In the final decade of his life, Morton Feldman turned his attention to the trio format with an intensity that would yield some of the most profound and uncompromising music of the twentieth century. Between 1978 and 1984, he composed three monumental works for flute, piano and percussion that together constitute an immense meditation on time, memory and the irreducible strangeness of sound itself. This landmark 6CD box set from Another Timbre presents all three pieces — totalling six and a half hours of music — in performances of extraordinary sensitivity and commitment by the GBSR Duo (pianist Siwan Rhys and percussionist George Barton) joined by flautist Taylor MacLennan.

The journey begins with Why Patterns? (1978), a work that already announces Feldman's late-period concerns: the patient unfolding of near-static sonorities, the delicate interplay of timbres hovering at the threshold of audibility, the sense of patterns emerging and dissolving like half-remembered dreams. At just under thirty minutes, it serves as a gateway into the vast temporal landscapes that would follow.

Crippled Symmetry (1983) extends this vision across ninety minutes of music that seems to exist outside ordinary time. The title, borrowed from an essay on Islamic art, points to Feldman's fascination with asymmetrical repetition — patterns that return but never quite the same, like the intricate geometries of Persian rugs that the composer collected and studied obsessively. Piano, celesta, flutes and metallic percussion weave a hypnotic tapestry of extraordinary delicacy.

The culmination arrives with For Philip Guston (1984), Feldman's tribute to his friend, the painter who had died four years earlier. The close friendship between Feldman and Guston had collapsed in 1970, an estrangement that would endure until the painter's death a decade later. Four years after that loss, Feldman dedicated this contemplative epic to his late friend and to their lost friendship — a work that conjures an emotionally complex world of hazy perceptions and hazier reflections. At four hours and forty minutes, it stands among the longest continuous works in the chamber music repertoire. As the hushed tones of piano, flutes, celesta and metallic percussion cluster in complex soft-focus rhythms, at some points cohering around snatches of melody, at others scattering to explore seemingly unrelated ideas, Feldman explores the limits of memory and half-recollection — traversing and re-traversing the same terrain with deceptively sure tread, leading the listener towards a poignant, perhaps devastating, conclusion.