Traces is a portrait of the chamber music of Detlev Müller-Siemens, four works for strings and piano written between 2002 and 2009 and played by the Mondrian Ensemble Basel. In them the calm and thoughtfulness of the form contrast with an inner turbulence: the musical language goes its own way and follows no pre-existing patterns. Two of the pieces are written in memory of György Ligeti, the composer's former teacher.

Müller-Siemens was born in Hamburg in 1957 and studied at the Hamburg Musikhochschule from 1970, where Ligeti taught composition from 1973. He works as both composer and conductor. The Mondrian Ensemble, a piano quartet founded in Basel in 2000, won the Nicati competition for the interpretation of contemporary music soon after its foundation. Two of the works here are dedicated to it. The recording is a co-production with Radio SRF 2 Kultur.

The String Trio (2002) has two movements. In the composer's words, the first is "torn, disjunct, often motoric", built from sharply contrasting sections that belong to several very different structural layers. The second is more unified: a fragile, hesitant, ascending melody, over which a short "presto-lamento" is laid near the end. In distant traces (2007) for violin, viola and piano, the piano has a double role, first a background of chords tending towards clusters for the fragmented string melodies, then a melodic, speaking actor. In ...called dusk (2008-09) for cello and piano a Kaddish remains inaudible as such, projected into the overtone spectrum "like light fragmented through a prism". Its notes divide the cello strings to produce the corresponding harmonics, and both instruments develop this material in different directions.

Müller-Siemens describes the result as a chimera, "different creatures that belong to the same body". distant traces and ...called dusk both carry the dedication "in memoriam György Ligeti", who died in 2006. The piano quartet lost traces (2007), also written for the Mondrian Ensemble, closes the disc: the music follows traces to find its way, loses them, pauses disoriented and seems for a moment to be entirely by itself before taking up the search again.

CD, Wergo WER 7310 2, released in 2014 (70'24").