the music traverses near-stasis in the final sections. The piece never lapses into austerity for its own sake; fleeting returns of prior material, and the cumulative effect of previous passages, create a subtle narrative that rewards attentive, repeated listening.
Where much of Winter’s oeuvre is marked by collaborative shaping and liminal processes, Single Track distills these tendencies, using the canon’s framework as both boundary and catalyst. The resulting album is less about cinematic drama than the poised unveiling of musical time – each section opening into the next, each gesture retaining hints of the previous while offering new facets. Like the best releases on Another Timbre, this music is resolutely unsentimental but far from impersonal, cultivating its expressivity through patience, control, and the inherent curiosity that comes from inhabiting a single idea so completely. Single Track emerges as a quietly audacious statement on what can be heard and discovered when movement itself becomes the site of musical invention. Rather than seeking grand proclamations, Winter and Liminar allow the slow tightening and release of form to become content, best experienced in a single, undistracted sitting.
