★Kairos
Geister
This double album with compositions from the last two decades offers an insight into the diverse musical soundscape of Joël-François Durand. From Mirror Land (2005) to Geister, schwebende Geister... (2020), Durand’s work shows a unique development ch…
Khôra
The cycle Khôra, featuring saxophone quartet and microtonal accordion, explores the dynamic interplay between sound, philosophy, and space. Inspired by Plato’s Timaeus and Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretation of Khôra, the nine pieces challenge traditi…
Passage
Jason Eckardt’s composition Passage is a profound exploration of the unsettling history surrounding the CIA’s interest in sensory deprivation and its impact on human psychology. Divided into three movements – Subject, Ascension, and Testify – Eckardt…
Infinita Domenica
Tip! For José Manuel López López it is essential to approach the works on this album with an open mind and to explore other forms of instrumental expressivity and sonic emotionality. He draws significant conclusions from these seemingly fragile figur…
Paesaggi con macerie
“Not all artists manifest social and political ideals. This is a contradictory fact in itself, since they are committed to improving society,” says Salvatore Sciarrino in his album Paesaggi con macerie, which presents four remarkable recordings for e…
musique noire
Julia Purgina’s works tell musical stories. Abstract stories, which usually initiate her working process. It is her goal “to write works that are clearly located in the present through their musical language and by speaking of the present, but which …
Lauschgut. Works for (Inside) Piano (1989–2022)
“In art, you can have a look at the world as the world wouldn’t see itself. I find that incredibly exciting,” says Charlotte Seither, presenting ten outstanding works for piano written between 1989 and 2022 – over a period of 33 years. All of these w…
Born In Waves
“Born in Waves is Estonian composer Elis Hallik’s first album, a gateway into the sounds and thoughts of an original artist. The album mainly features chamber compositions that represent important ideas from her oeuvre over the past decade. A versati…
Works for Amplified Piano(s)
With this album, Yoshiko Shimizu presents a second outstanding recording of works for amplified piano(s) by American composer George Crumb, being the only pianist who has created ‘solo’ realizations of his compositions Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmo…
Propagation of Uncertainty
"Olivier Messiaen once said that all you need to make music is a note and silence. For the composer Arash Yazdani, born in 1985 and raised in Isfahan, Iran (and now based in Tallinn, Estonia), a slightly adapted adage applies: All you need to make mu…
Femenine
"Femenine stages Eastman’s shaping and buildingof the black queer masculine form – caught notnecessarily between two poles of gender, but withhis work constantly driving his own self-making.He was an inventor and sculptor, reminiscent of Jean Tinguel…
Quaderno Di Strada
"Sciarrino is an important, and distinctive, figure in the Italian avant-garde. The present work is a setting of thirteen brief texts (its subtitle is ’12 canti e un proverbio’, twelve songs and a proverb) for baritone and 14 instrumentalists – the b…
Annunciation Triptych
"All is alive in Liza Lim's music, permeated by unstressed urgency. It's hard to think of anything less Kafkaesque than her Annunciation Triptych, in which she shatters the Romantic trope to pieces, rebuilds it in other ways, and uses the orchestra a…
Encyclopedia of Pitch and Deviation
Matthias Kranebitter has written the odd piece without electronics in the past. However, the use of electronics in his music usually is a given. At the same time, the way in which electronics are employed in his work is anything but a matter of cours…
Sensational Bliss
"In the past, I was interested in themes of sound, such as, 'new sound', 'expressive sound' and 'metaphoric sound'. In fact, I still enjoy these expressions. However, my obsession with expressing sound itself has decreased, and I instead want to expr…
Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions
If you enter into the music of Martin Smolka, prepare yourself to come face-to-face with profound and enigmatic conflicts. The music of Martin Smolka resonates straight into the core of a suffocated planet, suffering through unending catastrophes in …
Moon on the Sea – Sea in the Moon
If you enter into the music of Martin Smolka, prepare yourself to come face-to-face with profound and enigmatic conflicts. The music of Martin Smolka resonates straight into the core of a suffocated planet, suffering through unending catastrophes in …
Trostlieder
"Commenting on the folly of war, eight independent voices and texts compete for attention, reflecting the tumult of emotions...The impeccable recording quality allows us to appreciate the fine..." — Gramophone Magazine
A Thing Made Whole
In music, we don't tend to talk about things. We're too concerned about the meaning of the story, about the dynamics of the performance, the reception, the syntax, the gesture, the movement; we're too concerned about how a sound got here, where it ca…
Little Jimmy
e piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place.