ECM Records

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.

Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM

| Tyran Grillo

Horizons Touched

It’s all our music.
–Robert Frost, “The Self-Seeker”

I. A Living Archive

Few record labels compel us to approach them in any way other than chronologically. ECM is one of them. Its catalogue does not merely document music made; it charts ways of listening learned, unlearned, and learned again. Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM arrives, then, not as a monument erected after the fact but as an attempt to take measure of a phenomenon still in motion, to listen back without closing the ear to what has yet to sound.

The importance of this book, devotedly published by Granta Books in 2007, lies precisely here. Rather than offering a definitive account of ECM, it gathers voices, memories, and reflections in a way that mirrors the label’s own refusal of finality. It does not summarize so much as resonate. In doing so, it becomes something rarer than an institutional history: a field of attentiveness, an act of collective listening directed both backward and forward. What is preserved is sensibility over consensus.

In his introduction, Steve Lake rightly calls ECM a “work-in-progress.” Indeed, ECM is not a repository of completed statements but a living archive in which the contributions of everyone who makes it a reality function as vital organs within a larger, thriving body. The questions posed throughout the book are as follows: How does one listen to a past that refuses to settle into style, school, or doctrine? How does one write about music that has always positioned itself slightly ahead of its own reception?

Before ECM and its leadership under bassist-turned-producer Manfred Eicher, no one had thought of space in jazz in quite the same way. Through Eicher’s early work with engineers Martin Wieland and Jan Erik Kongshaug, the recording studio itself emerged as an unspoken player, an active participant rather than a neutral container. Light entered sound. Atmosphere became structural. Silence was no longer an absence but a condition. Yet even this often-cited “ECM sound” resists fixation, not because it lacks identity but because it repels reduction.

Given that so many locations, musicians, and traditions have passed through the label, to distill its ethos into a single style would be to flatten precisely what has given it life. As Eicher admitted in a 1999 interview, “All that can be really said about the ‘ECM sound’ at this point is that the sound that you hear is the sound that we like.” From this deceptively modest admission unfolds an expansive reality. What began as a jazz imprint grew far beyond the conventions of genre, making room for folk music, film soundtracks, electro-acoustic alchemy, and, with ECM New Series, classical streams grafted into the same current. Even there, the borders remain porous: Jan Garbarek improvising alongside the Hilliard Ensemble; curated excerpts from a Heiner Goebbels sound installation; Keith Jarrett playing Bach’s French Suites on harpsichord.

Horizons Touched matters because it understands this permeability not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be honored. Enabled by over 100 contributors, the book presents itself as an “oral history,” though the term hardly captures its scope. What emerges instead is a polyphonic portrait of a label that has always worked obliquely through implication, atmosphere, and trust. Like the music it documents, the book does not insist. It invites. And in doing so, it affirms ECM as a listening practice still unfolding.

II. Seeing as Listening

It is telling that, following Lake’s opening statement, the essays do not begin with Eicher but with “Our Music: Synopsis for a Film” by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The filmmakers speak of seeing as listening, and few in their art would know better. This inversion of sensory hierarchy sets the tone for what follows.

Eicher’s essay, “The Periphery and the Centre,” originally delivered as a speech upon receiving the Kultureller Ehrenpreis of the City of Munich in 2005, continues this meditation on margins and essence. He speaks of the ECM office in Munich, located in what he calls “a no man’s land of industrial culture” at the periphery of things. Having been there myself, I can attest to its uncanny contradiction of placelessness and situatedness. Yet Eicher cautions against romanticizing such things: “We must never settle too comfortably at the periphery—the margin should only be a source, a spot from which to grasp the essence of the centre.”

His reflections braid together formative years in music school and the cinema, early encounters with Godard and others yielding a profound understanding of the overlaps between ears and eyes. For Eicher, atmosphere is not decorative but catalytic. “The atmosphere produced at a recording session,” he writes, “should be inimitable and awaken the desire to make changes or, where necessary, to improve and perfect.”

III. Redefining Tradition: European and Northern Voices

John Fordham’s “ECM and European Jazz” traces how figures like Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber became pioneers not by breaking with tradition but by redefining it as personally as possible. Weber’s admonition to his band—“you can play anything, as long as it doesn’t sound like jazz”—was a refusal of complacency. As Americans like Keith Jarrett, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny entered the fold and collaborated with European musicians, the sound expanded further. British artists such as Norma Winstone and John Taylor, alongside Kenny Wheeler in the influential Azimuth trio (with Ralph Towner welcomed into the circle), contributed to this widening field. Saxophonists John Surman—particularly in his solo recordings—and Evan Parker, with his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, ensured that the threat of typecasting never fully took hold.

On the mainland, artists like Louis Sclavis, Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stańko, and Miroslav Vitouš laid the groundwork for a new canon. And then there are the Scandinavians, whose presence Michael Tucker explores in “Northbound: ECM and ‘The Idea of North.’” What Tucker calls “a multi-hued Northern aura” begins with Afric Pepperbird, Garbarek’s historic recording with Terje Rypdal, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen. Yet this “North” is less a geographic persuasion than an idea taking shape in those who inhabit it or yearn toward it.

To my ears, few albums embody this sensibility more adroitly than Rypdal’s If Mountains Could Sing. But the Northern idea is not all cool washes and snowbound stillness. There is also unrest and existential fervor, as in the shamanic charge of Garbarek’s Visible World, which, despite its cool sheen, is rich with colorful flame. Even in the gentler worlds of Tord Gustavsen and Mathias Eick, there is a nomadism that never feels quite settled in its skin.

IV. Liminal Spaces and Less is More

This sense of in-betweenness finds articulate expression in Ivan Moody’s 2004 conversation with Jan Garbarek, “On Parallel Lines.” Garbarek speaks candidly about the difficulty critics have in placing his music. Jazz and classical camps alike often seem unsure how to approach it, leaving it to resound in a liminal space. “I consider myself extremely lucky,” Garbarek says, “because ECM already has a given audience, and they don’t really think of it as jazz or classical: it’s just a certain approach.”

Their dialogue ranges across questions of collaboration with musicians from other traditions, converging on a shared belief that constraints can be the most liberating conditions for creation. “I only seem to have dreams when I’m awake,” Garbarek remarks, a line that feels like an unofficial ECM motto.

V. New Series: Shadows, Voices, and Reinvention

The ECM New Series emerges throughout the book not as an offshoot but as an intensification of the label’s core ethos. John Potter’s “Early Music Discoveries and Experiments” marvels at Eicher’s uncanny ability to bring together musicians, ideas, and inspirations no one else would think to combine—most famously in Officium, but also in the Dowland Project.

Helen Wallace’s “Musicians of the New Series” observes that “the musicians who make ECM recordings are shadowy presences.” (My own early encounters with the New Series included Paul Giger’s Chartres. I remember trying to imagine what he looked like, how he moved while playing. When a clearer photograph finally appeared on Schattenwelt, it felt like seeing, through time, a mythical figure brought briefly into focus.) Wallace also notes the lack of musician biographies in the CD booklets, emphasizing that these recordings arise not from contracts but from shared visions and relationships with living composers illuminated by deeply human interpretations, resting in a nest of empathy.

Peter Rüedi’s “Continuity in Change: The Metamorphoses of Keith Jarrett” goes on to frame genius as a state of constant reformation rather than a sustained pinnacle. Jarrett’s “many-sidedness,” of “supernatural proportions,” exemplifies this restlessness. Rüedi speaks of the hymnic quality shared by Jarrett’s music and ECM: an ember that glows with varying degrees of warmth, sometimes sparking fires that take on lives of their own beyond the hearth.

VI. Free Playing, American Roots, and the Canvas Without an Edge

Josef Woodard’s “ECM and US Jazz” reminds us that the label has always been “a source of cohesion” for American artists and a further corrective to simplistic notions of the “ECM sound.” The label’s genesis lay with Mal Waldron, and figures like the Art Ensemble of Chicago brought incendiary free-jazz energy into its orbit. Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Ralph Towner, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Peter Erskine, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Steve Swallow, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, and Charles Lloyd all testify to a lineage of hard-edged expressivity as much as lyric spaciousness.

In “The Free Matrix,” Steve Lake’s interview with Eicher, free playing again emerges as a foundational principle. Eicher recalls early encounters with Paul Bley and identifies a “special electricity” shared by artists as varied as Glenn Gould, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett—an ability to act as “an inspired catalyst whatever the context.” Music, Eicher says, is “a canvas without an edge.” He recounts the genesis of the label’s name, inspired by Werner Goldschmidt’s Wergo series and Stockhausen’s From the Seven Days, leading him to imagine loosening borders through the idea of an “edition” (borrowed from the world of visual art) of contemporality. Thus, Edition of Contemporary Music was born. He likens the label to a sea: “A continuous movement of undercurrents and unexpected drifts… But sometimes the sea is tranquil, and stays tranquil.”

Keith Jarrett’s essay, “Inside Out: Thoughts on Free Playing,” deepens this philosophy. He distinguishes between artists who treat nothingness as lack and those who understand it as a state “pregnant with everything.” His notion of having “accidents on purpose” feels like a quiet manifesto for improvisation.

VII. Forms, Covers, Folkways, and Modernist Echoes

ECM’s visual identity receives eloquent treatment in Lars Müller’s “The ECM Cover.” Müller sees the label as transforming its musical philosophy into the realm of vision. The covers rarely illustrate the music directly, yet they exist in harmony with it—two verses from the same poem, not mirror images.

Karl Lippegaus, in “Colours, Densities, Forms,” traces how ECM reshaped folk music through artists such as Egberto Gismonti, Anouar Brahem, Lena Willemark, Savina Yannatou, Eleni Karaindrou, Gianluigi Trovesi, Shankar, and Dino Saluzzi. He also recounts asking Eicher why ECM albums open with five seconds of silence. Eicher laughed: “People need time to sit down, don’t they?”

Paul Griffiths’s “Against the Grain: Modernist Voices” reframes modernism not as rupture but as continuity. For example, in Thomas Demenga’s fifteen-year traversal of the Bach cello suites—paired with works by Holliger, Veress, and Isang Yun—Bach emerges as modern for his time, just as modern works echo the past. Griffiths writes lovingly of Holliger and Kurtág as poets, a lineage that includes the spoken-word forays of Bruno Ganz (to say nothing of Griffiths’s own).

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s “All Roads Lead to Bach” both confirms and dismantles Bach’s mythic status. Bach was no passive vessel of divine inspiration but a laborious musical scientist whose work fell out of favor for decades. Returning to Bach, Jungheinrich argues, is an anti-Romantic gesture, one that resonates deeply with jazz musicians like Jarrett. Yet ultimately, the metaphor inverts itself: not all roads lead back to Bach; they stem from him outward into space and time.

VIII. Instruments, Futures, and the Listener’s Life

John Cratchley’s “ECM and the Guitar” charts the instrument’s breadth across the label—from Abercrombie, Towner, Connors, Frisell, Tibbetts, Rypdal, and Metheny to figures like Keith Rowe, Mick Goodrick, Derek Bailey, and Christy Doran—extending into the next generation with Jacob Young.

John Kelman’s “Present and Future Songs” characterizes ECM as a place of discovery. Alongside its mainstays, it has consistently welcomed new voices: Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød, Tord Gustavsen, Savina Yannatou. What unites them, Kelman writes, is not style but vision: “All hold humanity as paramount; all ask that music be accepted as a contradiction, engaging perfectionist ideal and practical imperfection.”

Geoff Dyer’s “Editions of Contemporary Me” offers a listener’s diary, his discovery of ECM entwined with the formation of his inner life. It makes me nostalgic for my own early listening sessions with friends, before digital fragmentation fractured albums into isolated tracks.

Further interviews, such as Griffiths and Lake’s with Eicher, reaffirm that the New Series was never a departure, only a continuation of ECM’s inner spirit. Thomas Steinfeld’s “Words and Music” explores the “aesthetical alliances” listeners inevitably draw across the label’s vast terrain.

IX. Voices, Engineers, and the Hand Holding the Key

Interleaved among the essays, Horizons Touched offers biographical sketches and first-person statements from ECM’s musicians, each a small window that opens onto a whole climate. These fragments do not merely annotate the label’s history; they humanize its method. They remind us that ECM’s continuity is not a doctrine but a chain of encounters: one musician hearing another across a room, across a record, across years, then walking away altered.

Jan Garbarek’s recollections of meeting Don Cherry glow with this catalytic force. Cherry’s folk sensibilities did not function as ornament or exotic garnish; they sank into Garbarek’s musical bloodstream, shaping how the saxophonist would understand melody as something older than genre, something carried like a story rather than “played” like a role. John Surman, too, appears not as a solitary figure descending fully formed but as someone who fell in with the Norwegian jazz scene by way of circumstance and gravity via Karin Krog’s quintet with Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen, Garbarek, and Terje Bjørklund—a scene, then, as a confluence of players finding shared weather.

The book is equally attentive to the invisible labor that turns vision into sound. Iro Haarla’s memories of bringing her partner Edward Vesala’s musical worlds to life are among the most moving examples. Vesala would sing ideas into a tape recorder—raw transmissions, half-formed, urgent—and Haarla would transcribe them, arrange them, translate the unrepeatable into something held and shared, using those recordings and other means of transmission. Here, creativity is shown not as solitary lightning but as an act of listening so deep it becomes architecture.

Generational echoes reverberate as well. Trygve Seim recalls his first encounter with Jan Garbarek—not in person, but through the spell of Eventyr, which set him on the path toward the saxophone at a time in his life when he was more interested in sports. That detail matters: it gives us the unmistakable sense of a life diverted by sound, a horizon touched early enough to become destiny.

From the New Series world, Kim Kashkashian offers a statement that feels like reassurance and challenge: the intense preparation of a recording is precisely when “preconceived notions are abandoned and the music is created anew.” ECM’s paradox—rigor as the gateway to freedom—finds proof in her fearless championing of Kurtág, Mansurian, Kancheli, and so many others, repertoire approached not as museum artifact but as living material, remade in the present tense. András Schiff appears, too, animated by a seeking spirit that never settles for attainment, spurring him toward greater interpretative levels, as if interpretation were not a finishing touch but an ethical pursuit, a way of staying in motion.

Anouar Brahem’s reflections widen the field again, returning us to that Godardian hinge where sight and sound exchange roles. He speaks of the silence that precedes image and the music that follows it, a dynamic mirrored in many bands along the ECM spectrum, where what is withheld becomes part of what is said, and where the breath before the phrase is meaning. Annette Peacock, in turn, expresses gratitude for Manfred Eicher, whose prophetic understanding of her essence became a leitmotif at ECM, less the discovery of a new artist than the recognition of someone already speaking in her own dialect, waiting for ears fluent enough to listen.

Several statements arrive like aphorisms—compact, paradoxical, strangely complete. Christian Wallumrød’s reflections on harmony and freedom turn composition and improvisation into mirror arts: “You write something because you couldn’t improvise it, and you improve something because it couldn’t be written.” Carla Bley’s slow, forward-thinking approach to making music is distilled into another truth earned over decades: “My solos usually end because I’ve had to abandon them.” Such statements suggest minds always moving ahead of what the hands can say.

Folk tradition is not treated as a quaint inheritance but as a living accumulation. Ale Möller speaks from deep knowledge, describing folk music as cumulative and locating ECM’s contribution in inward intensification, “increasing the inner density in music by reducing the external.” Dino Saluzzi sharpens this imperative by insisting on emotional sensitivity as the bridge to freedom: “Art doesn’t need muscles.” Robert Wilson’s poetic hymn to ECM (stylized as “Every Color Maginable”) extends the label into chromatic metaphysics. And Gidon Kremer, attentive to the bond between composer, performer, listener, articulates his love for Eicher’s vision of bringing them lucidly to us: “ECM stands for music intent on communicating something to us.”

Taken together, these voices form their own ensemble, less a supplement to the book than its beating heart. They do what ECM has always done at its best: place the “work” back into the work, the human back into myth, reminding us that the key is never merely the catalogue, the studio, the aesthetic.

The book closes not with an argument but with a gesture. Paul Griffiths raises a glass in the form of a prose poem written in Ophelian, in which meaning and music collapse into one another: “The key is in his hand. The key is his hand. There’s music in that hand.” The image lingers, unfinished, as if the act of letting go is where melody begins.

Leading up to this closing utterance is a dotted path of voices whose work has shaped ECM as surely as any score or improvisation. Reflections from photographers and visual artists—Roberto Masotti, Jan Jedlička, Jim Bengston, Mayo Bucher, Thomas Wunsch, Dieter Rehm—remind us that ECM’s sound has always traveled with an image, even when that image defies the conventions of illustration. Their contributions affirm the label’s belief that vision and music are parallel arts, each extending the other’s reach without collapsing into it.

Equally essential are the engineers, those who inhabit the threshold where intention becomes vibration. Peter Laenger, Jan Erik Kongshaug, James Farber, Stefano Amerio, and Gérard de Haro speak from within the studio’s invisible architecture, where listening is technical and moral. Amerio’s remark—“Recording for ECM means opening your mind to 360 degrees”—could stand as an epigraph for the enterprise. It names a practice of attention that is spherical rather than linear, attuned not only to what is played but to what surrounds it, precedes it, remains after it fades.

In ending this way, Horizons Touched refuses closure in the conventional sense. Instead, it disperses authorship, returning the music to the many hands that have shaped it, hands that frame images, tune microphones, adjust distances, wait for silence to speak. The key does not lock the door behind us. It stays in the hand, warm, provisional, ready to be passed on.

X. The Horizon Remains Open

Horizons Touched does not seek to close a circle. It leaves it slightly ajar, breathing. ECM has always seemed less concerned with preservation than with readiness for the next silence, the next alignment of breath and intention, the next sound that arrives without asking permission. To listen in this way is to relinquish certainty. It means accepting that meaning does not always announce itself, that music may resist immediate comprehension, that its most lasting truths often surface obliquely, long after the final note has faded. ECM’s legacy, if it can be called that, is not a fixed aesthetic but a discipline of sustained attention.

In this sense, the future of listening suggested here is neither utopian nor nostalgic. It is quieter, more demanding. It asks for patience in a culture of acceleration, for depth in a time of surfaces. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, to trust that what has not yet resolved may still be working on us, shaping us from within. The music does not rush to meet the listener; it waits. And in that waiting, something essential is restored.

Perhaps this is the true horizon being touched. Not a distant line toward which we move but a threshold we learn to inhabit. A space where sound and silence exchange roles, where intention loosens its grip, where listening becomes less about capture than encounter. The future implied by Horizons Touched is one in which music continues to arrive from unexpected directions, carrying with it traces of many worlds, yet asking only one thing in return: that we be present enough to hear it.

The horizon remains open because it must. To close it would be to mistake listening for possession. And ECM, at its heart, has never been about owning sound—only about making room for it, and trusting that what enters will know what to do next.

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide: Off Stillness (ECM 2842)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide
Off Stillness

Thomas Strønen drums
Ayumi Tanaka piano
Håkon Aase violin
Leo Svensson Sander violoncello
Ole Morten Vågen double bass
Recorded December 2021 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Peer Espen Ursfjord
Mixed July 2024 by Manfred Eicher, Thomas Strønen, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: December 5, 2025

Off Stillness begins not with sound but with a memory, one that Thomas Strønen carries like a stone kept in the pocket of his youth, made rounder and smoother with time. His recollection of slipping unnoticed through a café kitchen in Tønsberg to witness his first jazz concert at age 15 is more than nostalgia; it’s an origin story. There, engulfed in the sounds of Jon Balke’s Oslo 13, was a revelation. Rhythm, he discovered, was not a grid but a worldview, a way for the body to converse with the unseen.

From this quiet prelude, the latest iteration of his band Time Is A Blind Guide opens with “Memories of Paul,” a piece that feels like stepping into the half-light of Rainbow Studio, a space that does not merely record music but seems to cultivate it. Despite the title, this is not a tribute to Motian or Bley so much as a meditation on the tension between lineage and selfhood. Ayumi Tanaka’s piano breathes first, the faint stirring of a creature waking in its natural habitat. Håkon Aase’s violin is a drifting breeze, Leo Svensson Sander’s cello a subterranean hum, and Ole Morten Vågan’s bass a slow-moving tide beneath the surface. Strønen’s drumming is the pulse of the room itself, a presence woven so delicately into the others that extracting any single thread seems almost sacrilegious.

As the album moves inward, the climate changes with “Season.” Here, the strings take on an arid beauty, as if we’ve been transported into a landscape shaped by centuries of shifting winds. The piece proceeds like an archaeological dig through sand and sovereignty, yet from this dryness small harmonies bloom, each a tiny flower of possibility pushing through historical sediment. The music astonishes by how much it conveys with so little, conjuring a vastness that feels earned rather than imposed.

The ensemble’s paradoxical strength, its ability to move loosely while bound by deep listening, emerges even more fully in “Fall.” The piece sways like a great creature with an internal compass that needs no magnetic north. Its journey nourishes itself, leaving behind traces—melodic footprints, rhythmic indentations—for the listener to follow. Time is not measured but wandered through.

The mood softens with “Tuesday,” a piece stripped to its essentials, left bare so its poetic speech can resonate. Whether the musicians play in unison or diverge into their own small eddies, they inhale and exhale as a single lung. It is tenderness as a means of clarity.

A shift occurs in “Cubism,” where architecture abounds. The piece balances on a precarious structure of boards and cylinders, a slow-motion circus act in which each rotation differs subtly from the last. Strønen provides the chemical uplift, one reaction setting off the next. Tanaka’s piano becomes an alkaline counterpoint to the more acidic strings, and together they settle into an equilibrium that feels strangely, beautifully neutral. The music is precise without being rigid, playful without losing its center.

Abstract shapes drift into form with “Dismissed,” which begins like an experiment suspended in midair. Its irregular surfaces soon accumulate heat, expanding into outbursts of collective energy. Metallic tensions shimmer and collapse, highs and lows collide, and the piece finally dissolves into a sonic steam rising from a cooling forge.

Then comes “In Awe of Stillness,” which glistens with a self-generated glow, moving as if guided by impulses as old as they are unnameable. Just when it feels ready to drift away, it recoils slightly, a moment of satoric self-recognition. This pause resets the ensemble for the next step in its nomadic journey. Even as the piece thickens into louder phrases and hints of groove, it never sacrifices atmosphere. Nothing is ornamental; everything breathes.

By the end, one realizes that Off Stillness is as much a pilgrimage as an artistic statement. Its stories do not unfold in straight lines but in spirals, circling back to that teenage boy in Tønsberg who planted a seed that has now grown into a tree in its own right. The music invites repeated listening not to decipher it but to inhabit it, each return revealing new details, like light shifting across the same landscape at different hours.

For all these reasons, it may well be—both in craft and in spirit—the ECM album of the year. There is truly nothing else like it.

John Scofield/Dave Holland: Memories of Home (ECM 2860)

| Tyran Grillo

John Scofield
Dave Holland
Memories of Home

John Scofield guitar
Dave Holland double bass
Recorded August 2024 at NRS Recording Studio, Catskill NY
Engineer: Scott Petito
Cover photo: Juan Hitters
Produced by Dave Holland and John Scofield
Release date: November 21, 2025

Guitarist John Scofield and bassist Dave Holland, two musicians with such distinct sonic identities, join forces for a duo album that is as mighty as it is intimate. Despite having crossed paths countless times over the decades, whether onstage with giants like Herbie Hancock and Joe Henderson or in high-octane settings like ScoLoHoFo, Memories of Home marks their first album as a duo.

The idea had lingered for years, even surviving a pandemic-scrapped tour in 2020. When they finally hit the road in late 2021, the chemistry was immediate. By the time they toured again in 2024, making a record felt inevitable. The result mirrors their live sets with its blend of new and revisited originals shaped by decades of shared musical language. Their overlap in taste and technique makes the pairing feel natural, while their differences keep the music alive, alert, and constantly evolving.

A major point of connection, of course, is Miles Davis. Scofield’s mid-80s stint and Holland’s late-60s tenure offer a rare shared lineage, and you hear echoes of that history right away in the opener, “Icons at the Fair.” Built from the chord movement of Herbie Hancock’s version of “Scarborough Fair” (a session both musicians played on), the tune’s wistful intro quickly settles into a buoyant groove. Scofield’s rounded tone is an elegant vehicle for his improvisational flights, and the two musicians trade roles like seasoned copilots, each taking the lead before easing back into support. Holland’s solo radiates that trademark close-eyed smile, matching Scofield’s buoyancy beat for beat.

Scofield revisits several of his own classics here, each transformed by the duo format. “Meant to Be” adopts a darker hue than its earlier incarnations, its fluid changes and easy-living feel revealing two players fully at ease with themselves and each other. Holland pulls his solo seamlessly from the texture, almost as if it had been hiding there the whole time. Later, “Mine Are Blues” brings their full energies to the forefront. The drive is infectious, with the pair finishing each other’s phrases in a display of rhythmic and melodic telepathy. Scofield’s crunchy, tactile tone is on point. “Memorette,” swankier and more rhythmically playful, finds a lovely twang in the guitar and Holland sounding lush and resonant beneath it all.

Holland contributes several reimagined pieces from earlier in his career. “Mr. B,” his tribute to Ray Brown, brings out a delicate, cerebral side of Scofield, who responds to Holland’s writing with gorgeous restraint and curiosity. “Not for Nothin’,” first heard on Holland’s 2001 quintet album of the same name, reveals new secrets when reduced to its essentials. Here, the tune becomes lightning in a bottle—lean, open, and unexpectedly adventurous. Scofield seems newly inspired by the stripped-down setting, exploring bolder shapes and touches of abstraction.

The guitarist’s ballad “Easy for You” emerges as a quiet triumph that carries a gentle energy and a deep love for life. At over eight minutes, it gives both players space to breathe, to stretch, and to enjoy the subtleties of their wholesome interplay.

The album closes with two Holland compositions. “You I Love” is a vivacious romp, brimming with delight, while the contemplative, pastoral mood of the title track draws out the earthy, country-tinged side of Scofield’s playing. Like ending credits to a Western, it rides off slowly, tracing the silhouette of a hero dissolving into sunset. It’s both a musical farewell and a gentle summation of everything the duo shares.

Wu Wei/Martin Stegner/Janne Saksala: Pur ti miro (ECM New Series 2843)

| Tyran Grillo

Wu Wei
Martin Stegner
Janne Saksala
Pur ti miro

Wu Wei sheng
Martin Stegner viola
Janne Saksala double bass
Recorded October 2022
Teldex Studio Berlin
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 21, 2025

Pur ti miro represents one of those rare convergences in classical music when disparate lineages find themselves speaking, almost accidentally at first, a common language. It begins with curiosity, as violist Martin Stegner and double bassist Janne Saksala, both members of the Berlin Philharmonic, step beyond their usual orchestral frame to meet Wu Wei, master of the sheng. His instrument—an ancient Chinese mouth organ whose history predates all the works played here—has been modified with keys for the modern ear, capable of whispering like breath against glass or expanding in a cathedral-like radiance. When Stegner encountered Wei in 2009, as he recounts in the album’s liner note, he felt something akin to recognition, as if this millennia-old voice, rendered anew, had been waiting patiently to show him a corner of the musical universe he had not yet visited.

Their collaboration began with long improvisations that felt like conversations between strangers who, little by little, discover that they share the same dreams. But the true spark arrived one day when Wei, without announcement or expectation, introduced Claudio Monteverdi’s Sì dolce è’l tormento to the group. The sheng’s timbre, at once reed-like and celestial, enfolded the melody in a new kind of vulnerability. Early music, that echo of distant rooms and candlelit courts, suddenly breathed with a startling immediacy. Hearing it was nothing short of a revelation for Stegner.

From this moment, a desire for a project to nurture that revelation without taming it grew. The idea of a trio emerged: sheng, viola, and cello. Yet Stegner wondered what might happen if the music’s lower roots reached even farther into the earth. And so, the cello was replaced in the imagination by a double bass, and eventually in reality by Janne Saksala, whose warm resonance, playful experimentation, and architectural sensibility offered the perfect counterweight to the sheng’s shimmering glow. What began as an artistic experiment became a living portrait of three musicians drawn together by curiosity, humility, and a willingness to let go of what they thought they knew.

The recording opens, fittingly, with Sì dolce è’l tormento, and one feels immediately the trust between them. The strings do not accompany the sheng, nor does the sheng simply ornament the strings; instead, they dissolve into one another, forming a single instrument with three voices. The mournfulness of Monteverdi’s melody gains new terrain. It feels less like lament and more like a story we have heard so many times in languages we do not speak, whose meanings we may sense only in the pauses between syllables. Here, at last, someone translates them for us in real time.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Organ Trio Sonata No. 1 in E-flat major follows, and with it an architectural shift. The lively outer movements float and spin with a measured buoyancy, but it is the Adagio that becomes the trio’s proving ground. In that slow movement, the muted viola curls around the bright woodiness of the sheng, while the double bass expands the room so we may step inside the harmony itself. Bach’s geometries reveal themselves as bodies in motion, human-shaped and breathing. The Andante from the Organ Trio Sonata No. 4 in e minor deepens the sense of natural inevitability, a landscape in sound. The sheng is a waterfall glimpsed from afar, the viola a lone bird carving patterns into a gray sky, and the bass the mist that holds all of it in gentle cohesion. And when the title piece from L’incoronazione di Poppea at last appears, we recognize the sensation it carries: that life is forever repeating its own small operas, and we are simply pilgrims passing through the middle of one that has been running since long before we arrived.

At the center of the album sits Vivaldi’s La Follia, a theme-and-variation playground that allows the musicians to stretch not only their technique but their imaginative reach. Here, Wei’s sheng sounds at times like an accordion leaning into a waltz, at others like a human voice. Meanwhile, Saksala’s bass dances with kinetic clarity. When the trio slips unexpectedly into jazz-tinged territory, we catch a glimpse of what they can do when the score becomes a suggestion rather than a command. Echoes of Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia drift through, blooming into a finale that approaches the exuberance of a Romanian folk dance.

Thus, it makes poetic sense to end with a folk song proper: Bruremarsj frå Beiarn, a Norwegian bridal march. The trio plays it with both reverence and wonder. There is a hint of sadness at the beginning, that ache of separation inherent in every union, the leaving of one home to build another. The sheng’s accordion-like hum traces a path between joy and nostalgia. In its gentle call, the future becomes something familiar, while the past turns mysterious and soft-edged, retreating into obscurity.

Throughout the album, even in the most composed selections, a spirit of improvisation remains. The players listen more than they declare. They treat each phrase not as a given but as a question waiting to be answered. And because none of the instruments carries an aggressively sharp tone, the ensemble moves within a spectrum of shadow rather than light. The absence of a violin removes any temptation toward brilliance for its own sake.

It seems no coincidence that Pur ti miro translates to “I gaze upon you.” Listening to this album, one feels watched, not with scrutiny but with tenderness. The music looks at us the way a friend might look across a quiet table, curious about what we will say next. It regards us openly, lovingly, holding its breath just long enough for us to understand that we, too, are part of this conversation.

Mal Waldron: Free At Last (Vinyl Reissue)

| Tyran Grillo

“I feel if you look back too much,
you trip when you take a step forward.”
–Mal Waldron

Although Mal Waldron began his career in jazz as an alto saxophonist, playing in the long, tapering shadow of Charlie Parker, fate would soon guide him back to the keyboard. The piano was, for him, not just an instrument but a resonant vessel sailing in the tempests and calms of his cross-hatched personality. His classical training gave him a compass; his improvisational instincts supplied the wind. A prolific writer of tunes—angular yet melodic, pensive yet full of forward motion—he became an indispensable sideman to the luminaries of his era, including John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Jackie McLean, and, above all, Billie Holiday, with whom he shared a natural rapport. Their collaborations seemed to hover between worlds—her voice the smoke, his chords the fire.

But every light casts its own darkness. Waldron’s journey was interrupted by a nervous breakdown that landed him in the hospital. And then, at his seeming lowest point, when he was invited to Paris to score a film. It was more than a job; it was a turning point, a new way of listening. Each city he touched thereafter—from Bologna to Cologne and, ultimately, Munich—became another note in the unfolding score of his reinvention. By 1967, he had settled in Munich. Along the way, he crossed paths with Swiss bassist Isla Eckinger and drummer Clarence Becton, another American expatriate whose trajectory brought him across the pond into a music scene unlike any other.

Free At Last, a title that feels both biographical and prophetic, ended up being one of three studio recordings Waldron made with ECM’s founder, Manfred Eicher, the others being The Call (JAPO) and the elusive Spanish Bitch (Victor Japan). In Waldron’s rhythmic restraint, in his careful placement of silence and tone, surely Eicher glimpsed a growing philosophy of sound, one defined not by density but by depth, not by volume but by presence. Waldron’s subsequent decades would see him traversing genres, yet always with the same chiseling intent: to refine expression until it gleamed with truth.

Now, in this two-LP reissue, gloriously packaged in a gatefold sleeve with all the original artwork, plus new liner notes by Steve Lake (from which I’ve distilled much of the information above), we are granted with both the familiar and the newly unearthed. The 1969 session unfolds again like a memory recalled in sharper resolution, joined by alternate studio takes on sides III and IV. The all-Waldron set list remains startlingly modern. From the very first shimmer of Becton’s cymbals on “Rats Now” to the closing sparkle of “Boo,” Eicher’s curation of space and clarity is already very much alive. Listening to it in 2025 feels less like revisiting an old field and more like standing again in its soil, still fragrant, still fertile, still yielding. To reap this harvest after more than half a century is to marvel at how sound, once released, can resist decay.

As noted in my first-impressions review, the trio’s momentum is undeniable in “1-3-234” and “Rock My Soul.” Both skip across a sunlit surface like stones whipped by practiced hands. Yet it is in the quieter pieces that Waldron reveals his most robust intentions. Whether mixing shadow and sparkle in “Balladina” or masterfully blending poetry and prose in “Willow Weep For Me,” he makes us acutely aware that emotions are points of departure, not destinations. Eckinger’s bass hums with empathy, Becton’s drumming reacts in real time like reflected light, and together they guide the listener on a journey worth savoring.

Among the newly released takes, the extended “Willow” is especially revealing. Each gesture seems to weigh more, to linger longer. One senses them circling not around a song but around a feeling, its perimeter undefined, its center perpetually receding. As in the photograph of the LP I took above, their coming together stands as a testament to the power of a vision that, even as the tide of history swirls and churns around it, remains true to itself to this day.

Steve Tibbetts: Close (ECM 2858)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Tibbetts
Close

Steve Tibbetts guitar, percussion, piano
Marc Anderson percussion, gongs, handpan, loops
JT Bates drums
Recorded 2021-2024 in St. Paul by Steve Tibbetts
Drums recorded at 8vb Studio, Minneapolis by JT Bates
Mastered by Greg Reierson at Rare Form Mastering
Cover photo: Joel and Norris Tibbetts
An ECM Production
Release date: October 24, 2025

“Music is a twilight language.
The job is to translate some shadow into sound.”
–Steve Tibbetts

On his 11th album for ECM, guitarist Steve Tibbetts returns with his ever-present ally, percussionist Marc Anderson, joined by drummer JT Bates for a session of immense intimacy. If long-standing classics like Exploded View and Big Map Idea have attuned your ears in a certain direction, you can safely put those expectations aside. This time around, Tibbetts offers us imploded views and small map ideas. And while these are meticulously yet organically crafted as per usual, to appreciate their full potential requires meditation, repeat listenings, and an openness to disconnecting oneself from the FOMO of our digital lives in service of something far more subliminal and enduring.

All the more appropriate, then, that the album should take its first steps with “We Begin,” wherein a deep and sinuous sound stretches from horizon to horizon. Like many of the pieces here, it unfolds in multiple numbered parts, each embodying an interlocking experience that builds on the last. In Part 2, for example, the introduction of hand drumming gives traction and earthiness to the proceedings, even as Tibbetts morphs from one register to the next, swapping terrains with the ease of a fox changing the color of its fur without even thinking. The seasons are his compass, trudging through the underbrush as winter approaches. The delicate patter of canine footsteps is audible now and then, marking the forest floor with rhythms older than all of us put together.

In “Away,” another tripartite wonder, hints of distant thunder begin to encroach on our audible view. Without an umbrella, Tibbetts constructs one out of the materials at hand: his strings provide the metal spines, the percussion the webbing between them, and the melodies themselves the rod and handle where they meet. And even though the rain never comes, that’s okay. The beauty was in the anticipation of the downpour.

Not all is ferns and fronds, as “Remember” offers some grittier textures, recalling the solo work of Andy Hawkins. What’s fascinating here is how the title can be read as a metaphor for listening: both require a certain sensitivity to sounds and movements beyond one’s control. There is a sense of flow that exists just outside of time, especially in the piano Tibbetts adds to Part 2, lending an even more nostalgic tinge to the whole.

“Somewhere,” “Anywhere,” and “Everywhere” are something of a triptych in their own right. Consisting mostly of short intakes of breath, they cradle within them the slowest of burns in Part 3 of “Somewhere.” (It’s also a literal burn, as the tubes in Tibbetts’s amp catch fire at the 4’06” mark—listen for their satisfying decay!) Beyond that, one encounters hints of whale song, death knells, and other dark turns, all finding their final rest in “We End.” It’s a flower without a vase, gifted instead to the water’s surface.

Throughout this mellifluous journey, we are guided by two distinct voices. One is the 12-string, which Tibbetts strings in double courses rather than the standard octaves; the other, his acoustic and electric six-strings, on which he drops the low A and E down to G and C, respectively. “There’s always a bass drone available,” he notes of the effect. “That tends to keep all the tunes in the same key. I’m comfortable with that, having spent some time around gamelan ensembles, Tibetan longhorns, court music from Java, Hardangar fiddle from Norway. Most of the world’s music stays in one key or another.” True, and all the more reason to appreciate the yearning, keening quality of his touch. Like the sitar, so much happens after contact has been made.

This is by far the most delicate of Tibbetts’s albums, but for that reason, it speaks more directly to the heart. There is something uniquely tensile here such as only he can articulate. He is a master of suspensions: even in silence, one feels the slack in his gut. The cumulative effect borders on an autonomous sensory meridian response, where the creaking of strings and frets makes the very spine of the universe tingle. A shooting star in slow motion, it possesses time-lapse qualities. And just when you think Tibbetts will lift off and leave you behind, he touches down back on the soil and ensures your safe travels.

Sokratis Sinopoulos/Yann Keerim: Topos (ECM 2847)

| Tyran Grillo

Sokratis Sinopoulos
Yann Keerim
Topos

Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Yann Keerim piano
Recorded February 2024
Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Giorgos Kariotis
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

There is nothing quite like the sound of the lyra when Sokratis Sinopoulos takes it in hand. The instrument exhales an ancient soul into the modern air, and few musicians draw from its strings such a fusion of myth and immediacy. From his quartet recordings, Eight Winds and Metamodal, this more intimate duo with pianist Yann Keerim distills their chemistry into an even deeper alchemy of tone and silence. Their collaboration of nearly twenty years has ripened into an art of pure intuition, where melody and freedom speak the same language.

At the album’s heart lies Béla Bartók, whose Romanian Folk Dances serve as both axis and atmosphere. Yet it is in “Vlachia,” one of four original pieces inspired by the Hungarian composer, where their vision truly unfolds, as melancholy and art relate like light through water. The piano’s chords rock gently, a cradle of memory, while the lyra hovers between waking and dreaming, resisting the lull of its own tenderness. “Valley,” by contrast, opens like a watercolor, the soul of the landscape awakening at dawn, when even the smallest stones remember their own luminosity. Between the modally inflected interlude “Mountain Path,” with its blues-tinted horizons, and the quietly breathing “Forest Glade,” the musicians walk among elderly oak, beech, and elm, each exhaling the voices of forgotten peoples, their songs hanging in the air.

The Romanian Folk Dances themselves are reimagined here as meditations on time’s elasticity. “In One Spot,” normally brief and fleeting, becomes a slow unfurling, each phrase examined as though through a magnifying glass instead of a telescope. What was once a dance is now an act of remembrance, a transmission through hands, hearts, and breath. Keerim’s improvisations shimmer with restraint, unveiling the dance as a living organism rather than a set of steps. “Sash Dance” begins like a gift being unwrapped, its introduction a flowering reverie, before the familiar theme emerges, tender as an heirloom passed from parent to child. Sinopoulos’s harmonic touch is radiant, his bow tracing lines that dissolve as soon as they are drawn, while Keerim decorates with the grace of rain gathering on the edge of a leaf.

A solo lyra ushers us into “Dance from Bucsum,” its lament carrying the weight of centuries. Gradually, it finds vitality again, as if memory itself were relearning its steps. The piano’s entrance is light breaking through foliage. “Romanian Polka” delights in this interplay, its bowings and pluckings coaxing the piano into a rhythmic embrace. The music feels rooted in the soil, yet perpetually on the verge of flight. “Fast Dance” is not so much quickened as transfigured. What was once earthy now becomes spectral, its pulse sifted through the mesh between moments.

“Stick Dance” closes the circle, beginning in abstraction before broadening into a spacious terrain of inspiration. There is such reverence here that one hesitates to call it an ending at all. In returning to the first of Bartók’s dances, the album folds time in upon itself, reviving what it has just allowed to rest. It becomes not a conclusion, but a threshold, suggesting that each listening might return us to the beginning with altered ears.

As Sinopoulos and Keerim write in the album’s booklet:

“Our Topos is where tradition meets the present, the Balkan Mountains meet urban space, the music of the countryside meets contemporary creation. Our Topos is where we meet and interact, shaping our individual and common identities.”

Indeed, Topos is less a location than a living field, a place where listening itself becomes part of the composition. Between the lines of melody and silence, we, too, are invited to breathe, to dwell, to remember. And as the final tone recedes, one wonders whether the music has ended at all or merely crossed into another realm, where echoes continue to shape the clouds, unseen but never lost.

Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs (ECM New Series 2751)

| Tyran Grillo

Meredith Monk
Cellular Songs

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Ellen Fisher
Katie Geissinger
Joanna Lynn-Jacobs
Meredith Monk
Allison Sniffin
John Hollenbeck
Recorded January-March 2022 / March 2024
Power Station Studios, New York
Engineers: Kevin Killen (2022), Eli Walker (2024)
Assistant: Matthew Soares
Mixing: Eli Walker, Alexann Markus (assistant)
Cover photo: Julieta Cervantes
Recording producers: Meredith Monk and Allison Sniffin with John Hollenbeck
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

All too often, women have been mythologically depicted as vindictive creatures who exist only to distract and destroy. Whether in the Sirens of the ancient Greeks or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, they sing, weave, and create in isolation, forbidden the pleasures of love, peace, and community. And while the work of singer and composer Meredith Monk has always been concerned with questions of agency, it was never made so clear to me as when the boxed set of her collected ECM recordings materialized in 2022. As the first album to appear since that watershed release, Cellular Songs doesn’t so much continue the journey as fold in upon itself, so that by the end, the listener is left with a compact flower of such potent expressivity that it seems capable of leading one’s ears in directions never thought possible yet which sound intimately familiar, as if remembered from a dream that preceded language.

Cellular Songs is the second part of a trilogy that began with On Behalf Of Nature, a work exploring our global ecosystem from a molecular vantage point. For Monk, the title names what is fundamental not only to life but to all of creation. “What is going on in the cell is so complex,” she writes, “and it’s a prototype of the possibility of what a society could be if you take those same principles and expand them.” As Bonnie Marranca suggests in her liner notes, composing and contemplation are synonymous, which makes Monk a meditator of worlds, one who reduces the act of communication to a microcosmic array of consonants, vowels, and blends. In this regard, it is difficult to imagine anything so biologically poetic as the opening “Click Song #3 Prologue,” in which Monk and her vocal ensemble (Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Allison Sniffin, and Monk herself), with percussionist John Hollenbeck, get to the heart of things. Their tongue clicks are droplets in a distant cave, each carrying minerals and unfelt emotions until, over millennia, stalagmites rise as records of their passage. Like the three “Cell Trios” that follow, they constitute an internal code that locks into place. Flowing harmonies and dissonances encompass the breadth of life itself, a reality in which the voice is central, porous in its itinerant grace. 

Hollenbeck’s vibraphone appears organically in a handful of pieces, a trace element in the soil of this music. Whether documenting a universal grammar in the syllabically potent “Dyads,” playing alongside the piano in “Dive,” or bowing a glassy surface in “Melt,” it allies itself with the building blocks of existence, defying the horrific structures so often fashioned from them. It is the vein in every vocal leaf, seeking photosynthesis without flesh and treating entropy as the dissolution of time. Sniffin’s pianism is equally cathartic in “Lullaby for Lise,” where she joins Geissinger. Rather than leaning on lyricism to seek fantasy, it straddles the threshold between waking and dreaming, recognizing that lived experience is always a blend of both. I hear it as a song to a child not yet born, gestating and growing with all the possibilities of time in her blood and brain, opening her eyes at last in “Generation Dance.” Thus, she comes to know the vision of her mother and her mother’s mother, and as she exhales in “Breathstream,” Monk’s solo voice gives shape to inherited traumas, now able to be wielded in the name of healing.

In the unfolding of “Branching,” each voice becomes the first in an ever-multiplying lineage of wisdom. Speaking of rituals and sacrifices, their repetition serves not as comfort but as a catalyst born of a primeval, generative power. “Passing” finds those same figures trading off vocalizations with a precision that is open to nature’s chaos, while “Nyems” reveals the playfulness of communication for the ephemeral metaphor it truly is.

Given that nearly all of the work presented here is stripped of linguistic meaning, what a radical blessing to encounter the coherence of “Happy Woman.” Here, the feeling is one of transparency, yet also of quiet critique, an awareness of the many roles women inhabit, whether by choice or by force. The opening refrain and its variations (“I’m a happy woman,” “I’m a hungry woman,” “I’m a thinking woman,” etc.) are the stitches of a mother among mothers, quilting herself into the patchwork of history.

By the album’s end, the sacredness of vibration becomes paramount. From these humming atoms emerge animals, rivers, and clouds, leaving us to wonder where the so-called intellect fits into the larger picture. Because if a heartbeat is nothing without silence, then its divisions are where forgiveness begins.