From its very first shimmer, Nova Atlantis feels like a threshold slowly brightening, a sonic coastline where centuries meet and dissolve into one another rather than remaining neatly on opposite shores. Miako Klein, moving between Baroque violin, recorder, and electronics, and Jia Lim, tending a replica harpsichord entwined with circuitry, do not merely revive the past or ornament the present. They braid them into a single breathing organism whose pulse is at once archival and prophetic. The album drifts outward from Francis Bacon’s unfinished 1626 vision of a knowledge-bound utopia, yet it refuses the posture of illustration. Instead, Bacon’s imagined
Read moreVita Morgana is the latest album devoted to the work of Greek composer and producer Thanos Chrysakis, released on his own Aural Terrains imprint, a label name that already gestures toward topography, strata, and the slow intelligence of landscapes. The program gathers three earlier works alongside more recent compositions, most of them written for solo flutes in varied incarnations. Performed with unwavering focus and artistic integrity by Wilfrido Terrazas, this recording offers an experience that invites one to wander rather than to map. For listeners attuned to contemporary practices in which sound behaves as an ecology, Vita Morgana is essential.
Read moreSome composers refine the language they inherit. Others trouble it, bend it, and compel it to confess what it would rather conceal. Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) belongs to the latter lineage. His music does not decorate Baroque convention so much as interrogate it from within, testing how much strain the form can bear before it reveals something truer than elegance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the six Trio Sonatas, ZWV 181. To encounter them is to overhear the composer thinking aloud: restless, contrarian, devout, and faintly dangerous. Zelenka came to Dresden as a virtuoso of the orchestra’s lowest
Read moreA veneer is a promise made by surfaces. It is the thin layer we polish so the hand does not snag on splinters, the face we present so the wound can breathe without being seen. Stephen Upshaw’s debut recording understands this double bind with unnerving clarity. Across four works, his viola does not seek to anesthetize pain but study it as a corporeal fact, as memory lodged in muscle and bone, as a story retold until it becomes survivable. The cumulative effect is that of the self in rehearsal, learning how to carry its history forward without collapsing beneath it.
Read moreThe first rule of MANTRA is “You do not talk about MANTRA.” The second rule is that if you find yourself unable to stop thinking about MANTRA, you talk around it, circle it, cultivate the soil from which it grows. That is how this album begins, not with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s looming monolith, but with John Liberatore’s Sedgeflowers, a choice that feels both mischievous and deeply principled. Pianists Ryan McCullough and Andrew Zhou do not kick down the door. They plant something. And what emerges is an astonishingly inventive and coherent program that understands that radicalism is a spirited little ouroboros
Read moreValentin Silvestrov emerges from the late Soviet classical tradition as a figure of quiet resistance, not through overt polemic but by turning inward when history demanded proclamations. While many composers of his generation negotiated the pressures of socialist realism or the rigor of the avant-garde, Silvestrov gradually chose another path, treating music as an echo rather than a declaration. But he carried it further, dissolving form until what remained was remembrance itself. In his hands, composition became a kind of afterlife, where melody appears already worn by time, as if it remembers having been heard before. Handsome Skies, as realized
Read moreReleased on Thanos Chrysakis’s Aural Terrains label, Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes unfolds as a considered gathering of voices. The instrumentation itself suggests a downward gravity, an attraction to breath, wood, and string as sites of glorious friction. Across the program, Jason Alder, Tim Hodgkinson, Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, and Lori Freedman inhabit the lower reeds with an intimacy that borders on corporeal. Vincent Royer and Jill Valentine draw violas into their extremes in either direction, while Carla Rees and Karin de Fleyt allow flutes to hover, flicker, and occasionally wound the air. The album opens with Gérard
Read morePainful footsteps are behind me Here you stand so clear and far Through the willows all I see is a lonely burning star –Thor Lange, “Sun at Rest” Cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen and bassist Mathæus Bech, a.k.a. LuLo, came together through a shared fascination with the singular, often-misunderstood Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952). Their approach to his music is both reverent and daring. Rather than treating the scores as sacred artifacts, they dismantled them lovingly, listening closely to recordings, transcribing passages by ear, and distilling sprawling works—from piano pieces to string quartets and symphonies—down to a page or less of
Read more“Not even Arvo Pärt’s Gregorian chants could save her.” When life tears your heart out, music has a way of suturing it back into place before you lose consciousness for good. This is what it feels like to immerse oneself in Trozos De Mí (Pieces Of Me), the latest project from Bogotá, Colombia-based pianist and composer Valentina Castillo (under the stage name Uva Lunera). Having previously explored her idiosyncratic blend of minimalism, groove, and songcraft across a travelogue of studio and live settings, she has produced what is, so far, her most intimate and transformational multimedia experience. Combining sound, text,
Read moreMany people’s first exposure to the world of Studio Ghibli and its star director, Hayao Miyazaki, was My Neighbor Totoro. For me, it was Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I will never forget my reaction to the opening sequence, during which Sheeta, the sole living heiress of the eponymous all-but-forgotten realm, falls from an airship. As she hurtles toward the earth below, eyes closed as if resigned to this tragic fate, her crystal necklace begins to glow, imbuing enough power in its slender cord to bring her to the softest of landings into the arms of protagonist Pazu. Nothing prepared
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