Martin Davids/David Yearsley: In the Cabinet of Wonders

| Tyran Grillo

The organ is a colossus, the violin a slender voice. By sheer mass and volume, they seem destined never to agree. One threatens to drown the air in thunder, the other to disappear beneath it. And yet, in 17th-century Hamburg, they discovered a shared breath. High in the gallery of St. Catherine’s church, they spoke not as rivals but as companions, drawing crowds who came to hear scale converse with fragility. What could have been a contest was a study in equilibrium, like a skeleton learning, haltingly, how to stand upright.

It was in this bustling hub that Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595-1663) and Johann Schop (c. 1590–1667) met across air and string. Their sounds descended like thought itself, Scheidemann’s pipes carrying the gravity of heaven, Schop’s bow and strings tracing the precarious outline of the human voice. What emerged was more than music. It was a convergence of opposites: cleric and townsman, traveler and citizen, the enduring and the fleeting. In that reverberant space, the city heard itself briefly whole, briefly hushed, before motion returned and the pulse of everyday life resumed.

Under Scheidemann’s quick, laughing hands, sound sprang outward, ricocheting through stone and space with wit and momentum. The organ became less a monument than a body with many lungs, capable of sudden whispers as well as exuberant exhalations. Alongside this abundance, Schop’s violin did not retreat. It danced. Its lines flashed with surprise, then slipped without warning into shadow, like muscles tightening and releasing beneath the skin. Between them unfolded a living exchange, in which the church itself became a resonant demonstration that opposites, when truly listening, can cohere into a single organism.

This album invites the listener into a corporeal experience, one that breathes, sweats, remembers, and occasionally stumbles forward in exhilaration. The music of Schop and Scheidemann, as reimagined by 21st-century analogues Martin Davids and David Yearsley, circulates like blood through civic arteries, passing between church lofts, dance floors, and private chambers, rarely holding one posture for long. What binds the recording is neither style nor chronology, but a shared faith in music as something handled, inhabited, and exchanged socially. Sound is treated as anatomy rather than abstraction. What we hear are the bones of it all, flexing, testing their reach, discovering what they can bear.

Schop’s Intrada à 5 from Erster Theil newer Paduanen opens the album by wrapping the senses in gauze. The interwoven voices refuse hierarchy, relying instead on mutual dependence. Each line anticipates the others’ weight and direction, like ribs designed both to protect and expand. This is consort music already aware of its future disassembly and reconfiguration, carrying that latent plasticity within it. The partnership feels so complete that separation seems almost injurious. From the outset, beauty is not the goal but the consequence. Expression rests on marrow and sinew, and imagination requires a listener willing to inhabit the charged space between intention and realization.

Much of the album’s gravitational pull lies within the orbit of ’t Uitnemend Kabinet of 1646, where Schop’s violin resurrects itself as heir and provocateur. His reworking of Alessandro Striggio’s Nasce la pena mia unfolds like a slow-motion game of double dutch, the ropes of austerity and playfulness turning with deliberate care, demanding full coordination to avoid collapse.

The Lachrime Pavaen after John Dowland presses further inward. The soul twists into a Möbius strip of emotional transference, sorrow folding endlessly back upon itself without settling. Chromatic figures reach deep into the gut to retrieve a half-digested grief and hold it up for inspection. Yet nothing here feels morbid; instead, it suggests that emotion without physicality would simply cave in, that even pain needs a skull in which to resonate.

Scheidemann answers this inwardness with motion and propulsion. His Galliarda ex D sets fire beneath the feet, insisting on the intelligence of movement. Rarely do both touch the ground at once. The sound remains perpetually mid-step, angled toward what follows. Dance here is a matter of orientation, a way of thinking forward with the entire frame. That energy carries seamlessly into the Canzon in G, whose relaxed atmosphere allows light and shadow to exchange places with quiet charm, the organ responsive rather than domineering.

At several moments, the album reveals its improvisatory foundations. The performers’ Intonatiofunctions as connective tissue, recalling a time when much of this repertoire lived between the notes, sustained by trust, familiarity, and shared risk. This ethos extends into Scheidemann’s setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden. Told in two verses, the first establishes the firm outline of a torso, while the second pencils in the extremities.

The relationship between instruments grows aerodynamic in Scheidemann’s intabulation of Giovanni Bassani’s Dic nobis Maria. The cadence is measured yet generous, giving the violin space to breathe while the organ subtly lifts and supports. Imagined as wind and wing, the pairing becomes a lesson in controlled flight, with ornamentation serving as lift. This play of disguise reaches its height in the Englische Mascarada, where the organ steps forward alone. It imitates viols, recorders, and cornetts, its movements almost tactile. The backdrop assumes the foreground, and scale itself learns to play, shedding weight without surrendering substance.

Schop’s sine titulo from ’t Uitnemend Kabinet may be the album’s quietest act of defiance. Tone, transition, and spirit nourish one another organically, as if the piece were activating its own nervous system mid-flight. The violin’s occasional double stops flare like shooting stars across an otherwise stable sky, fleeting, unnecessary, and wholly persuasive.

As the program draws toward its close, its communal heart comes fully into view. Schop’s Præludium, the first work ever published for solo violin, clears the air with intent, a measured breath before speaking plainly. What follows, an improvisatory fantasy on his chorale tune Werde munter, mein Gemüte, unfolds as a conversation restored. The organ answers phrase by phrase, until the violin can no longer remain apart and joins the coda. Harmonies shimmer. What emerges is gratitude, rooted in shared labor. The album concludes with the Pavaen de Spanje, whose stark colors and abrupt shifts return us to orbit.

By its end, the recording has quietly redrawn the boundaries of historical performance. This is no reconstruction, but a living metabolism, a system dependent on circulation, exchange, and constant adjustment. The music does not ask to be preserved so much as inhabited. It leaves the listener with the sense of having moved through a body rather than examined an object, of having felt joints flex, lungs fill, and organs hum in sympathetic response. The final sounds do not conclude so much as release, sending us back into the world more aware of our own inner architecture, and perhaps more willing to trust it when it makes overtures to leap.

In the Cabinet of Wonders is available from False Azure Records here.

David Yearsley: Handel’s Organ Banquet

| Tyran Grillo

Every good meal begins with a premise, and this one opens in the kitchen rather than the chapel. The cover caricature sets the tone before a single note is heard: George Frideric Handel rendered as a hog, snout forward, hunched over the organ in mid-18th-century satire. It is a reminder that iconography and appetite have always shared a table. Organist and scholar David Yearsley accepts the joke with a grin and sharpens it into art, giving Handel not only hands but feet with which to prepare. Since Handel himself rarely bothered with pedals in his scores, save for the Organ Concerto in B-flat Major, opus 7, no. 1 (HWV 306), Yearsley’s approach feels less like historical correction than culinary invention, an act of inspired seasoning rather than academic garnish.

This recording is not about dutifully reheating the classics. It is about tasting them anew, discovering how familiar flavors bloom when exposed to different heat, different hands, different feet. Yearsley plays Handel as one might approach a well-loved recipe, respecting the ingredients while daring to improvise at the stove, if not—at the risk of a poor analogy—allowing a rat to pull some hair under the toque.

We start with a clever pairing: Sinfony from Messiah (HWV 56) combined with the Fugue from Suite in E Minor (HWV 429). The unmistakable opening arrives like a dish you have known since childhood, instantly recognizable, deeply comforting. Yet Yearsley plates it with unexpected accompaniments, adding decorations of improvisational whimsy and alert, in-the-moment thinking. The transition into the fugue is seamless and generous, the musical equivalent of warm bread passed across the table. There is solace here, and a sense of being gently welcomed back for seconds.

As with rosy steps, the morn (from Theodora, HWV 68) follows, a radiant oratorio aria that unfolds theatrically on a stage of its own making. Its inner pulse is sensual and full of promise. The music breathes with unanswered questions and lush excitement, each phrase suggesting that the best bite may still be ahead.

At the center of the table sits the Passacaille in G (HWV 399), the giblet bag of the Trio Sonata in G Major. On the organ (no pun intended?), it acquires a lively delicacy, sumptuous yet never heavy. The lines spiral and turn, dancing themselves toward oblivion with an umami that belies their craft. Time seems to loosen its grip here, as though the dish refuses to cool.

Lord, to Thee, each night and day (another Theodora morsel) returns us to the world of aria, moving with grace through fluid key changes that feel both inevitable and surprising. The progression is palpable in its mouthfeel, each modulation a subtle shift in seasoning. When the turn toward the end arrives, it does so quietly, gloriously, a kind of musical retribution that needs no raised voice to make its point.

The communal platter arrives with O praise the Lord with one consent (opening chorus of Chandos Anthem no. 9, HWV 254). Verdant colors and resplendent textures ply the ear, expanding William Croft’s 1708 St. Anne hymn tune into something plush and enveloping. The result is sonic velour, draping the dining surface in lavishness, even if the organist’s feet are working overtime to keep its stitches from fraying.

With Lascia ch’io pianga (from Rinaldo, HWV 7), Handel’s most famous lament from his first London opera of 1711, the organ sings without words. Its vocal qualities survive the transfer intact, barely eroded. Vegetal stops add depth, enhancing the meaty base without overpowering the line. It is a reminder that sorrow, like flavor, often deepens with slow attention.

The heartier courses follow. The Trio Sonata in F, op. 5, no. 6 (HWV 401) sheds its ensemble skin to become a solo affair, compressed into a single instrument yet expanded by the breadth of Yearsley’s imagination. The central Allegro dazzles with its tessellated structure, each piece fitting snugly against the next, while the subsequent Adagio melts everything down into a rich, savory gravy that coats every note. Close behind comes the Concerto in G minor/G major, op. 4, no. 1 (HWV 289), another full-course meal in a full-course meal of full-course meals. Highlights abound, from the delightful second-movement Allegro to the concluding Andante, a light-footed wonder that dances around the table, refusing to sit still.

For dessert, Yearsley offers his adaptation of the “Amen” from Messiah, recast as a Fuga in D. It culminates in a pedal cadenza that is itself a four-part fugue played only with the feet. The effect is brilliantly virtuosic and deeply satisfying, as organic as farmers market ingredients transformed by a confident cook who trusts the produce and his palate.

A bonus track serves as the final flourish: A Hallelujah Concerto, an improvisation on Handel’s most beloved chorus. Composer and performer seem to spur one another on, whipping the soufflé together until the peaks stand just right. It is exuberant, inventive, and impossible to resist. A finish to end all finishes, at least until the next course.

When the last resonance fades, the table is cleared, and the listener is left pleasantly full. Satisfaction lingers, along with the faint sense that something mischievous and marvelous has just occurred. You may want to keep your napkin as a souvenir. It bears the marks of a meal well enjoyed and proof that Handel, in the right hands and feet, still knows how to cook.

The album is the third release from False Azure Records, an exciting new label where old and new make merry. My ear continues to follow them with keen interest.

Daniel D’Adamo: The Lips Cycle (YAN.008)

| Tyran Grillo

Isabel Soccoja voice
Nicolas Vallette flutes
Laurent Camatte viola
Élodie Reibaud harp
Recording: Daniel D’Adamo, Alexis Derouet and Maxime Lance (Césaré), Gérard de Haro, Jérôme Decque (Gmem), Vincent Carinola (ESM), Philippe Dao (GRM)
Mixing and mastering: Gérard de Haro, Nicolas Baillard (La Buissonne – 2019)
Production: Marc Thouvenot & La Buissonne
Artistic Direction: Pascale Berthelot
Release date: November 17, 2020

This album stands as a threshold document, both an ending and an aperture. As the final release on the CUICATL label, it traces the emergence of a language that never stabilizes. The Lips Cycle is born from an inquiry that seems modest on its surface: What happens when speech is imagined but withheld, when the voice rehearses itself without crossing into audibility? During a period of isolation in São Paulo in 2010, Daniel D’Adamo turned inward, not toward silence but toward its hidden mechanics. Tongue grazing teeth, lips shaping absent vowels, breath circulating without destination. What emerged was not a void but a densely populated interior world, one smaller than phonemes and closer than words.

Listening becomes an ethical posture here, a sustained attention that must abandon expectation. These works unfold at a scale where meaning erodes faster than it can be grasped. The ear is asked to linger inside residues, murmurs, and half-gestures, where sound hovers between intention and disappearance. Sensuality arises not from excess but from proximity. The music leans close, breathes close, and insists on contact.

The cycle unfolds across works composed between 2010 and 2017 for voice, flute, harp, and electronics. Said electronics are not supplemental but anatomical, spun from the same material as the instrumental and vocal writing. They stretch physical effort into space, allowing sound to circulate, refract, and return altered. Spatialization becomes a way of thinking, a means of extending the performers beyond their own outlines. The listener is drawn into an immersive field where sound behaves like a tactile substance rather than a linear message.

Lips, your lips for mezzo-soprano and electronics opens the cycle by dwelling on the fragile perimeter of the voice. It studies what surrounds speech rather than speech itself. Inhalations splinter into texture, whispers fracture into particulate noise, and words cling desperately to coherence before slipping free. There is an almost ASMR-like intimacy to the listening experience, yet it is charged with volatility. Quiet never fully arrives. It is continually interrupted by a hovering, half-formed song that presses against audibility. The piece advances like a dream that cannot remain intact, gathering toward eruptions where fantasies flare and collapse, leaving behind delicate ruins of promise and ash.

With Keep your furies for mezzo-soprano, alto flute, and electronics, tactility builds. The alto flute enters not as accompaniment but as a second voice, equally bodily, equally vulnerable. Breath and metal converge until distinctions blur. The overlap between singer and instrument is so complete that only a sliver of separation remains. Sound seems to move through the body rather than around it, activating involuntary responses along the spine and scalp. Time behaves erratically here, like pages of a flip book animated in uneven bursts. Leaves become sounds, sounds become gestures, and gestures dissolve before they can settle.

Although Air lié for flute and electronics nominally removes the human voice, its presence lingers. Extended techniques, metallic inflections, and sustained resonances unfold according to their own internal logic. Breath persists, transposed into silver and duration. The piece’s ambient quality allows for a deeper enmeshment between ear and sound, a slow suspension in which spirals accumulate and tighten. One does not exit this space so much as become absorbed into its influence, gently erased as an observer.

Traum-Entelechiæ for mezzo-soprano, alto flute, viola, harp, and electronics reintroduces the voice into a thickened, almost alchemical texture. Convergences of tone function like temporary laboratories where language is subjected to stress and mutation. Texts drawn from Leibniz bring numerical rigor and philosophical speculation into collision with fragile vocal utterance. Questions of individuality, continuity, and becoming hover within the sound, never resolved. Even as the title gestures toward full realization, the music unfolds through asymptotic fragments. Moments of melodic clarity surface briefly, only to implode into breath and noise, as if coherence itself were an unstable state.

The emotional core of the cycle arrives with Fall, love letters fragments for mezzo-soprano, harp, and electronics, based on the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Here, intimacy is not narrated but exhaled. Desire, ecstasy, and emotional turbulence emerge through wordless gestures that bypass articulation altogether. The harp and electronics cradle these eruptions with remarkable precision, allowing feeling to register without being named. It is love stripped of declaration, passion rendered as vibration and pulse.

Threaded between these works are three “Transitions,” brief passages that function as subliminal corridors of breath, clicking keys, and flickering tongues. They stitch the cycle together while dissolving any sense of stable orientation. One crosses from one state to another almost without noticing, already altered by the passage.

Placing this cycle in the lineage of works such as Berio’s Visage feels inevitable, yet these compositions speak in a quieter register. They do not confront language so much as destabilize it from within. What ultimately binds them is a sustained meditation on the fragility of the utterance. Language here is never secure. It trembles, erodes, and transforms under pressure. Words aspire to fix experience, but sound exposes their impermanence. In these pieces, speech is always in the process of becoming something else. Like those of us wielding it, it survives only by continually undoing itself.

Yann Robin: Inferno / Quarks (YAN.007)

| Tyran Grillo

Orchestre National de Lille
Alexandre Bloch conductor (Inferno)
Peter Rundel conductor (Quarks)
Éric-Maria Couturier cello (Quarks)
Recordings made by France Musique on October 13, 2016 and by the technical team of the Orchestre National de Lille on July 1, 2017 at the Auditorium du Nouveau Siècle in Lille
Mixing of Inferno and mastering: Anaëlle Marsollier (Studios La Buissonne – 2018)
Production: Marc Thouvenot & La Buissonne
Artistic Direction: Pascale Berthelot
Release date: November 17, 2020

The seventh release from the CUICATL label, distributed by ECM Records and realized under the careful ear of Studios La Buissonne, unfolds like a descent staged in slow motion. It gathers two major works by French composer Yann Robin, not as paired opposites but as adjoining chambers within the same cavern, each carved by pressure, time, and an almost obsessive attention to sound as material that resists obedience.

Inferno for large orchestra and lectronics (2012/15), extends the molten logic of Robin’s earlier Vulcano into a broader and more perilous terrain. Where its predecessor seethed and erupted, Inferno opens the earth itself, widening the aperture to accommodate a full symphonic body and an electronic presence that behaves less like an accompaniment than a witness condemned to remain. The piece draws energy from volcanic force, from the grinding insistence of tectonic movement, but it also looks backward toward older cosmologies, toward the crater imagined as a mouth leading downward into realms where weight and consequence become absolute. Dante’s descent through the nine circles of Hell hovers here not as a story retold but as an organizing gravity, a philosophical excuse for sound to fall, to sink, to stretch itself into registers that feel less heard than endured.

From the outset, an oscillating electronic rhythm seeps upward from darkness, insisting on existence. It is tethered to the depths like a ferryman who has forgotten the surface, guiding others while remaining trapped in transit. Around it, the orchestra gathers in fragments. Flutes flicker briefly, offering half-phrases that seem to remember speech without fully recovering it. Other winds echo these gestures, voices reaching upward only to be pulled back by the mass below. The strings surge and recoil, animated by digital reactions, their undulations fueled by something restless and unnameable. They rise, they strain, and they fall back into place, condemned to repeat the same arc with minute variations, a ritual of motion without escape.

As the descent deepens, distorted impulses dart through the texture like fleeting hallucinations. They pass too quickly to be grasped, yet not so quickly that they leave no residue. The mind latches onto their outlines, assembling meaning where none is offered. Horns enter alongside radio signals, sharing air and intention without ever truly merging. They pass through narrow spaces, stiff and unyielding, only to warp once released, bending themselves into unfamiliar shapes as though testing the idea of survival beyond the threshold. A distant pulsing emerges, eerily reminiscent of a helicopter circling far above, a cruel reminder that time continues elsewhere, measured and indifferent. The balance of the piece begins to tilt. Timpani recede into silence while stillness itself becomes percussive. Out of this exchange rises a shrill, piercing song, demonic not in caricature but in its inevitability, spreading a thin carpet of resignation across the sound field. When the music finally withdraws, it does so gently, offering a softening that feels less like relief than a carefully staged illusion.

Quarks for cello and orchestra, composed in 2016, shifts the axis of inquiry without abandoning the underlying tension. Its inspiration lies not in physics as a system of laws but in the instability of language itself. Murray Gell-Mann’s decision to name the quark with a phoneme stripped of inherited meaning becomes the conceptual spark. Robin follows that gesture into sound, tracing how an idea becomes vibration, how vibration becomes articulation, and how articulation acquires the dangerous authority of a name.

The piece begins almost below perception. The cello stirs with grating gestures that refuse pitch, as if testing the edges of its own body. These sounds feel private, internal, the murmur of a language not yet agreed upon. Gradually, a chittering vocabulary forms, its units stitched into larger phrases by the orchestra. But coherence is never allowed to settle. Each structure is dismantled, recycled, pasted back together like fragments in a scrapbook whose chronology has been deliberately erased. Snippets of history drift through, human and otherwise, and with them comes a persistent unease. For all its orchestral breadth, the work remains fiercely intimate. The cello’s relentless friction keeps the listener tethered to its interior life, to the sensation of an instrument pushing against the limits of its own coherence.

Listening becomes a form of inhabitation. The ear does not observe the cello from a distance but moves inside it, sharing its insistence. It ceases to function as a soloist in the traditional sense. In its highest squeals, animal and raw, something elemental surfaces: an echo of creation itself, a human attempt to mirror the authority of the divine by assigning boundaries where none naturally exist.

Taken together, these works do not offer answers so much as conditions. They place the listener in situations where descent and emergence are concurrent states. What lingers after the final vibrations fade is not the memory of specific gestures but a quieter unease. If meaning arises only when we impose it, and if naming is always an act of power, then listening becomes an ethical move. To hear without conquering, to remain attentive without demanding resolution, may be the closest we come to understanding a world that does not require our comprehension in order to continue.

2025: A Year in Review

| Tyran Grillo

First, allow me to thank you, dear readers, for your patience over the past few years as I navigated a series of life transitions and slowly found my way back into the rhythm of listening, reflecting, and writing. Returning to this practice has been quietly restorative, an act of reorientation as much as renewal, and it has been deeply gratifying to once again inhabit the role of reviewer. I hope that, in reading these pieces, you have found the same pleasure in weighing your own responses to the music against mine. After finally catching up with ECM’s recent output and dusting off a few long-neglected companions from my shelves, most notably Horizons Touched, I feel newly aligned with the label’s ongoing journey and eager to keep pace as it continues to unfold.

With that, I would like to humbly offer my ECM picks of the year for your consideration. On the jazz-oriented side of the spectrum, Thomas Strønen’s Off Stillness, the latest installment in his Time Is A Blind Guide project, stood clearly apart for me. Following Strønen’s artistic evolution across the ECM catalogue has been a rewarding through-line, and witnessing where he has arrived with this record fills me with a quiet, vicarious pride. The album’s balance between freedom and form, speaking and listening, forward motion and gentle retreat is a joy to experience. It is music that breathes and responds, and I hope it has spoken to you with the same quiet insistence with which it continues to speak to me.

Choosing a single favorite from the New Series proved more difficult, but in terms of depth and lasting resonance, Meredith Monk’s Cellular Songs ultimately rose to the surface. There is something profoundly pure and elemental in the collective intelligence of her ensemble and in the visceral immediacy of the music itself. Long after the final sounds fade, its presence lingers, asking to be felt rather than interpreted. In a world marked by upheaval, confusion, and uncertainty, its message arrives as a necessary balm.

I would love to hear your own reflections. Please feel free to share your top ECM albums of 2025 in the comments.

After bringing my ECM reviewing efforts for the year to a close, I turned my attention to several long-neglected projects. Chief among them was finally committing my thoughts on INDEX, an Austrian imprint I have long regarded as the counterpart to ECM within the realm of avant-garde film. Thank you for bearing with me as I documented these socioculturally prescient works here on the site, which I envision as a living archive for other important labels and creative endeavors beyond ECM alone. Given INDEX’s deep relationship to cinema, it felt natural to house these reflections here for those who share that interest. Along the way, I also caught up with releases from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook label, as well as ECM artist Dine Doneff’s neRED imprint, both well worth exploring if they have escaped your notice.

Looking ahead, I have a handful of January releases already waiting in the wings, along with several additions to my ongoing “ECM Rarities” list that I trust will pique your curiosity.

Here’s to attentive listening, continued discovery, and an exciting new year ahead.

Dine Doneff: Nostos

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, percussion, lute, classical guitar, tambura, voice
Takis Farazis piano, accordion, voice
Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Dimos Dimitriadis flute, saxophone
Dany Hayes trumpet
Melina Kana voice
Maria Thoidou voice
Takis Kanelos drums
Manos Achalinotopoulos clarinet
Dimitris Chalkias clarinet
Dimitris Christidis trumpet
Nikos Kollias Tantsis trombone
Pantelis Benetatos piano
Nikos Sidirokastritis drums
Michalis Siganidis double bass
Recording Engineer: Yannis Tsambazis
Polytropon Studio, Thessaloniki – November 1995
Dany Hayes was recorded in Silverbold Studios, New York (1996)
Work Arranger: Dine Doneff
Cover: Fotini Potamia
Mastering: Chris Hadjistamou, Athens Mastering
First release by LYRA (Athens) June 1999
Producer: Dine Doneff

Nostos marks the opening chapter in a trilogy that has since come to define the mature voice of multi-instrumentalist and composer Dine Doneff. First released in 1999 on the Athens-based LYRA label and later rehomed by Doneff’s own neRED imprint, it is a recording that reveals more of itself with each return. Its thematic concerns, tonal palette, and ethical orientation radiate forward through Rousilvo and culminate in Doudoule. In hindsight, this debut installment feels less like a preface than a generative source.

Its title announces the central concept of return, understood not simply as physical homecoming but as a confrontation with memory, loss, and belonging. Doneff shapes this idea across two broad arcs spanning nine pieces, tracing a passage from encounter to separation and from outward motion toward interior reckoning. In doing so, the recording situates itself within the continuum of world music not as a stylistic mosaic but as a lived conversation, where Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean, jazz, and modal traditions coexist without hierarchy or pastiche.

The opening sequence begins with a spare invocation. A solitary lute establishes an atmosphere of distance and ancestry, carrying a gravity that binds the personal to the collective. From this threshold emerges an intimate convergence of timbres rather than a declarative statement. Doneff’s percussion entwines with the lyra of Sokratis Sinopoulos, while Takis Farazis’s piano follows a parallel route, at times aligning, at times drifting away. Melina Kana’s wordless vocal presence introduces warmth without tethering expression to language. What surfaces here is not certainty, but a shared willingness to move together even as divergence remains inevitable.

As the record broadens, its physical presence becomes more pronounced. Rhythms drawn from tabla and hand percussion root the sound in bodily motion, while winds and brass stretch the frame outward. The flute of Dimos Dimitriadis and the trumpet of Dany Hayes sweep across a textured accordion field shaped by Farazis, until abstraction gives way to something tactile and immediate. The audible stamp of Doneff’s boots on the studio floor, joined by voices and clapping, anchors the performance in lived space. This is tradition not preserved in frame, but reanimated through breath, movement, and communal energy.

That sense of shared experience crests in the dance-centered passages. Supported by Doneff alongside drummer Takis Kanelos, a gathering of horns and reeds conjures a celebration that feels simultaneously rooted and unbounded. Dimitriadis on saxophone and Manos Achalinotopoulos on clarinet take spirited turns as extensions of a collective pulse.

As expected, the trajectory turns toward parting. The midpoint recognizes separation as a necessary counterbalance to union. When the latter half of the program begins, attention shifts inward. With Nikos Sidirokastritis on drums and Doneff on bass, restraint and equilibrium come to the fore, favoring coexistence over confrontation. The ensuing voyage unfolds with patience, introduced by a fragile, minor-key piano figure. Brass and saxophone gain strength through persistence rather than force, their lines etched like accumulated experience into the terrain. Farazis’s solo, supported by Sidirokastritis’s tactile rhythmic foundation, arrives with a sense of earned reflection.

The closing stretch resists easy resolution. Interlaced basses, voice, piano, and accordion form a slow, shadowed progression that edges toward closure even as it slips away. Maria Thoidou’s vocal presence hovers between lament and affirmation, acknowledging that return is never a simple reversal. What follows is an uncertain space where meaning remains unsettled.

The final gesture stands alone, with Farazis at the piano. In a brief span, the closing piece compresses entire lives into touch and resonance. It suggests solitude without despair, remembrance without sentimentality. If Nostos offers a lesson, it is that return does not restore what has vanished, nor does it annul distance traveled. Instead, it proposes a way of carrying lived experience forward.

Within the wider terrain of world music, Nostos already signals Doneff’s refusal to exoticize tradition or flatten difference. His evolution as a composer and performer begins here with an ethic of attention, treating sound as a site of encounter rather than assertion. The recording does not argue for unity as sameness or identity as enclosure. It gestures toward something quieter and more enduring: that belonging is shaped through movement, through departure as much as arrival, and through the humility to return altered. In that sense, Nostos remains deliberately open-ended, continuing to resonate wherever listeners recognize themselves in its unfolding path.

William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops

| Tyran Grillo

“You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure,
look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world’s decay.”
– Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

What does it mean to commemorate a tragedy? Is remembrance an ethical imperative, a refusal to let past violence dissolve into abstraction, or an act of humility that acknowledges life as provisional, evaporating even as we reach for it and leaving only residue as memorial? These questions are not philosophical curiosities but preconditions, pressing upon us as inhabitants of a world in which catastrophe is no longer exceptional but recurrent. Whether we are welcomed into the social fabric or violently excised from it, erased until no thread remains to testify to our presence, we are left with unfinished desires and unlived lives. The future becomes an amputated limb, felt as absence, aching nonetheless.

Confronted with atrocity, the psyche’s first response is erasure. Memory folds inward, constructing architectures of absence meant to spare us endless replay. On an individual level, this forgetting can be merciful; on a collective scale, it is untenable. Trauma migrates and returns through architecture, sirens, televised repetition, and the language of fear that reshapes daily life. This is what renders trauma unspeakable: not silent, but overdetermined, burdened by language that buckles under its weight. To remember and retell is therefore not only historical fidelity but an attempt at psychic repair, a reaching toward coherence that acknowledges rupture as fundamental.

Trauma unfolds within a tension between denial and compulsion, between dissociation’s numbing fog and the violent clarity of reliving. Dissociation functions as a protective splitting, allowing the mind to survive what it cannot integrate. This explains why trauma narratives are fragmented, contradictory, and radically subjective and why they are so often pathologized, reduced to symptoms rather than recognized as meaning-making labor. Not only victims but witnesses are caught in this oscillation, raising the deeper question of how recurrence might be transformed into care, how involuntary return could become an act of tending rather than re-injury.

William Basinski never set out to address these concerns. Yet The Disintegration Loops does so with an intimacy and rigor that feels almost inevitable in retrospect.

In July of 2001, Basinski was transferring analog tape loops recorded in 1982 into digital format, hoping to preserve them. Instead, he discovered that the magnetic coating was deteriorating, each playback stripping away more and more material. The music began to die as it was being saved. Rather than intervene, Basinski listened, recording the collapse in real time. Two months later, on September 11, he played the first completed piece while watching the towers fall from his Brooklyn apartment. What began as an accident revealed itself to be an elegy, not by intention but by alignment.

This strictly limited box set, released by Temporary Residence Ltd in 2012, gathers the complete Disintegration Loops across four CDs, accompanied by a fifth disc of live orchestrations and a DVD documenting the smoke-filled aftermath as seen from Basinski’s window. Together, they form a durational encounter with loss understood as a process rather than an event.

The opening movement, Dlp 1.1, unfolds like a funereal hymn performed by a military band trapped within its own cycle of grief. Each iteration inches toward healing without ever arriving. Time behaves asymptotically, with consolation endlessly approached and never attained. The elegiac quality feels not ornamental but necessary, as though these sounds constitute the only response left to a collective brought to its knees. The loop does not simply repeat itself but erodes, its subtle alterations inviting the listener to shift attention and settle into new details even as the core remains recognizable. This mirrors aging itself. The self persists while the body thins, surfaces fray, and entropy asserts its claim. What gives the experience its gravity is its insistence that we remain alert to impermanence. Nothing here pretends to endure. At a certain point, a shadow passes through the sound, and meaning seems to gather beneath the rubble. In moments of shock, reality becomes elastic. Time slows, distance collapses, and language recoils. This music does not translate that condition. It inhabits it.

As the work moves into Dlp 2.1, an uneasy American pastoralism emerges. Layers hover and pulse, carrying a sensation felt more than heard, as if coursing beneath the skin. Reverie is encouraged, along with visions of a time when technology seemed less predatory, though perhaps it never truly was. The music floats without detaching, tethered to gravity even in its most gently transcendent moments. When the reverie fades, what remains is the recognition that transience is not an interruption of life but its substance. Kingdoms rise upon fantasies of permanence, and this loop dissolves them quietly, without spectacle. That dissolution deepens with Dlp 2.2, which scrapes against the wheel of time itself, one made of stone and lubricated by centuries of blood and tears. Ancestral bones grind into powder, feeding a morose mill powered by a river that is both divine and suffocating. Breath turns liquid. Motion continues without destination. Meaning churns rather than resolves. Handmade accents surface, distant horns and fragile drums, as if created for the purpose of breaking (and they do break). Smoke thickens. The air becomes uninhabitable for language. Without charity, we fragment into isolated links in a chain that once encircled the world and now corrodes in our hands. This is not a movement toward closure but an opening, a door already flung wide, revealing that love draws its intensity from fear and that vulnerability is the condition of connection.

With Dlp 3, the work enters the dark sublime at its deepest register. Creation becomes audible, revolving endlessly around itself. Childhood memories surface without invitation. Alternate selves walk beside us. The ground feels unstable, and to listen is to hang suspended by a thread woven from the detritus of one’s own body, shed hairs, discarded cells, forgotten versions of the self. A recursive recognition takes hold. I see myself watching myself. I know I have been here before. I turn away and glimpse you, mistaking myself for someone else, steadied only by the belief that the stars remain, waiting to guide us home. But what happens when home has been irrevocably altered, when the skyline smiles back with missing teeth, when the dream reveals itself as soot in the lungs and bodies rendered particulate? Hope does not vanish here. It circles, drawn by gravity, holding coherence together through sheer persistence. If you die before I do, I will live for both of us.

Dlp 4 sweeps the listener away. Flesh yields to sensation, and the mind consecrates surrender. Orientation dissolves as winds rake the plains, teasing demons from the soil. Dust ascends. Fear reveals how easily it can masquerade as intimacy when crisis arrives. Beauty persists, compressed into a single breath before being stolen away. Nothing can be restored, yet everything can be remembered. The music dies audibly. With Dlp 5, light breaks through with quiet authority, not blinding but decisive. Yesterday returns. Sun on skin. Promise in the air. The towers stand again, angelic in their familiarity, until realization arrives. This was always temporary.

Dlp 6 allows hope to return, tempered by grief. Understanding arrives too late to prevent harm, yet early enough to matter. Scars become inevitable. Memory and forgetting oscillate, exhausting but generative, and through this movement, defenses form not against the world, but against paralysis. The returns of Dlp 1.2 and Dlp 1.3 function less as reprises than as reckonings. One unfolds as an epilogue of the soul, where love remains possible though never redemptive, where no ecstasy compensates for loss and no reconciliation guarantees comprehension. The final return is granular and worn, a restoration undertaken with full knowledge of the cost and the conviction that the attempt itself was necessary.

Trauma does not reside solely in the event but in our tendency to become trapped within our responses to it. Healing requires transformation. This music functions as an unspoken reminder that something remains hidden yet shared, an existential tremor binding us together. The Disintegration Loops offers a reorientation, teaching us how to remain with what cannot be repaired. It refuses the fantasy of transcendence that would lift us cleanly out of history, asking instead that we stay within duration, accepting that meaning accumulates through attention rather than arriving through revelation.

What emerges from this sustained listening is a form of solidarity that does not announce itself. It does not rally or instruct. It gathers. Each listener becomes a vessel for the same slow erosion and fragile persistence. In this way, the work performs a quiet ethics, reminding us that survival is not an individual achievement but a shared condition, and that grief is most bearable when held in common, even across vast distances of time and experience. The loops bind us not by synchrony but by vulnerability, by the recognition that what breaks in one place reverberates elsewhere.

There is generosity in allowing decay to speak. By refusing to interrupt the tapes’ dissolution, Basinski grants the material world a kind of dignity, permitting it to complete its own sentence. This gesture extends toward us as well. We are permitted to falter, to lose coherence, to shed pieces of ourselves without forfeiting our worth. If there is hope here, it is not of renewal or return but of continuity without illusion, of carrying forward what remains even when it is fragile and incomplete. The loops end, but listening persists, in memory, in shared silence, in the altered way we attend to the world after the sound has faded. Something survives because it is carried.

ECM New Series: A Compendium

| Tyran Grillo

“I can imagine the New Series in the form of a journey: there is a route mapped out, but it is open to contingency; it does not insist on the shortest or most direct road. It allows for detours that might lead into totally different areas from the original plan.”
–Manfred Eicher

There exists a particular sensibility in recorded music that refuses spectacle, distrusts haste, and listens for what emerges only when attention is sustained. It is an ethos built on patience, on the belief that sound is not merely an event but an environment and that listening is as much a moral as an aesthetic act. Within this sensibility, music is not asked to announce itself loudly or justify its presence through novelty or authority. Instead, it is allowed to exist in a state of becoming. The Compendium at hand arises from this worldview. It does not rush to explain or persuade. It invites the reader into a space where time slows, where artistic intent is inseparable from restraint, and where the deepest meanings are often carried by what is nearly imperceptible.

Producer Manfred Eicher understands classical music not as a fixed inheritance but as a living terrain shaped by memory, silence, and risk. It softens the rigid hierarchies that separate genres, eras, and disciplines, favoring instead a continuity that flows between medieval chant and contemporary composition, between written score and spontaneous intuition, between the concert hall and the solitary act of listening. The guiding conviction is that music’s truth lies not in classification but in presence. How a note is played, how a phrase is allowed to decay, how a recording captures air, distance, and stillness matters more than the lineage of the material itself. The book emerges as an artifact of this conviction, shaped by the same attention to space, texture, and inwardness that has long defined the sound world it chronicles. It stands not as a monument but as a threshold, inviting readers into a cinematic way of hearing.

To situate this volume properly requires a widening of perspective, an understanding of how recorded classical music has historically been framed and mediated. For much of the 20th century, the dominant classical record labels functioned as custodians of authority. Houses such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Philips constructed a sonic canon through monumental interpretations, star conductors, and a reverence for definitive statements. Their achievements were immense and lasting, yet their aesthetic tended toward the architectural. Performances were designed to stand as reference points, recordings as polished monuments to permanence, history rendered stable and self-assured.

Against this backdrop, the New Series emerged not in opposition but in quiet divergence. Under the wider umbrella of ECM Records, it proposed a fundamentally different relationship between music, performer, and listener. Classical music was no longer approached as a preserved inheritance to be polished and displayed but as a living continuum, shaped by fragility, curiosity, and permeability. The New Series allowed sound to be influenced by poetry, film, sacred ritual, folk memory, and contemporary abstraction without anxiety over category or lineage. It invited unfamiliar accents into familiar forms and treated unfamiliar forms with the same care traditionally reserved for the canon.

The Compendium mirrors this orientation with remarkable fidelity. Its structure resists hierarchy, favoring proximity over ranking, conversation over proclamation. Rather than reinforcing the idea of repertoire as a fixed body of works to be mastered, it presents classical music as an ongoing exchange among composers, performers, and listeners across time and geography. Each page represents a frame in a larger, evolving montage. In doing so, the book articulates a philosophy that classical music remains most vital when it is allowed to remain unfinished, receptive, and alive.

At the center of this vision stands Eicher, not as a figure of authority in the conventional sense but as a listener whose curatorial instinct has quietly reshaped the conditions under which music comes into being. His words from a 1986 interview provide more than an epigraph for this review. They function as its axis. When he describes the New Series as a journey with a mapped route that remains open to contingency, he gestures toward an understanding of artistic practice that values deviation as deeply as intention. Progress is not measured by efficiency or arrival but by attentiveness to what reveals itself along the way, detours the very means through which meaning is discovered.

This conception of music as an exploratory act underlies every page of this volume. One senses its affinities with interior monologues, the long take in cinema, the negative space of modern painting, and the instinctive pacing of the stage. Music, in this framework, does not exist in isolation. It absorbs light, text, gesture, and silence, allowing each to subtly alter its contour. The Compendium reflects this sensibility without didacticism. It does not attempt to persuade through argument or analysis. Its structure mirrors the listening experience the New Series has long cultivated, where coherence arises gradually, and conviction emerges not from assertion but from accumulated attention.

The journey begins, with a sense of inevitability rather than chronology, in Arvo Pärt. His music, austere yet luminous, does more than inaugurate the New Series. It establishes a gravity field around which much of what follows seems to orbit. Pärt’s work reintroduced stillness as a radical force in modern music, restoring silence as something charged with ethical and spiritual weight. Thus, the label’s deeper preoccupations with time, devotion, and resonance come into focus.

From there, the book proceeds composer by composer, each chapter opening onto a distinct interior landscape while remaining visibly connected to a larger constellation. Figures such as György Kurtág, Giya Kancheli, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Alexander Knaifel, and Veljo Tormis are presented not as representatives of national schools or stylistic movements but as participants in a shared inquiry into memory, loss, and the fragility of form. Many of these composers write music that feels as though it is listening backward, attentive to echoes of vanishing traditions, while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Their work often proceeds by subtraction rather than accumulation, trusting sparse gestures, broken phrases, and restrained dynamics to carry emotional and historical weight.

Taken together, these composers suggest an alternative modernism, one less concerned with rupture or provocation than with remembrance and inwardness. Their music asks how history survives in sound, how trauma, exile, and cultural erosion might be transmuted into quiet persistence. The Compendium allows these affinities to emerge organically, without forcing comparison, inviting the reader to sense the shared temperature of their work over technical minutiae.

The scope widens further with composers whose practices actively dissolve the boundaries between genres and disciplines. Heinz Holliger and Heiner Goebbels bring to the New Series a heightened theatrical and literary awareness, where music becomes inseparable from text, gesture, and spatial experience. Their contributions underscore the label’s openness to works that exist as events rather than objects. In a different but equally expansive way, Meredith Monk articulates an aesthetic grounded in directness, purity, asymmetry, and transparency. Her music, born of the physicality of the voice and the ceremony of performance, seems to distill the label’s approach into human breath and movement, reminding us that experimentation need not sacrifice intimacy.

Alongside these figures stand composers such as Gavin Bryars, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Thomas Larcher, Dobrinka Tabakova, and Eleni Karaindrou, whose work stands slightly askew from prevailing trends. Their music is neither doctrinaire nor opportunistic. It operates according to an inner necessity, attentive to lyricism, atmosphere, and emotional clarity without yielding to sentimentality. The New Series has provided a home for such voices precisely because it values conviction over conformity, allowing composers to develop long arcs of work free from the pressures of fashion or institutional expectations.

The presence of each is deepened by carefully chosen quotations reflecting on the act of composition itself, paired with portrait photographs and images from recording sessions. These reveal the human conditions under which their creations come into being, the solitude, concentration, doubt, and patience required to bring sound into focus. One senses the rehearsal room, the studio, the long hours of listening and adjustment. In this way, the book affirms one of its central truths: that modern music, at its most vital, is not an abstract system but a lived practice, shaped by time, attention, and the enduring vulnerability of those who make it.

Equally vital to this story are the performers, whose interpretations run through the New Series in quiet refrain. They are not presented as virtuoso personalities imposing themselves upon the music but as mediators who allow its inner logic to speak with clarity and force. Their artistry lies in restraint as much as command.

Artists such as Gidon Kremer, András Schiff, and Kim Kashkashian exemplify this ethic through an almost ascetic devotion to sound itself. Their performances are marked by transparency of texture and a shedding of rhetorical excess, allowing even the most fragile or fragmentary music to retain its integrity. In the case of Keith Jarrett, whose presence bridges the worlds of improvisation and composed music, the New Series reveals how attentiveness can dissolve distinctions between genres, bringing the same intensity of listening to both the written score and being in the moment. Conductors such as Dennis Russell Davies further extend this approach, shaping large forms with a sensitivity to balance and pacing that privileges inner coherence over outward drama.

The ensemble performances documented in the Compendium deepen this perspective. Groups like The Hilliard Ensemble and Trio Mediaeval bring centuries-old repertoire into dialogue with contemporary composition, revealing unexpected continuities across time through their vocal blend and disciplined stillness. The Danish String Quartet exemplifies how chamber music, when approached with collective intelligence and trust, can achieve a rare balance of precision and vulnerability. In these performances, risk is not theatrical but structural, emerging from the willingness to expose the music’s quietest tensions.

Together, these musicians embody the New Series ideal, where lucidity replaces polish and attentiveness supplants display. Their work suggests that, at its highest level, performance is morally shaped. The Compendium honors them not as interpreters of a fixed tradition but as active participants in a living one, reminding us that the future of classical music depends as much on how it is experienced in the moment as on the notes preserved on the page.

As a physical object, the Compendium embodies the visual and tactile intelligence that has long distinguished ECM’s aesthetic. Its design speaks in a measured voice, austere yet quietly radiant, disciplined without austerity for its own sake. White space is not an absence but a field of attention. Typography, sequencing, and image placement appear calibrated to slow the reader’s pace, encouraging a form of engagement that mirrors the label’s decades-long listening habits. One does not skim this book. One dwells within it, returning to pages as one might return to a recording, attentive to shifts of mood and emphasis that only reveal themselves over time.

In this way, the book becomes an extension of the recordings themselves, another site where listening is shaped by care. It aligns with an idea of art that does not rush to occupy the foreground but waits for the reader or listener to meet it halfway. The reward for this patience is depth, not as density of information but as depth of presence.

In the end, ECM New Series: A Compendium stands as far more than an anniversary publication or institutional summation. It is a sustained meditation on how classical music might remain fully alive in the present without forfeiting its inwardness or historical gravity. By expanding the very conditions under which music is performed, recorded, and heard, the New Series has quietly altered the expectations surrounding classical sound. It has shown that innovation need not announce itself loudly, that progress can unfold through refinement, patience, and a deepening of attention.

This book captures that achievement with a humility that feels inseparable from its subject. It neither proclaims a legacy nor attempts to fix it in place. Instead, it reflects a way of thinking about music as a continuing conversation with time, one that values listening as an act of openness rather than mastery. Like enduring works of literature and art, the New Series does not seek to dominate history or escape it. It listens to it, answers it, and leaves space for what has yet to arrive.

Dine Doneff: Roden Voden (neRED/6)

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, mandola, tambura, piano, organ, percussion, and tapes
Kyriakos Gouventas violin on “Flow”
Main corpus of recordings: MK Studio, Munich
Müncher Kammerspiele – December 29, 2018
Engineer: Johann Jürgen Koch
Additional recordings: Vertekop Studio – 2019
Engineer: Pande Noushin
Mixed and edited by Dine Doneff
Domagk Cell 27, Munich – May 2025
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover artwork: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

We Macedonians
will not live in fear
The time will come,
and we’ll sing
our old song, again.

Those lines run through Roden Voden like roots growing in the earth. They function neither as a slogan nor as a promise easily fulfilled, sounding instead as something learned under pressure, after history has already exacted its toll. In this sense, Dine Doneff’s concluding chapter in a trilogy that began with Nostos in 1995 and continued through Rousilvo in 2004 does not simply present music. It stages a reckoning. The album listens backward into time, gathering voices recorded between 1991 and 2009 in Rousilvo, Ostrovo, Ts’rnessovo, and Voden, Greece, and carries them forward into the present, where memory, erasure, and survival collide.

Macedonia’s modern history is marked by fragmentation, forced silences, renamings, and borders drawn without regard for the lives lived along them. Languages were pressured into retreat. Songs were sung quietly, or only at home, if at all. Roden Voden treats these conditions as active forces shaping every sound. Doneff’s original compositions do not dominate the archival material. They surround it, support it, and sometimes unsettle it, as though the music itself were asking how an inheritance scarred by violence can be carried without being embalmed.

The album opens its first vocal threshold with “Spell,” voiced and written by Vane Indiff (b. 1944). The poem abandons narrative in favor of invocation. Natural forces, measures of time, mythic presences, and ancestral peoples accumulate in a relentless cadence that feels closer to ritual than to verse. Language becomes a circle drawn to awaken a world that has been dispersed. The poem does not describe resurrection. It attempts it, using repetition and breath as tools of release.

Such ritual gravity strengthens with “Zhalaj me Majko,” sung by Slava Pop’va (b. 1927). This folk song unfolds as a quiet lament shaped by exile and unspoken longing. Its melody lilts and never fully settles, searching for reassurance of love in a land that does not recognize her. Addressed to a distant mother, the song carries the weight of a year spent loving in silence. Devotion here is intense but unseen, and by the final lines, it is no longer an emotion but a fatal condition. What remains is a spare, devastating cry that transforms private despair into communal mourning.

“Kirka,” another text by Indiff, fractures time and meaning even further. The poem constructs its logic from color, the everyday, and the body rather than from a story. An almost childlike order is established before being obliterated by the abrupt fact of death as the self is reduced to wood, fire, and branches. Innocence and physicality collide without romanticism. Loss is rendered through disjointed fragments that resist consolation, insisting instead on the rawness of what remains.

Collective tragedy takes center stage in “Dve Tri Poushki,” rendered by Neshka Ts’rnessova (b. 1925). The song distills catastrophe into stark repetition. Rifles are counted. Fallen youths are counted. Grieving mothers are counted. Loss is now the only measure, allowing the song to move from sudden violence toward an enduring lament that binds faith and pain.

The political heart of the album asserts itself most directly in “Censored Memory,” to which Doneff contributes percussion, strings, and a poem in Greek. At the center lies “Oj Lele Brate mi Tane,” a song about Tane Stojchev Kljandzev (1874-1907) from Gornitschevo, leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation in Lerin (Florina). Memory here is not merely fragile. It is actively suppressed. By layering languages, voices, and historical reference, the track refuses singular authority and exposes history as something perpetually contested, shaped as much by silence as by speech.

“Nubeti” returns to the terrain of intimate loss. The folk song that follows unfolds as a dialogue between generations. A young widow carries her wedding crown as a relic of happiness interrupted. The mother speaks in the cadence of continuity and social expectation, while the daughter rejects comfort, insisting on the singularity of her grief. Survival and fidelity are placed in quiet opposition, and the song refuses to resolve the tension between them.

“Prikazni” unfolds as a dense, dreamlike collage where landscape, memory, and lament bleed into one another. Mountains, lakes, and weather respond like wounded witnesses to human violence and erasure. Personal cries of love and death interrupt the natural imagery, giving way again to familial grief and village memory. The verses move by emotional association rather than linear sense, capturing a world fractured by loss, where love, labor, war, and dispossession sound together for both the living and the dead.

“Narrative” gathers three texts into a single arc. “Stojna,” voiced by Stojan Gjorgiff (b. 1913), compresses catastrophe into a stark moral tableau where reproach and irreversible action collide in a single breath. Its restraint leaves the listener suspended in an unresolved aftermath. “Stara Panoukla,” sung by T’rpa Tanva Noushna (b. 1905), begins with pastoral tenderness before revealing a plague disguised as an old woman, death entering through the most ordinary gestures. “Dzemo,” sung by Tome Bojn (b. 1929), recounts the revenge killing of Dzhemail Aga, grounding historical violence in personal memory and inherited grievance. Together, these songs demonstrate how folk tradition carries ethics, fear, and justice as lived knowledge.

Threaded between these exhalations are extended wordless spaces where Doneff’s instrumental pieces function as corridors between testimonies. “Flow” opens this terrain with a radiant spread of piano, laying out a landscape where the living and the dead move together. Mandola and tombak provide traction, while a violin lifts memory skyward toward something unforgotten. “Prism” refracts emotion into color, turning sound into touch, a moment of fragile wonder. “Monologue,” an arco double bass solo, is a meditation on loss already named, allowing sorrow to resonate and slowly quiet. “Ghosts of Freedom” lingers with spectral patience, giving shape to implications too heavy for words. “Meglen” serves as connective tissue, bass and percussion sketching a passage rather than a destination. The title track itself emerges from ambient sounds recorded at the cemetery of Rousilvo, dissolving the boundary between presence and absence. “Ni Tvoj Ni Moj,” also rendered via the bow, strips a traditional ballad to its emotional bone. “Pepel” closes the album with classical guitar, light percussion, and the sound of locals speaking bilingually in Macedonian and Greek about atrocities suffered in Edessa Voden during the late 1940s. These unpolished voices do not seek resolution. They exist as ash does, settled, persistent, unavoidable.

Roden Voden matters because it refuses to let history become abstraction. These recordings are not artifacts sealed behind glass. They breathe, falter, contradict, and endure. By interweaving them with contemporary composition, Doneff does not attempt to heal the past. The album suggests that remembrance is not about closure or reclaiming a pure origin. It is about staying with what is difficult, listening without impatience, and recognizing that perseverance often sounds like an unfinished song. In the end, the album does not ask us to remember more clearly but more honestly and to accept that even in fear, even in silence, the old song awaits.