Sylvia Lim: Flare [Another Timbre]. It’s good to hear some more music by Sylvia Lim, having first heard her Sawyer Editions album back in 2022. On Flare you can hear her quietly individualistic style taking shape, resisting easy definition. Her compositions show an interest in acoustic decay and a peculiar method for exploring it. There’s no apparent system at work, relying on her curiosity and imagination to discover new ways of hearing instruments. The title work is for piano solo, played by Ben Smith: the instrument is treated as a resonator, using muted strings to eke out overtones from two keys, repeatedly struck in a trill. The substance of the music comes from the sonority, articulated by rhythm and phrasing, creating a piece made of shadows and echoes, a translucent projection of music. The small, intimate things we overheard is aptly named, a discordant congregation of clarinet and bass clarinet, violin and percussion passes by the ear as though partly concealed. The piece is played by various Apartment House alumni, as is shadowfolds, a recent piece for five musicians made in an attempt at polyphony; this manifests itself in compound, heterogenous changes in timbre. As shown in the piano piece flare, there’s a reductive approach taken in a number of Lim’s works: the Miyabi guitar duo of Hugh Millington and Saki Kato play the diptych same but different with one string prepared, snapping and buzzing against the others as the guitarists pluck single notes with only small variations in pitch, working their way down to one repeated, naked sound treated with minute attention. It’s striking how the reductionism never comes across as cold or affected, seeming to be born out of a strong affection for even the simplest sounds. Grafting, a trio for bass clarinet, violin and cello played by Mira Benjamin, Heather Roche and Natasha Zielazinski, might be the most completely realised composition here, with languidly winding melodic fragments surfacing briefly amongst slow, droning notes that are both tender and remote; it ends with a coda that recapitulates the material as a frail impression of its former self. By the time you reach the last piece Field of Play you become aware that the range of sounds has reduced down to a small, softly-lit space, reaching a minimum with this suite for prepared cello. Natasha Zielazinski, credited as co-composer, adds a single object to the strings for each section, muting the pitch and opening up a complex of frictional noise. All sorts of deep sub-tones and hoarse upper partials emerge from Zielazinski’s bowing, sounding as though barely above a whisper but recorded so closely as to seem immense, adding suspense that the delicate sounds may suddenly break. It’s common to describe a work as explorative, but this hushed work comes from a gentle but intense focus on a single spot.

Eldritch Priest: dead-wall reveries [Another Timbre]. A collection of three more pieces by Eldritch Priest, including the promised recording of his string quartet dust breeding performed by Apartment House. When I heard them play it live I was struck by the way each of the seemingly incongruous threads that make up the piece seem to frequently end up chasing their own tails, likening it to “a complex knot, slackened to the point where you can’t tell if grabbing one end will pull it tight or unravel it completely.” Hearing it again now, the emphasis on harmonics and fast, heavily ornamented playing suggest that the work is an alternative interpretation of the string quartet form, transposed to a different order. The high, floating sounds add colour while removing the substance of the pitch, hinting at something transparent which is nevertheless obscured by the layers of filigree. dormitive virtue is a piano piece from 2001, recorded by the composer in his apartment around that time. It’s been heard before as a short track for solo electric guitar on his same-titled album, a collection of “wistul, bluesey jazz rumination”. Here the jazz is less in evidence, as the piano version takes a much longer time, lingering over phrases and repeating chords as though they were echoes, pausing before ready to move on to the next section. Strangely enough, its the earlier, longer take which is the fully composed version; the guitar’s improvisation is a distillation of certain motives and mood. The introspective nature of the solo piano carries over into the other works to some degree. dead-wall reveries continues in his style of angular, discontinuous melodies and antimelodies to construct an ergodic composition that would otherwise seem typical for him, except that in this work the music is cast in a more mellow and vulnerable mien than the usual bluff statements that take on mystifying twists and turns. An ensemble of clarinet, vibraphone, violin, cello and piano (played here by the ensemble Arraymusic) picks its way through a confounding course of contradictory conversation; yet even as it does so seems to reflect upon itself – it never resolves, of course, but it does seem to be reaching some sort of understanding of the situation and adapts its behaviour accordingly. The violin part is the most frequently active, loosing off fast melodic passages charged with nervous energy, or cutting across the other instruments with electronic distortion. All three works find new ways of elaborating upon knots; self-interfering structures that feed upon entropy. Apartment House will also be playing his long, earlier work pleasure drenching… in London later this month.

Zeynep Toraman: a lifetime of annotations [Sawyer Editions]. No foreknowledge of Toraman or her work, and Sawyer make a habit of keeping their sleeve notes terse. I was originally going to pass on reviewing this because at first it sounded like more of the same, although the same what I’m not sure of exactly. Two works for small groups of strings, each using faint bowing of slow, elongated tones. Regular readers will get a familiar feeling. It may share a common style, but there is something distinctive in the way Toraman works and puts her pieces together. The String Trio: a lifetime of annotations omits viola for two violins and cello; played by veterans Clara Levy, Biliana Voutsckova and Judith Hamann, they take a melodic line and extend it for half an hour, multiplying it with some unexpected harmonies to create a diffuse counterpoint that emerges and evolves throughout the piece, starting out somewhat remote but settling into a pensive mood. Slow Poem (v.2) is a duet for violin and viola performed by andPlay, the duo of Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson previously heard playing Catherine Lamb and Kristofer Svensson. As you may expect, it’s a bit more astringent without the cello’s range, made moreso by their frequent use of very high harmonics, but it doesn’t become abrasive. What makes this piece is a sensitive combination of composition, interpretation and recording that makes the frailness of the sounds intimate, for music that is vulnerable instead of affected and aloof. Even as the sounds become thinner towards the end, they seem more settled than in the more fully-voiced opening.

Lance Austin Olsen: Fascist Cockroaches Over Canada Meet The Resistance [Somnimage]. This is a shorter work made for Somnimage’s unknown territory series, coupled with a digital print of one of Olsen’s visual works. Olsen plays solo on amplified acoustic guitar, raw and uncultured, surrounded by extraneous sounds of scraped and rubbed objects, with an added sample as a sting in the tail to add a pointed reference to place and time. The tone is unmistakeable (see title) but doesn’t stoop to propaganda, locating its grievances in its attitude instead of elevating and restricting to a particular set of circumstances. In some ways this is the theme of the piece, as the ills of the world are ever-present, changing only in appearance and in place.

Jamie Drouin & Lance Austin Olsen: a field far beyond form and emptiness [Infrequency Editions]. Time flies, and this is apparently the first album put out by Olsen and likeminded long-time collaborator Drouin in six years. Again, there’s a newfound starkness in their approach here, even as their work together is more ambivalent and neutral in tone than the portents of Olsen’s solo work. Besides the old radios and found tapes, there’s a particular focus on capital-I Instruments here, even if amplified: cello, guitars, dulcimer and piano predominate. It’s a strikingly pointillistic work, with acoustic phenomenon placed front and centre in clear relief. Elements of collage and found sounds are still present but used sparingly, adding inflection points to the surface. Silence is always present, either through implication in the sparseness of the sounds and the low dynamics throughout, or the extended pauses which separates the work into chapters. It’s both the strangest and the most conventional work I’ve heard by the duo; an extended composition of endurance and restraint which is never passive or fully at rest, even in its most subdued moments.

Okkyung Lee: just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities [Shelter Press]. Okkyung Lee dispenses with the cello and makes an album entirely of home recordings with electronic keyboards, computer and a cheap cassettee recorder. Ten pieces that are gnomic but fully realised. The setting and pervading mood of comforting melancholy recalls the convalescent feeling produced by the “lockdown aesthetic” of a few years ago, but the music here is more definite and complete. The keyboards hearken back to the clean synth sounds of the early 1980s, here brightly coloured but not strident, mellowed by a soft VHS burr of nostalgia. The slightly lo-fi sounds evoke the domestic form of techno-optimism from that period, when home computers were new and suggested boundless potential, simultaneously futuristic and quaint. Each of the ten tracks evokes a mood while also suggesting a quiet wit operating behind its pithiness. I mentally bracketed it with Tim Parkinson because it seems to share the peculiar combination of being friendly but aloof. The pieces are charming and seemingly trivial, too candid to be ambient, too obliging to be musique d’ameublement, but as with The Projects this music has an oblique way of acting on the senses.