A Closer Listen
Elegance is the key word to describe our Modern Composition slate, whose orchestral timbres speak simultaneously to mind and soul. Whether scoring the weather, remembering atrocities or challenging existing regimes, this music calls its listeners to a higher state of mind.
It’s difficult to pick a single highlight moment in this year’s slate, although two spring to mind: the real-life explosions of “Bombs of Beirut,” from Kronos Quartet & Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Jessica Moss’ all-female choir singing “No one / is free / until all are free.” In this year of meaningful music, these witnesses cut to the bone, laying bare the pain of the world, leaving listeners humbled, rejuvenating their ideals.
Cicada ~ Gazing the Shades of White (flau)
We begin with an album about nature, although every modern album about nature is fraught by threats to its sustainability. Gazing the Shades of White is a gorgeous suite that follows the paths of glaciers, marveling at the impact they leave behind while musing on their future. As the world’s ice and snow continue to recede, the whole concept of winter is redefined. While acknowledging this looming crisis, the album comes across as an expression of wonderment. (Richard Allen)
Original Review
Guy Buttery ~ Orchestrations
If there’s anything that defines these Orchestrations of folk and jazz guitar pieces, it’s playfulness. All the best collaborations are the result of play, and Chris Letcher’s arrangements, which incorporate an impressive array of guest musicians, turn Buttery’s compositions into blooming flowers, a great landscape of colorfully hybrid sprouts. Let it guide you towards the sun, so you may also lull and sway alongside them in this bright, windy day. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
Hania Rani ~ Non Fiction (Decca)
Nothing can move you like non fiction. Reality often seems to be romance manifest, a structure of feeling elaborately extended over life itself: as a contemporary composition, this concerto brings with it the historical baggage of those who saw an intensity beyond time in the ephemeral flashes of everyday occurrence. You need only look at the vital mise-en-scène before your eyes – it contains a miracle, a wonder, a concrete myth. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
Jessica Moss ~ Unfolding (Constellation)
Unfolding is a profound, politically urgent work born from the artist’s direct response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Moss constructs two long-form compositions that move from mournful introspection to a potent, collective incantation, layering ceremonial violin drones with elegiac chimes, field recordings, and, on standout track “One, Now,” the paintbrush drumming of Tony Buck. The album culminates in the devastating choral finale “until all are free,” a secular hymn that transforms personal grief into a public invocation for solidarity. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Original Review
Kronos Quartet & Mary Kouyoumdjian ~ WITNESS (Phenotypic Recordings)
The album confronts the Armenian Genocide and the Lebanese Civil War with a clarity and gravity that resist the hollow familiarity of the lacrimosa. WITNESS roots itself in lived experience: field recordings from Beirut’s bombed-out streets, folk songs, and the harrowing testimonies of survivors who speak of women drowning themselves to avoid dishonour and of families erased overnight—“I lost in one night between 15 to 20 immediate family.” The simple but devastating refrain, “I was young but I still remember” encapsulates the spirit of the work, bearing witness. By weaving these voices into the quartet’s tense, eruptive textures, the work invites not just reflection but empathy—an insistence on seeing and hearing what history too often buries. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Original Review
Macie Stewart ~ When the Distance Is Blue (International Anthem)
Macie Stewart crafts a love letter to liminal spaces on When the Distance Is Blue. The Chicago multi-instrumentalist collages prepared piano improvisations, field recordings from global travels, and lush string quartet arrangements into a cinematic song cycle. Inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s writing, the album evokes the melancholic beauty of transience, capturing airport echoes, Parisian stairwells, and Tokyo fish markets as fleeting moments of reflection. An elegant, ambient work where found sounds and formal composition blur, offering a serene companion for life’s in-between states. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Original Review
Meriheini Luoto ~ Talven uneen vaipuen (Falling Into Winter’s Sleep)
Meriheini Luoto gathers an ensemble of ensembles for this gorgeous celebration of the sounds of winter. Released just in time for the Finnish snow, Falling Into Winter’s Sleep suggests the sound of sleet on windows, accumulating drifts, animals burrowing deep, flocks flying south and finally the spring thaw: not through field recordings but instrumentation. The center lies still, a vast plain of white; the action occurs at the edges, especially the percussion that suggests an emerging spring. (Richard Allen)
Original Review
Natalia Tsupryk & Neil Cowley ~ There Was a Field
There Was a Field captures the rare electricity of music made without editing, discussion, or hesitation. Violinist Maria Tsupryk and pianist Neil Cowley meet in a space of gentle tones and light-hearted moods, each giving the other just enough room to breathe and respond. Their interplay never settles for the obvious: melodies emerge with a quiet certainty, interventions are subtle but deeply felt, and the music displays the kind of intuitive patience that can only happen when both performers listen as intently as they play. The result is an EP that feels perfectly formed yet utterly unforced, its softness carrying an almost luminous clarity. There Was a Field is a small, quiet marvel, an improvised conversation that blooms into something quietly radiant. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Ukrainian Field Notes XLIV
Rebecca Foon & Aliayta Foon-Dancoes ~ Reverie (Constellation)
We often understand dreams as light ephemeralities, a flight of fancy, but real dreams and nightmares are intensive processes of a mind partially unraveling. The contemplation suggested by the album art and track titles is far from passive: its dynamism is rooted in the expressionist unfolding of a natural reasonability, its melodies an appeal to sway alongside trees, its impressionistic moments of stillness an invitation to let their leaves touch our sensibility like they do the stream’s slow surface. Embrace the daydream, fall infinitely into the world’s hidden crevices. (David Murrieta Flores)
Original Review
Valentina Goncharova ~ Campanelli (Hidden Harmony Recordings)
Campanelli reveals Valentina Goncharova not only as a boundary-dissolving performer but as a composer who treats sound as a living, breathing force. The music feels conjured rather than composed—shamanic, immediate, and imbued with a childlike sense of abandon. Goncharova traces a spiritual arc that moves between plaintive introspection and playful mischief: the quiet melancholy of “Hut in the Mountains” sits alongside the sly exuberance of “Halloween.” Framing the journey are the titular “Campanelli” tracks, ritualistic moments built from bells and Tibetan bowls that function as both invocation and interlude. Listening becomes a meditative, regenerative experience. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Ukrainian Field Notes XLII
Wed Dec 17 00:01:05 GMT 2025