“Best Classical Music Albums of 2023”

Recorded by Andrew Munsey
Produced by Steven Schick and Andrew Munsey

Soundlines: On Language and the Land is the second album of Weather Systems, a three-volume recording by the “‘Philosopher King’ of Percussion” (New York Times), Steven Schick. This album captures the 700-mile journey of the noted percussionist as he searched for language, rooted in the sounds of the animate earth, that could bind the disparate experiences of a 21st-century musician into a unified experience. Through a highly contrasted collage of music, language, and sound effects, Schick presents layered emotions in which a humorous façade dissolves to reveal deeper truths connecting music and life.

Triple disc. Released December 1, 2023 on Islandia Records.

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Davis remains a driving force in classically-influenced free jazz, and has not engaged in late-career coasting. The album bursts with irregular energy and serves to showcase his younger collaborators as much as Davis’s own playing.

Recorded by Andrew Munsey & Andrés Gutiérre Martínez

Anthony Davis – Piano
Kyle Motl – Bass
Kjell Nordeson – Drums

“In 2018, I had the good fortune to organize a session with two absolute heroes of music: Anthony Davis, and Kjell Nordeson. I’d been playing with Kjell in various groups for a few years, and had been studying with Anthony at UC San Diego; the three of us had played as a trio a handful of times.

For the session, we played some of Anthony’s older works, including some which referenced The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. With that idea of literature and music in mind, I brought some minimal pieces taking literary inspiration, Vertical Motion – referencing the story by Can Xue, and Labyrinths – in obvious reference to Jorge Luis Borges. We also improvised freely, some of those improvisations became the Fictions tracks.

Lady of the Mirrors is a classic Anthony Davis piece, most notably appearing on the solo piano record of the same name. Here, it allows different forms of interaction between voices and space. Vertical Motion and Labyrinths were both written with Anthony and Kjell’s improvisational prowess and ability to develop material in mind: pretty bare sequences and themes that allow everyone to take an idea and really stretch.

The recording sat on the shelf half-forgotten for some years before I went through and picked the tracks that showed the improvisational interplay of the group in its best light.

It was truly an honor to make the music on this record.“
–Kyle Motl 

Recorded by Andrew Munsey & Andrés Gutiérre Martínez
Mixed & Mastered by Matt Baltrucki

LP. Released September 15, 2023 on Astral Records.

Artwork by D. Norsen
Photographs by Farshid Bazmandegan & Peter Gannushkin

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“The results are sound-noise innovations and soundscapes of a breathtakingly unexpected nature…. This may well end up as a milestone in the repertoire going forward. Do not miss it.” 

Engineered and mixed by Andrew Munsey.

Mivos Quartet: Olivia De Prato, Maya Bennardo, violins; Victor Lowrie Tafoya, viola; Tyler J. Borden, cello

“The Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, is one of the most inaccessible places to humans on earth. Six seasons in the Arctic, according to the Inuit, are not demarcated by a fixed calendar, but by what we hear in the changing environment.

Hydrophones were placed about 300 meters below the sea surface at a seafloor recording location 160 km north of Point Barrow. They capture the sound of sea ice, marine mammals, and the underwater environment throughout an entire year.“
– Lei Liang

A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons (2022) is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, George Crumb, John Cage, and Pauline Oliveros come most directly to mind, given their penchants for the enlarging of an instrument’s sonic palette in the service of extra-musical concerns.

At the heart of Liang’s vision is an all-inclusive and ever-evolving concept of presence in dynamism. When describing the experience of performing and recording Six Seasons, it is the idea most often revisited by the Mivos Quartet. To be present as listener, as reactor, performer, and planetary citizen is paramount. Liang’s goal is to create a totality, an experience to be shared in a common space.

Ironically, though sonically miles apart, Liang’s closest artistic ally may be the similarly poly-mathematical and intellectually insatiable Anthony Braxton. In the AACM composer’s Echo Echo Mirror House system, his entire musical autobiography is channeled through iPods, containing his discography, into Ivesian open-form ventures of constantly shifting focus over which soloists emote in transtemporal echolocation. Liang is creating a similarly vast and multivalent space-scape of metaphorical surfaces, windows, and gradations with kaleidoscopic physical implications. The intersections of individual and communal experience flourish, redefining the process of listening to the emanations from our planet, in crisis but also in all its manifold beauty. From under impenetrable ice, only the lone and disoriented Beluga whale’s distress call, pervading the cycle’s harrowingly sparse coda, compels all the more to render Liang’s dream of transformative unification a reality. (Marc Medwin, from the liner notes)

CD. Released June 23, 2023 on New World Records.

Engineered and mixed by Andrew Munsey
Produced by Lei Liang
Digital Mastering by Paul Zinman

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This release has convinced me beyond a doubt that Roger Reynolds is a major compositional voice of our time, not to mention a powerhouse of ideas. Performance, recording, and documentation are beyond criticism.

Mastered by Andrew Munsey.

Featuring: Irvine Arditti (violin), Steven Schick (speaking percussionist)​​​​​, Pablo Gómez Cano (guitar), Liz Pearse (voice and piano), Paul Hembree (computer musician).

The westward panorama from Roger Reynolds’s Del Mar windows comprises not only the Pacific Ocean but also, as the light changes, his own visage and the virtual world in an easterly direction. The simultaneous, layered reflection serves somehow as an apt portrait of the composer’s many aspects – fused, recombined, shifting, mirrored – they are both here and there. And this multiplicity is deeply emblematic of the four remarkable works found in For A Reason.

The works (spanning over three decades) are the result of his intensely collaborative process with artistic friends, who, in this case, also happen to be celebrated performers: Pablo Gómez Cano (guitar), Irvine Arditti (violin), Steven Schick (percussion), and Liz Pearse (voice). The process of composer and performer finding common ground foregrounds what is, perhaps, for Reynolds the most fundamental issue at stake in creating music: “I’m interested in the whole world of how music speaks — not just what it’s saying, but how it’s saying it.” Incorporating texts by Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera, Reynolds’s aim is not to mimic the sense of the text but to be informed by his analysis of what the writer is seeking and how they construct it.

Adding another layer to these multi-dimensional conversations is the interplay of the acoustic instruments with live computer manipulation, realized in two of the works (those in the SHARESPACE series) by artist Paul Hembree.

And, between the initial spark and the final score, how does Reynolds keep track of the developing composition? Sketchbooks. The composer (who recalls from his Detroit childhood being awestruck by his father’s intricate architectural drawings) employs a fresh notebook for each composition, using each one to imagine, plan, flesh out, add to, keep pushing, going beyond, and ultimately to bring a logic to the work. Perhaps the ‘reasons’ are embedded within, but the physical album, For A Reason, pays tribute to these intimate, handsome artifacts; a 44-page book (with illuminating essay by Thomas May), encased together with a double CD. Although it barely contains Reynolds’s boundless imaginings, it is certain to set some previously-unimagined, creative ideas into motion for the curious listener while serving as a major illumination of the composer and his work.

The stars are aligning for Pulitzer laureate, Roger Reynolds, in a singular convergence: as he approaches his 90th year later in 2024, unflaggingly dedicated to his mentorship of UCSD students, he has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his archive is the subject of a Library of Congress Special Collection, and his creative output has never been stronger. He is lovingly portrayed as the subject of a forthcoming documentary film by Kyle Johnson, FOR A REASON, and this Neuma double-album showcases the works featured in the film. 

Double CD, released May 29, 2023 on Neuma Records.

Recorded by Paul Hembree, Jacob Sundstrom, & Tornike Karchkhadze.
Mastered by Andrew Munsey.

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Recorded by Tornike Karchkhadze and Andrew Munsey, Spring 2022
Mixed and mastered by Andrew Munsey

Art by @mags.lou

visualizer: youtu.be/wfNKiAgKKVM
released April 30, 2023

Earwash Records
New York, New York

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Acclaimed composer Lei Liang releases Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes, a multidisciplinary diptych that marries diverse areas of inquiry into Chinese landscape painting and folk song, oceanography, software development, earth science, and underwater acoustics. The result are two inspiring linked works that employ these varied methodologies to explore our relationship to and sonic experience with our planet.

New Focus Recordings

Released March 10, 2023

Producer: Lei Liang

Recording engineer: Andrew Munsey

Hearing Landscapes:
Lei Liang — composer and principal investigator

Audio Team: Zachary Seldess — principal collaborator / Greg Surges — audio software developer Eric Hamdan — audio system developer

Visual Team: Falko Kuester — visual explorer; Samantha Stout — cultural heritage engineer; Eric Lo — robotic engineer; James Strawson — robotic engineer; John Mangan — software engineer; Alex Matthews — video production

Chris McFarland — software developer

Hearing Icescapes:
Lei Liang — composer / artistic director; Joshua Jones — oceanographer / principal scientific advisor; Theocharis Papatrechas — audio engineer / sound designer; Nicholas Solem — sound designer

David Aguila, trumpet; Teresa Diaz de Cossio, flute; Myra Hinrichs, violin

Hearing Icescapes was recorded at Studio A, University of California, San Diego on January 24-25, 2022

Hearing Landscapes and Hearing Icescapes were created for multichannel surround sound environments. This recording is a binaural rendition.

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“this album may well prompt a continued exploration of deeply literate composers who need not be lost and have much to offer”

Gramophone

“consummately expressive performers … extraordinarily well curated … one of the best recordings I have heard thus far in 2023” 

Sequenza21

GRAMMY® Award-winning American soprano Susan Narucki, “one of the great practitioners of contemporary vocal music” (Opera News) presents This Island, a specially curated, unique set of 21 art songs written in the first half of the 20th century, chiefly by women and some receiving their world premiere recordings.

The catalyst for This Island was a line from a collection of letters by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“… If you could only be here with me so I could share with you the happiness of these great poems, they would let you realize what we all now need more urgently: that transience is not separation …”

The poems Rilke cites are by Belgian Symbolist Emile Verhaeren, whose poetry – Susan discovered – has been set to music by composers both familiar and virtually unknown, including Nadia Boulanger and her Paris Conservatoire teacher Raoul Pugno, Belgian Irène Fuerison, Dutch Henriette Bosmans and the mysterious Parisian composer Elizabeth Claisse. Susan rounds out the album with songs by American composer and educator Marion Bauer, who studied in Paris and met Boulanger and Pugno, and Dutch composer Henriette Bosmans whose music Susan was familiar with, bringing the project full circle.

Avie Records

Released February 10, 2023

Recorded: 3–5 March & 27–29 June 2022, Conrad Prebys Concert Hall,
UC San Diego Department of Music, San Diego
Producer: Judith Sherman ·

Engineer: Andrew Monsey
Editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis ·

Mastering: Jeanne Velonis and Judith Sherman

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released November 18, 2022

Recorded at the Conrad Prebys Music Center, UC San Diego
Recorded and Edited by Andrés Gutiérrez, Andrew Munsey, Douglas Osmun.
Mixed and Mastered by Andrew Munsey
Piano Tuner: Joe Garrison
Design: Marc Wolf
Cover image: Mari Kawamura

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Jones Jones seems like such a pedestrian name for a trio of decidedly revolutionary dimensions but these players manage to transcend. Saxophone trios are nothing new in the music, dating back to the ‘50s, but when one combines Larry Ochs (tenor and sopranino saxophones), Mark Dresser (bass) and Vladimir Tarasov (drums, turning 75 this month) sparks will fly. This collectively improvised album was recorded on Jan. 12th, 2020 at Studio B on the campus of UC-San Diego, where Dresser is a professor, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pedigrees of each member of Jones Jones is quite impressive: Ochs is the O in the ROVA Saxophone Quartet; Dresser came to fame as a 10-year member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet; and Tarasov is best known as a member of the Ganelin Trio.

The album begins with an almost orchestral vibration, courtesy of deep drum tones. Dresser attacks his instrument from every direction other than what is expected and Ochs stokes the fire with a garrulous bellicosity. Dresser sets up “Bali Hai Jones” with a rough-sawn arco that could leave splinters, as Ochs pitches and yaws over the defiantly non-metronomic pulse of the drums. Many of these tracks are seamlessly performed with great variety without running out of steam. On “Call Of The Jones”, the bassist heralds a hair-raising dissonant drone with the bow, virtually daring Tarasov into a hailstorm of activity, reminiscent of Rashied Ali’s explosive contributions to John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, especially when Ochs launches into a series of screaming, squealing multiphonics. The bassist and drummer conjure up a sensational groove with pizzicato pluck and feathery brushes on “Jones Free Jones”, enabling Ochs to warble in a joyously gruff exploration bringing to mind prime Archie Shepp (think On This Night, for reference.) Tarasov opens “RBG Jones” by tattooing an infectious beat on snare as Dresser injects bi-tonal tapping and Ochs swings for the fences with a blistering caterwaul. The penultimate selection, “Further Adventures of Ms. Microtonal Jones”, highlights the almost impossibly rich sound of arco bass in contrast to shimmering cymbals and soaring sopranino commentary.

Anyone who loves the work of a truly exploratory saxophone trio that extrapolates the revolutionary templates of the ‘60s would be wise to seek this out.

ESP Disk

Released June 18, 2022

Jones Jones Is:
LARRY OCHS – tenor and sopranino saxophones
VLADIMIR TARASOV – drums, percussion
MARK DRESSER – double bass

Recorded and mixed by Andrew Munsey at Studio A, UC San Diego, January 16, 2020.

Produced by Larry Ochs.

Mastered August 2021 by Myles Boisen at Headless Buddha Lab, Oakland, CA.

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Wilfrido Terrazas — My Shadow Leads the Way

A flutist’s shadow come alive, a bell-driven invention, a rebellion of the spoken word aspiring to be music, this collection of pieces stems from –and wraps around– the naked eloquence of Ricardo Cázares’ poems, transforming them into a musical glossary of the instability of meaning, memory, and thought. Words here are raw musical materials, wrestling amongst themselves, unaware, as both the English and Spanish texts whirl around each other –not quite together, but also not quite apart– and are intermittently drowned under waves of sinuous flute melodies and clouds of percussive attacks and resonances. Over them, the shadow looms large. The instrumental tracks continue to weave memories of the sounds once heard as words: sometimes into ruminating, abstract melodies; sometimes into thick, slow-morphing heterophonies hopelessly lost in themselves.

And yet, meaning is there somewhere, veiled, latent, waiting to be fully grasped, or, rather, invented. “Sound is one”, wrote the legendary Tom Corona. Perhaps it is through our own shadows that we must walk to find it. Even if it’s seemingly too late. Even if defeat has caught up with us. “Even if there is no place/that’s yours on the map”, writes Cázares, “you will have to hurry/and stake your claim/however you can/before the world and music/fall flat”. We can definitely try. But perhaps it is too late because music has already staked her claim. Claiming sound for herself, and word as sound, and, therefore, meaning as volatile and ever-changing, it subverts the specificity of the moment-poem and boosts its scope to unfathomable reaches. Still, if all fails, at the very least, we will always have the shadow.

—Wilfrido Terrazas

Transvection Ltd. 021

All music by Wilfrido Terrazas
Wilfrido Terrazas: flutes, percussion, spoken voice
Original Poems in Spanish by Ricardo Cázares, from his book ‘Latitud’
English Translation by Joe Imwalle
Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Andrew Munsey at Studio A, Warren Lecture Hall, UC San Diego, California. February- April 2022.
Cover Photography by Jose Pita Juárez
Cover Design by Edgar Medina
Produced by Wilfrido Terrazas

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