Behind the wallpaper

New Amsterdam Records (2023)

 “Behind the Wallpaper is a concept album about someone undergoing a mysterious transformation. At first her life is mundane, even dreary — but moments of altered perception reveal something sinister flickering in the corners. And then, late one night, she has an inexplicable encounter in a university science park. Soon she finds herself changing, in ways that may or may not be visible to others. Like the cycle’s unnamed protagonist, the music slips unnoticed through the cracks in the walls, drawing on indie pop, Weimar cabaret, Elizabethan music and 19th-century Romanticism. 

I wrote Behind the Wallpaper for Spektral Quartet and singer Julia Holter, whose own music has a stylistic fluidity and vulnerability that made her the perfect choice for this dreamy, unsettling story.” - Composer Alex Temple

on this album

ENIGMA

SONO LUMINUS (2021)

If you would, coax your mind back to a time when you believed ducking your head beneath the covers was ample defense against the bogeyman. Do you remember, in the haze of half-sleep, seeing something or someone in your room that didn’t belong? As you breathlessly flicked on the light, you were relieved to find it was only a chair lopsided with laundry, or a vacuum propped against the doorframe. That faint halo of light, surrounding this once sinister and now innocuous object, that is the penumbra – that permeable border between light and dark. This is the space where Enigma lives.

We’ve all been living in an in-between of sorts for the last year, haven’t we? Nothing quite as poetic as the blend of blinding light and unfath- omable dark one encounters with an eclipse, an early touchstone for this composition it is worth noting. But we’ve done quite a bit of living in the grey area, which is maybe broader than we thought. The thing is, traveling to Virginia to record this album was in some ways the first glint of hope on the horizon...well...that there was still a horizon.

This album is the result of a multi-year alchemy between the singular writing of composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir and the playing of three-time GRAMMY nominees Spektral Quartet. The first string quartet composed by Thorvaldsdottir, Enigma is simultaneously colossal and introspective, moving between heart-wrenching chord progressions and the scrapes and clicks of extended string techniques. A piece of profound emotional magnitude, Enigma provokes considerations of our relationship to the vast cosmos that surrounds us – and the infinite universe within.

on this album

Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Enigma

Experiments in Living

New Focus Recordings (2020)

THIS ALBUM WILL NEVER BE HEARD THE SAME WAY TWICE

Do you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? “If you approach the mysterious stranger, turn to page 48...If you duck into the forbidden cave to avoid them, turn to page 136,” etc. There was a thrill to the equal possibilities of adventure or capture, friendship or deception, renown or obscurity.

Experiments in Living is the musical analog, and one where your listening experience will change profoundly based on the choices you make at each fork in the road. While routes through the record can be ever-changing, this double album flows along two currents. Part One pursues three historic innovators and singular voices circumventing the entrenched rules of their time – Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ruth Crawford (Seeger) – while Part Two pitches through passageways of music motivated by jazz, improvisation, and experimentation by way of composers Anthony Cheung, Sam Pluta, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis. Finding the provocative connections between them is what defines our work together.

on this album

JOHANNES BRAHMS: String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51 No. 1
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30
RUTH CRAWFORD (SEEGER): String Quartet (1931)
SAM PLUTA: binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state
ANTHONY CHEUNG: The Real Book of Fake Tunes  featuring Claire Chase, flutes
CHARMAINE LEE: Spinals featuring Charmaine Lee, voice and electronics
GEORGE LEWIS: String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living

Serious Business

Sono Luminus (2016)

Classical music can always benefit from a dose of the funny.

Each piece on Serious Business looks at humor in music from a different angle – not necessarily with the goal of making the listener laugh, but as a sophisticated subject to be explored (without taking that subject too seriously, of course). If you've been to one of our shows, read our newsletter, or follow us on social media, you know that humor has been an essential part of our approach to performance from the beginning. 

Recorded in 9.1 surround sound at the acoustically superb studios of Sono Luminus, the album includes the world premiere recordings of three highly-virtuosic string quartets written for us – Sky Macklay’s Many Many Cadences, David Reminick’s The Ancestral Mousetrap, and Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s Hack, plus prankster Josef Haydn’s String Quartet Opus 33, No 2 in E-flat major, “The Joke.” 

on this album

chambers

Parlour Tapes+ (2013)

In 2013 we released our debut album CHAMBERS in collaboration with Chicago’s first and only contemporary art music cassette tape label (yes, you read that right), Parlour Tapes+.  Showcasing a city teeming with musical exploration and ingenuity, CHAMBERS was created in collaboration with composers Marcos Balter, Hans Thomalla, Eliza Brown, Chris Fisher-Lochhead, LJ White, and Ben Hjertmann.  From exquisite microtonal harmonies to textures at the edge of the audible to hyper-kinetic guitar-pick strumming, CHAMBERS leads listeners through six rooms, each filled with a distinct voice and unique acoustic.

on this album

from this point forward

Azica Records (2014)

The music of Astor Piazzolla is well known to North American audiences, but what came after the Tango Nuevo revolution?

We have teamed up with accordion and bandoneon virtuoso Julien Labro to uncover exactly that with our upcoming album on Azica Records, From This Point Forward. “Jazz,” “contemporary classical” or “tango” are genre labels far too cramped to encapsulate the music of Argentine composer/pianist Fernando Otero, whose De Ahora En Más is featured on the record. Breathless fugues, opaque chord clusters and circular grooves here have a tincture of tango, but the language has evolved into something much more risky. Also hailing from Buenos Aires, composer/pianist Diego Schissi has similarly transformed the tango vernacular with tunes like the irrepressible Líquido 5.Perhaps it can best be summed up in the composer’s own words, in email correspondence with Labro and the quartet: “It is display of Full Power, a forceful demonstration of energy…edgy and a bit uncontrolled.”

on this album

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