Between Tones

ORDER SOON

©Lorena Alonso Noblom

The recordings gathered on this release bring together twoensemble works for acoustic instruments by Berlin-based Canadian musician-composer-artist Chiyoko Szlavnics, in documentary recordings by Ensemble Contrechamps designed for various spatialisations by producer Santi Barguñó. Szlavnics’ work as a composer takes inspiration from her early mentorship in Toronto with the innovatory thinker and creatorJames Tenney, as well as ongoing studies of Indian Dhrupad practicein the Dagar family tradition, which Szlavnics began learning fromMarianne Svašek, and continued in India and the UK with mastersinger Uday Bhawalkar and his students. She draws psychoacoustically manifesting lines, shapes, forms, and patterns with abstract masses of precisely-tuned frequencies, emerging and receding like breathing. The sounds bear a deep honeyed resistance that could, at any moment, glide into smooth and inexorable momentum, passing through each other like clouds of energy or colliding into explosions of perceptual details. For her, making music is observing the ever-changing manifestations of cosmic clouds, temporally disjunct forces across huge distances cohering in the mind of the listening ear’s act of cognition: beautiful in their everchanging forms, yet without meaning and without statement.

Distribution

Susanne Peters, flute
Valentine Collet, oboe
Laurent Bruttin, clarinet 1
Marie Mercier, clarinet 2
Charles Pierron, horn 1
Clémence Lion, horn 2
Paul Hübner, trumpet 1
Mathilde Conley, trumpet 2
Serge Bonvalot, tuba
Thierry Debons, percussion 1
Sébastien Cordier, percussion 2
Maximilian Haft, violin 1
Madoka Sakitsu-Lapeyre, violin 2
Jesus Manuel Larez Leon, violin 3
Rada Hadjikostova, violin 4
Matteo Cimatti, violin 5 *
Patrick Schleuter, violin 6 *
Hans Egidi, viola 1
Vincent Hepp, viola 2
Anne-Laure Dottrens, viola 3 *
Martina Brodbeck, cello 1
Jan-Filip Ťupa, cello 2
Aurélien Ferrette, cello 3 *
Jonathan Haskell, double bass 1
Noëlle Reymond, double bass 2 *
Max Murray, conductor

Credits

Recorded at
Bellelay Abbey, Switzerland
October 2023

Contrechamps artistic direction
Serge Vuille

Executive production
Elisa Charles

Stage manager
Florian Guex

Recording
Santi Barguñó, Hugo Romano Guimarães

Just intonation assistance
Thomas Nicholson

Liner notes
Marc Sabat

Graphic art direction
Lorena Alonso Noblom — lorenanoblom.com

Produced by
Santi Barguñó

Recorded in high definition 3D format for sound installations (7.1.4), surround sound (5.1) and stereo (2.0).