Reviews

Tarkovsky’s Inner Ear

| Tyran Grillo

Released by Cold Spring on September 4, 2026, this vital boxed set gathers remastered soundtracks from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre across five CDs. Their passage from Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s orchestral writing to Eduard Artemyev’s electronic interiors opens a fissure that continues to emit productive fumes from deep within the core of the earth to this very day. The individually printed sleeves and accompanying artcards, reproducing Soviet and Japanese posters, return these intimate experiences to their public faces. Inside the matte box, however, cinema contracts to the dimensions of a listening body. The change of composers also shifts the terms of attention. Ovchinnikov gives the human voice an analog horizon, while Artemyev lets that horizon infiltrate the voice until its source shades into humanless oblivion. Across this passage, the sacred grows increasingly difficult to distinguish from the material conditions of hearing. An entire landscape can settle behind the sternum, its trees drawing nourishment from an ache whose origin we cannot locate.

Ovchinnikov’s score for Ivan’s Childhood (1962) enters a bucolic world already trembling at its foundations. Harp illuminates the strings from within, while the winds carry a sweetness too alert to relax into innocence. Ivan, a 12-year-old scout whose family has been killed by the Nazis, resists the adults who would remove him from the front. His competence has become the terrible credential of a childhood forcibly surrendered. Against this, his dreams preserve his mother’s presence, although preservation offers little protection. Ovchinnikov allows lyricism its full emotional amplitude, making Ivan’s vulnerability almost unbearable. Every tender phrase acquires a second circulation beneath its surface, carrying the blood of an event still waiting to occur.

Percussion unsettles this fragile enclosure, dislodging any confidence that the ground will remain beneath Ivan’s feet. Between the double basses and the violins’ breathier extremities stretches an abyss through which his small body must somehow pass. Even the adult courtship surrounding Masha cannot establish a refuge. Kholin’s kiss, suspending her above a ditch in the birch forest, binds desire to the geometry of danger; intimacy briefly occupies the space a grave might claim. The score’s dances register such pleasure with an urgency that exposes its provisional tenancy. Timpani give mortality a pulse, and the brass answers with cries that seem torn from the soul’s anatomy. Once Ivan’s fate becomes known, the final dream’s return to childhood cannot repair the historical wound. The hymnal slowing of the music leaves the water holding an image for which the world has withdrawn its permission.

With Andrei Roublev (1966), the sanctuary becomes a place of entropy. Bells bring their immense, inhabited hollowness into Ovchinnikov’s writing, and the flute’s more solitary inflections suggest a melody listening for its own burial. Tarkovsky’s icon painter moves through a medieval Russia where religious vocation offers no exemption from human brutality. After killing a man during the sack of Vladimir, Rublev renounces painting and takes a vow of silence. Heard against this refusal, the score’s choral abundance becomes agonizingly complex. A voice may ascend while its owner remains implicated in what happens below. A lone soprano, surrounded by the brittle intimacy of struck strings, opens a small aperture in that contradiction. Through it comes the possibility that devotion begins in the inability to reconcile the beauty one can imagine with the suffering one has helped to make.

Pagan ritual and Christian authority trouble one another across the film, denying its sacred spaces any simple moral enclosure. Ovchinnikov’s murmuring voices deepen this instability, their apparent serenity revealing chambers of holy delirium. Orchestral surges can dazzle so completely that vision becomes another impediment to seeing. Yet the bell-casting episode, in which the young Boriska risks everything on a skill he claims to have inherited, draws sound back toward the labor of fallible hands. His eventual confession that his father never entrusted him with the secret of casting recasts the bell’s successful ringing as an act undertaken without certainty. Rublev’s response, offering companionship and a return to creative work, gives the music’s spiritual reach a human address. Hearing the score apart from the film makes that dynamic newly palpable. The choir seems to gather clay around its vowels, each sustained breath touching the substance from which an image of the divine will have to be fashioned. Even transcendence has dirt beneath its fingernails.

This brings us to Solaris (1972), where Artemyev makes electronic sound inseparable from the disturbance of recognizing oneself. Bach’s chorale prelude, BWV 639, played on organ by Leonid Roizman, establishes an earthly center whose apparent stability the surrounding textures steadily estrange. Psychologist Kris Kelvin arrives at a space station orbiting a sentient ocean and encounters Hari, his wife who died by suicide, returned through an intelligence working upon his memories. Her presence gives bereavement a body, then exposes the insufficiency of the recollection from which that body has been made. Artemyev’s ANS synthesizer inhabits this interval with extraordinary sensitivity. Familiarity becomes almost extraterrestrial when it approaches us without the consoling distance of representation. A remembered face can turn toward its rememberer and begin asking questions he has spent years avoiding.

The metallic drones and rattling chains seem to exchange occupants. Abrasive resonances presage the vibrating sculptures of Harry Bertoia, although here the bronze appears to have grown directly through the nervous system. Beneath them, a rushing darkness carries the bodily cost of Kelvin’s encounter. Hari’s growing awareness of her condition exceeds the boundaries of his remorse, and the soundtrack permits that excess to remain frightening. Resurrection acquires an ethical burden: Having summoned someone through desire, what right have we to dictate the terms of her existence? Of these five discs, this one sustains the most persuasive independent life. I hear affinities with early Lull and Thomas Köner in its submerged expanses, if intensified by a harsher grain. Sound retains enough resistance to prevent contemplation from becoming comfortable, even at its most ravishing.

I remain particularly haunted by the final withdrawal of the camera, revealing the apparent return to Kelvin’s father’s house as an island within the Solaris ocean. The strings make the scale of that disclosure bodily. Home has become something another intelligence can construct, while the longing invested in it remains painfully ours. Hearing this passage without its image intensifies my memory of that first viewing, opening a trapdoor beneath the relief I we all want the scene to initially grant. Bach’s devotional gravity now gathers around a question of responsibility. If an alien consciousness can offer the shape of forgiveness, the person kneeling inside that shape must still answer for the life that brought him there. The ocean may contain the house; it cannot perform the work of inhabiting it.

Mirror (1975) carries this unstable habitation into the folds of an individual life. Of all these soundtracks, it seems most thoroughly absorbed into its film, sound and image exchanging their functions until each becomes the other’s means of recollection. The largely unseen Alexei moves through childhood memories and the clefts of his adult relationships. Margarita Terekhova’s presence as both his mother, Maria, and his former wife, Natalia, makes recognition falter inside its own apparent success. The face returns, but the person demands another encounter. Even as Artemyev’s electronic textures inhabit this complicated recurrence, pastoral beauty offers little chronological reassurance. A field can belong to childhood while opening directly onto the fear of losing one’s son, and the music enters through both distances at once.

Chant and synthesizer inhabit the same tenuous dwelling; Baroque passages introduce an elegance that memory cannot keep intact. The European inflections, with their flamenco bite, cut across any temptation to hear this world as a sealed Russian interior, finding resonance in the film’s Spanish exiles and Civil War footage. Proof that private remembrance has neighbors, even when it believes itself alone. Maria’s panic over a possible printing error, followed elsewhere by the impossible suspension of her body above a bed, sets institutional terror against an image of profound weightlessness. Artemyev allows these incompatible states to share an acoustic bloodstream. Arseny Tarkovsky’s recited poems further complicate the inheritance, the director’s father entering a son’s cinema through his own living voice. Listening becomes a form of kinship whose obligations extend beyond the people we can identify. Anonymous bodies in archival footage acquire a terrible proximity to the family photograph. This is where the soundtrack’s apparent diffuseness becomes essential. Its passages refuse the neat ownership of a single emotional subject, allowing a feeling to migrate beyond the person who first appeared to authorize it.

Stalker (1979) approaches us through a landscape whose every invitation may conceal a prohibition. A guide leads the Writer and the Professor into the restricted Zone toward a Room reputed to grant the deepest desires of whoever enters it. Artemyev’s Indian-inflected flute and circling electronics invest this movement with exquisite uncertainty. Melody flowers through the mechanical rattle of the rail journey, opening inward even as the travelers advance. Water drips into an acoustic space that seems to be aware of its own depth. The score’s choral beauty gathers around the guide’s battered faith, yet its tenderness leaves room for the skepticism of his companions. Their arguments cannot domesticate what surrounds them. Each attempt to turn the Zone into an explanation seems to lengthen the path through it.

The story of Porcupine, who sought his dead brother and received wealth, places a terrible doubt inside the promise of fulfillment. Desire may know us in ways our preferred account of ourselves cannot bear. This possibility deepens the music’s spiraling movement, its delicacy admitting a self-undoing more intimate than catastrophe. A flute phrase can seem to reach the threshold and hesitate there, having discovered that admission would require surrendering the identity that asked to enter. Artemyev makes the spiritual ordeal inseparable from physical duration. The track rattles beneath the body, while an electronic halo gathers around the effort to believe. Such passages return me to the care with which these soundtracks conduct emotional transference. We carry ourselves into their spaces and encounter the limits of what we are prepared to receive. Their beauty can leave our knowledge painfully incomplete.

Then there is Monkey, the Stalker’s daughter, sitting at a table as a drinking glass apparently moves beneath her gaze. The domestic surface holds an event the arduous expedition could neither secure nor explain. I find myself thinking less about the girl’s possible powers than about the glass. Throughout this set, objects have borne so much human longing that we might reasonably ask whether our hunger for revelation has allowed them an existence of their own. The bell must announce faith; a house must accommodate remorse. Here, an ordinary vessel slides toward the edge of what we can account for, carrying no assurance that its mystery concerns us. Perhaps reverence requires us to release even the desire to be spiritually enlarged by everything we encounter. Somewhere inside the glass, beyond the reach of thirst, there may be a life that has never asked to become our revelation.

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica: Pages of a Biography (ECM New Series 2803)

| Tyran Grillo

Gidon Kremer
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography

Gidon Kremer violin
Geneva Lewis violin
Andrew Pushkarev vibraphone, tubular bell
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography, Passacaglia, Darf ich…
recorded January 2024
Studio Residence Paliesius, Ignalina
Engineers: Vilius Keras, Aleksandra Kerienė
Kaleidoscope of Lost Time
recorded September 2020
at the Reformation Church, Riga
Recording engineer: Varis Kurmiņš
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 30, 2026

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica continue their long association with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, a recording in which the violinist’s history passes through the hands of those who have helped to shape it. Georgs Pelēcis and Andrius Žlabys contribute works conceived for Kremer, while Arvo Pärt’s presence reaches back to Tabula Rasa, the 1984 release that inaugurated the imprint. With Kremer approaching his 80th birthday in 2027 and the ensemble its 30th anniversary, the program opens a space in which the commemorative impulse can become strangely permeable. A life told through music acquires entrances its subject could never have built alone. Founded in 1997 to bring young musicians from the Baltic states into a shared artistic undertaking, Kremerata Baltica gives this understanding a collective body.

Pärt’s Passacaglia, heard in the orchestral version prepared in 2007 for Kremer’s 60th birthday, establishes this relationship through the simplest of circular motions. Kremer and Geneva Lewis draw their violin harmonies over the strings with a delicacy whose slightly abraded edges give the music a spirited skin. Andrei Pushkarev’s vibraphone places metallic footprints across a frozen lake, each tone opening a small chamber of depth beneath the surface. There is something almost Vivaldian in the suppleness of the textures, though the lower strings carry a dramatic undertow that gathers its force slowly. Pizzicato figures bring that development inward, registering as minute disturbances in the body’s private machinery. Above them, the violin lines entwine and separate with an ease that leaves room for friction. The recurring harmonic pattern gives each change a place to return to, even as its emotional coordinates shift. Within the circle, belief is allowed to wander; repetition discovers the difference between coming back to a place and becoming available to it.

Pelēcis’s title concerto, written for Kremer in 2007, gives that wandering a more personal geography. Their friendship began during their school years in Riga and continued in the shared quarters of the Moscow Conservatory, where Pelēcis witnessed the preparation through which public achievements slowly acquired their private framework. His score draws on the violin concertos that became decisive points in Kremer’s early career. Brahms and Elgar enter alongside recollections of competition performances; Sibelius and Beethoven provide further points of contact with the interpreter’s developing identity. Yet the quotations remain answerable to the person who once lived inside them. Set among more dramatic episodes, they emerge from the uncertain border between musical inheritance and remembered experience. Pelēcis’s description of the solo monologues as “intimate pages from a personal diary” becomes especially telling here. The diary has been written by someone else, and its subject must read himself into being through a voice that already knows him.

The opening solo feels its way into this territory with the vulnerability of childhood. Kremer gives the line an existence prior to explanation, finding in its exposed grain the authority of something alive. Buoyant orchestral gestures begin to court it, and their exchanges admit dissonance at the margins. Pelēcis lets passages of flowing beauty encounter the abrupt editing cuts of recall, as the pastoral turns its pockets inside out, spilling dark coins into the grass. Throughout the piece’s nearly thirty uninterrupted minutes, the violin speaks from within that complexity, drawing the insistent rhythms of the strings into its own work of discovery. Kremerata Baltica responds with an alertness that gives the broader episodes their cinematic scope while preserving the intimacy of the solo voice. The relationship between them becomes a sustained act of thinking in sound, capable of admitting doubt without surrendering its momentum. Near the close, the vibraphone distils the preceding expansiveness into a peculiarly bare utterance. The violin threads itself through that resonance, a silver filament drawn from a sentence whose meaning has become too familiar for speech.

With Žlabys’s Kaleidoscope of Lost Time, composed between 2014 and 2020 for Kremer and his ensemble, that inward scrutiny enters a more fractured consciousness. The composer envisioned Kremer’s sound in his earliest sketches, and the violin writing carries the imprint of a particular touch even at its most abstract. Žlabys speaks of giving the sensation of time’s disappearance a more durable form through music, so that beauty and sadness can be visited again. Across the work’s five movements, such revisitation becomes a problem of perception: every return alters the eye through which the past is apprehended. The opening Prelude sets this process in motion through dramatic undulations, its folk inflections carrying something dreamt into the firmness of the pulse. The dance occasionally appears to have misplaced its dancers, leaving their gestures suspended in the strings. Kremer inhabits those absences with a searching intensity, giving the music’s surreal spaces enough physical resistance to be felt. Time acquires joints here, and we hear the strain of their bending.

Scherzacaglia carries its mixed ancestry in its name, inviting musical forms to loosen their claims to separate identities. Along the way, neoclassical poise meets a rhythmic insistence suggestive of Shostakovich. Dissonant hymnody opens fissures in the devotional surface. The performers give each shift a distinct pressure, sustaining the sense of movement through different states as Dissonance gives way to Quarter=87. In Perpetuum, the violin’s flowing beauty opens an expanse so luminous that earlier agitations seem briefly to have been cast by its light. The double basses stir beneath that radiance, pulling its apparent weightlessness toward the body, until the opening dance reenters with the altered gravity of something that has survived its own telling. Žlabys makes this return both irresistible and disturbing.

Pärt’s Darf ich … (1999) gathers these questions into a more intimate register, with Lewis taking the solo violin part beside Pushkarev’s tubular bell in C sharp. The violin has a declamatory force that feels inseparable from its prayerfulness: its address is bold because the act of addressing remains vulnerable. Against the strings, the bell gives that vulnerability a vertical dimension, opening a heavenward passage through the music’s spare physical means. A requiem appears to have been dismantled and its fragments reassembled as a psalm, the weight of mourning redistributed through the possibility of praise. Kremer calls the work “almost a prayer,” understanding it as a reminder that musicians serve a cause beyond themselves. Lewis gives that conviction a voice of her own, making the album’s generational relationship audible in the place where it becomes most exposed. Her final high note is exquisitely breathy, a slender fold in the air holding open the title’s unfinished question. Permission itself acquires a barely material form.

That question quietly rearranges the premises of a recording devoted to one musician’s life. On an album named for Kremer’s biography, the closing solo belongs to another person, and his history finds one of its deepest expressions in her freedom to speak. The friendship encoded in Pelēcis’s concerto and the evanescence Žlabys seeks to preserve have brought us to an ethic of hospitality. Whatever these relationships transmit may become unrecognizable to the giver. Biography begins to touch the obscure responsibilities of parenthood, where a future is nurtured without its face being prescribed. Somewhere an eyelid is forming in darkness, protecting a gaze the past cannot rehearse. To have lived well may be to have made room for that gaze, including everything in it that will never turn toward us.

Tania Giannouli/Nik Bärtsch Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My review of Metakosmos, the new duo album by Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch, is now available at All About Jazz. Across eight pieces, the Greek and Swiss pianists bring melodic luminosity and rhythmic precision into an intimate exchange, exploring how attentive listening allows two distinct musical imaginations to create a shared world. Repetition becomes a means of discovering difference, while dampened strings, submerged strummings, and percussive accents reveal unexpected voices within the pianos. The review follows these encounters through dreamlike interiors, spiraling patterns, and moments of poised exuberance, considering how the music makes room for meanings neither player could arrive at alone

Kali Malone: Living Torch

| Tyran Grillo

To sustain a flame is to enter into a secret negotiation with extinction, to nourish an illumination whose very existence depends upon its gradual disappearance. In Living Torch, Kali Malone transforms this paradox into an almost unbearable metaphysics of resonance, wherein sound becomes both the vessel and the slow dissolution of its own materiality. Duration wavers between breath and electricity, harmonic inevitability and spectral disobedience. Each sustained tone carries the sediment of another, opening subterranean chambers where the ear must renegotiate its relationship to time. The austere architectures that have distinguished Malone’s compositional language, particularly her excavations of the pipe organ’s interior life, undergo a profound transfiguration. Something once seemingly immovable begins to tremble at the edges of its formal certainty, exposing a vulnerability concealed beneath the mathematics of repetition. Perhaps a structure reveals its deepest truth precisely when it can no longer guarantee its foundations.

Composed between 2020 and 2021 at the Parisian studios of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, that storied laboratory of electroacoustic experimentation, Living Torch extends Malone’s investigation of just intonation and canonic structures into a labyrinth of timbral interdependencies. The trombone of Mats Äleklint and bass clarinet of Isak Hedtjärn merge with Malone’s electronic apparatus, including the boîte à bourdons and an ARP 2500 synthesizer bearing the historical imprint of Éliane Radigue. Commissioned for GRM’s Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra and premiered in its complete multichannel incarnation at Radio France, the piece treats space as an active participant in the reallocation of acoustic identity. The devotional patience of early music encounters the temporal dislocations of American minimalism, their intertwined genealogies refracted through the material consciousness of musique concrète. Within the sounding body, counterpoint undergoes a molecular reimagining. What survives of the canon is the eerie persistence of one vibration inside another, an inheritance speaking long after its source becomes unrecognizable.

In the first of the work’s two parts, the drone establishes itself as a compass of the heart, spinning in slow motion without ever securing a magnetic north. Its apparent stability is beset by minute discrepancies of pitch, the delicate interference of neighboring frequencies producing pulses that seem to originate beneath the audible surface. Just intonation, far from presenting a frictionless ideal of consonance, exposes the intimate volatility of consonance itself. One tone approaches another and the air thickens with consequences, while an apparently singular presence separates into competing interiors. Äleklint’s trombone contributes a corporeal grain that the electronics can prolong but never entirely domesticate. Hedtjärn’s bass clarinet emerges with a darker, more secretive pressure, its breath inhabiting the lowest registers with a kind of reluctant articulation. Their sonorities fuse with the circuitry, until the roughness of an attack or the instability of an exhalation discloses the laboring organism within. The human respiratory impulse is absorbed into an electrical continuum that nevertheless remains haunted by the possibility of suffocation.

The feeling of this music is intensely circular, caught in a bewildering simultaneity of waking and falling asleep. The internal drone wanders in search of a new body, only to discover the contours of the one it was desperate to leave, returning to the sadnesses that prompted its excursion. Malone’s long tones refuse the consolations of a conventional crescendo. Their concentration arises through microscopic redistributions of anxiety, through harmonic overtones that slip into audibility and retreat. Because the ear cannot settle upon a definitive foreground, listening assumes the uneasy condition of remembering something that has yet to become real. It is the opposite of déjà vu and is where the piece’s canonic intelligence becomes emotionally devastating. The music becomes an apparatus of selfhood, reforming its contours to prevent the body from disappearing while exhausting the impulse that keeps it alive.

By the second part, this inward circuitry has acquired a more troubled permeability. A sensation of distance enters the sound, suggesting wings gathering an impossible momentum. The instrumental voices seem to strain toward the edges of their registers, rubbing against the drones until the distinction between a breath drawn and a current sustained becomes increasingly tenuous. Low frequencies retain their gravitational authority, but their mass is traversed by finer disturbances, spectral fissures through which an unfamiliar dimension of the composition appears to glance. There is an undercurrent of despair in these migrations, although the music never permits despair the luxury of a settled identity. Each departure produces another return, subtly altering the place to which it leads. The two parts consequently establish a peculiar dramaturgy of circular motion, in which repetition does not close a circuit so much as deepen the wound around which the circuit has been drawn.

At moments, the atmosphere and trembling recall Darrin Verhagen’s Witch trilogy, whose sonic immersions can feel indistinguishable from visitations to the psyche’s hidden territories. Malone, however, moves according to the flickering logic of her own distinct flame. Where terror might be summoned by the arrival of an alien presence, Living Torch locates its deepest unease in the possibility that the foreign has always resided within the familiar. Its resonances move across the threshold where language ceases its habitual tug and asks the body to relearn the grammar of flight. Breath becomes an increasingly abstract measure of being, until the stillness of death seems momentarily audible inside the effort required to remain alive. The music’s spiritual force resides in this refusal to separate transcendence from its physiological cost.

What remains most unsettling is the ethical question concealed inside this choreography of persistence. A flame survives by consuming its own substance; a tone endures only through the continual expenditure of energy. Perhaps the self, too, is sustained through an unacknowledged succession of disappearances, each present tense quietly burning the person who made it possible. Between frequencies, identity ceases to be a possession and becomes a debt toward all the selves we have already extinguished. The torch illuminates no destination. It passes, instead, from one vanishing custodian to another, and the most difficult act of listening may be to recognize, among its vibrations, the unburied voices of those we had to become in order to survive ourselves.

A Name That Remembers: PIANIKA’s Intimate Circuits

| Tyran Grillo

There’s a secret, a beautiful secret, hidden behind the lips of most of us who write about music: our ears are magnets for fingerprints. We rarely notice them until a sound has already gone, leaving something of itself behind. In the music of PIANIKA, a New Zealand electronic producer, such elusive contact becomes a compositional principle. Acoustic sounds retain traces of their origins within electronic arrangements, where the organic and synthetic enter into an unusually sympathetic relationship. Her rhythms invite movement without demanding it, balancing the restorative qualities of ambient music with the physical pleasures of a gentle house beat. There is something quietly radical about this hospitality of sound, this willingness to let a melody disclose its vulnerabilities without requiring their resolution. Even the spaces between notes seem charged with possibilities for reflection, allowing the smallest gestures to acquire unexpected significance. PIANIKA makes music for those moments when consciousness loosens its grip on the immediate world.

The question of naming is particularly meaningful for PIANIKA, whose moniker is her middle name, inherited from her great-grandmother, the daughter of the chief of Maniapoto, a Māori iwi she describes as known for its music. Its history involves an intriguing act of translation: Bianca, a character in an English book, was given the Māori name Pianika. The association with purity or whiteness is therefore indirect, an etymological suggestion rather than a literal definition. As a child, she went by Pianika, although her official first name gradually assumed precedence. The inheritance continued to resonate more deeply with her, eventually becoming her artistic identity. Her music seems animated by this transformation, taking sounds from their original contexts and allowing them to communicate in unfamiliar ways.

Another inheritance proved equally consequential. “My grandmother passed away before I was born, leaving behind her piano,” PIANIKA recalls. The instrument remained in her childhood home, where she developed an immediate fascination with it, sometimes playing for hours. Music offered an early means of meditation and emotional expression, although her academic interests eventually led her toward biochemistry. That scientific background offers an interesting perspective on compositions whose seemingly simple structures reveal considerable intricacy upon closer listening. Her path changed at 22, when her partner asked why she had never considered pursuing music more seriously. Shortly afterward, she downloaded Ableton and began exploring electronic production, drawing upon more than a decade of informal classical piano experience. Her equipment remains modest: a laptop, headphones, a carefully maintained collection of virtual instruments and her beloved piano. This economy is reflected in the music, whose emotional range arises from a restrained sonic vocabulary.

Her practice draws further nourishment from the natural world, whose sounds she has gathered during years of travelling with a microphone. Field recordings become integral to her arrangements, preserving traces of the environments in which they originated. Daily walks through forests and beside the ocean remain essential to her creative routine, while sailing and surfing offer other forms of immersion. “I feel inspired most of all,” she confirms, “by the interactions of water and light.” Her album artwork features photographs taken during the same adventures that inspired the compositions. Although she received an offer of a photography scholarship in her final year of school, she pursued other interests, allowing her visual practice to develop alongside her music. Her photographs preserve encounters with a landscape; her compositions translate their sensory qualities into another medium.

PIANIKA has described her fusion of ambient music and subdued techno beats as “lullaby house,” an expression that captures her ability to reconcile the circularity of rhythm with the surrender of sleep. Her introduction to electronic production was strongly influenced by Majestic Casual and The Sound You Need, platforms that expanded her sense of what electronica could accomplish and “felt like coming home after a long journey.” Among her inspirations are KAASI, Petit Biscuit, ODESZA and Darius, although the sensuous vocal atmosphere of Galimatias and Alina Baraz’s Urban Flora seems especially relevant to her aesthetic. Despite these affinities, her compositions possess a distinct character, their rhythmic precision softened by affection for acoustic sounds and understated melodic development.

Across Pisces (2024) and Dream Work (2024), followed by the newly released Touch (2026), PIANIKA develops a vocabulary whose meanings remain beautifully unsettled. The first draws upon an astrological imagination, the second explores the unconscious processes through which memory and desire evolve, and the third turns toward physical contact and vulnerability. Together, they suggest a progression from cosmic belonging toward increasingly personal forms of connection. This is particularly compelling in electronic music, an art capable of generating extraordinary sensations of proximity through technological mediation. PIANIKA encourages us to consider how much of what we call presence depends upon memory and imagination.

With Pisces, musical structure and emotional expression seem inseparable. The title track opens in a gentle drift before the beat enters, discovering peace in a broken world. Just as its direction becomes predictable, the arrangement expands into weightlessness. In “One,” the human voice becomes increasingly important. Words remain shy and just beyond reach, yet their intentions are intensely present within the delicate backbeat; the listener responds to their tone without being directed toward a particular interpretation.

In a chill mix of “With You,” the lights of love dim as a blissful equilibrium develops through the interaction of rhythm and melody, suggesting two people discovering a way to communicate without eliminating their differences. The internal pulse of “Sun Kiss” feels connected to the body’s instinct for movement, its melodic details offering emotional release without insistence.

Of the three EPs, Dream Work offers the deepest immersion in PIANIKA’s contemplative affinities. Its opening “From Love (ambient edit)” has an immediately restorative quality, developing through subtle changes in texture rather than pronounced rhythmic movement. An ambient rendition of “Pisces” follows, its oceanic sounds suggesting the faint rush of blood in the ears.

“Interlude” brings the piano forward amid softly echoing textures, with birdsong joining the intimate relationship between natural sound and electronic composition. By the time “Hvar” introduces snapping fingers and flowing vocals, the music has acquired an even greater sense of proximity. A restrained digital pulse supports the arrangement, while the animate character of the singing makes this one of PIANIKA’s most affecting creations. She understands that tenderness depends as much upon what remains understated as upon what is openly expressed.

The piano assumes greater prominence in “Unravelled,” accompanied by a voice that moves gracefully around its melodic phrases. A sense of self-discovery emerges without insisting upon any final understanding. “Accolades” introduces delicate click-core sensibilities and lilting arpeggiations, suggesting nostalgia without attaching it to a particular memory. This sequence arrives at “You,” a loving conclusion that offers reassurance while acknowledging the uncertainties of attachment. Addressing another person involves recognizing an existence that can never become entirely available to us. Here, affection becomes a willingness to accept that mystery, allowing closeness to remain meaningful without eliminating distance.

The music is especially attentive to the subjective experience of time, which expands or contracts according to the intensity of inward attention. Hearing familiar material in a different arrangement encourages reflection upon memory and reinterpretation: musical ideas once associated with movement acquire another emotional character when their rhythmic context changes. Dream Work thus considers how experience continues to develop beyond the moment in which it first occurs.

Touch brings these concerns into a more explicitly affectionate register. Its opening “LUH” recalls the tender vocal atmospheres of Late Night Alumni, its delicate beat accompanying the passage of time with reassurance. “As You Grow” follows with midrange vocals that retain a slight distance while remaining clear in their emotional transmission. Beneath the singing, a gently insistent rhythm supports the patient, almost familial affection implied by the title.

An uplifting expression of development appears in “So Proud of You,” PIANIKA’s collaboration with TÂCHES. Higher clusters of sequenced notes lend the arrangement an expansive sense of movement and discovery. The transition toward “Shy” brings a quieter perspective on emotional exposure. Its vocal fragments convey affection through their hesitancy, approaching the threshold of intelligibility without always crossing it. Shyness acquires a dignity rarely afforded to it, becoming an indication of attentiveness rather than a limitation upon connection.

This openness to transformation is particularly evident in her treatment of the human voice. Asked how she decides when to sing and how to process her vocals, PIANIKA spoke of creative flow: “As an artist, I find satisfaction in turning down the volume of the conscious brain, and letting the subconscious make the art.” She frequently slices recordings into fragments, playing them through a drum rack and processing them with Valhalla Supermassive reverb. Such experiments sometimes suggest a song’s direction, as with “Shy.” While developing a remix of TÂCHES’s “Dances for Wolves,” she explored an alternative vocal interpretation that did not appear in the final remix but later supplied material for 9’6”. There is a philosophical implication in this fragmentation. Singing, ordinarily associated with identity and direct communication, becomes more ambiguous when words are separated from their original contexts. Meaning persists through tone and rhythm, beyond intelligible language.

The closing original version of “From Love” gathers these qualities into lo-fi beats and intimate singing that convey acceptance. Heard alongside its ambient treatment on Dream Work, it demonstrates how the same musical material can acquire new significance through changes in arrangement, much as our recollections evolve with subsequent experience. This relationship between continuity and transformation also illuminates the EP’s title. Physical contact is among our most immediate experiences, yet its meaning remains dependent upon interpretation. A touch can communicate reassurance or uncertainty according to circumstances the gesture itself cannot explain. PIANIKA approaches this nuance with sensitivity, recognizing that intimacy involves an ongoing negotiation between the desire for closeness and another person’s irreducible independence.

When I asked whether her music possessed a metaphysical or spiritual dimension, PIANIKA responded: “I think any music that makes you feel something is working with the metaphysical.” Music enters the body through measurable vibrations, yet the feelings awakened by those vibrations cannot be explained entirely through their physical properties. Each listener brings a different history to the encounter. PIANIKA hopes her work will communicate uplift, calm and awe for the beauty of the Earth, while allowing listeners to discover meanings beyond those she consciously intended. Its emotional clarity coexists with an openness that respects the complexity of those receiving it, offering consolation without presuming to know what anyone needs.

Alan Pasqua: My New Old Friend

| Tyran Grillo

Time has a peculiar way of inhabiting music, gathering in the hollows between notes and returning through melodies whose origins have long since dissolved into memory. For pianist Alan Pasqua, whose career has traversed the incandescent frontiers of jazz fusion and the intimate architectures of acoustic improvisation, such temporal hauntings find exquisite expression in My New Old Friend. Having studied with Jaki Byard and joined Tony Williams’ New Lifetime following a fateful Carnegie Hall encounter in 1975, Pasqua later lent his harmonic imagination to Bob Dylan and Santana. His celebrated “Proto-Cosmos” remains an emblem of that earlier volcanic vocabulary. Yet beneath the electricity, another language had been quietly ripening, one whose silences carry the sediment of entire lifetimes. Released by Cryptogramophone in 2005, My New Old Friend gathers six originals and five lovingly reconsidered standards into a meditation on remembrance’s peculiar elasticity.

The title acquires particular poignancy through the intertwined histories of its musicians. Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine first crossed paths at Indiana University, sharing a Bloomington farmhouse in 1971 before their careers carried them across the expanding cartographies of jazz. Bassist Darek Oles, a more recent collaborator, completes this convergence of histories. Recorded at Conway Studios in Hollywood during sessions spanning 2003 and 2004, the album was conceived with almost devotional attention to detail. Pasqua even brought his handcrafted Yamaha S6 into the studio to ensure a particular sound. Oles supplies a supple gravitational center while Erskine’s exquisitely calibrated touch allows rhythm to breathe beyond its own circumference. Companionship becomes a form of listening whose deepest syntax is the freedom to discover something previously unimagined in someone already known.

“You Must Believe in Spring” opens with a lushly articulated piano introduction, an act of emotional architecture whose foundations materialize beneath our feet as we enter. Pasqua’s touch is sensitive yet texturally bold, every harmonic choice carrying a quiet inevitability. Erskine skips with the grace of a waterskater while Oles swings through the gaps in the trees on a vine of utterly melodic fortitude. “All the Things You Are” brings a more spirited gait, Erskine’s cymbals scintillating at the edges of Pasqua’s effortless invention. The trio plays as though it had written the tune, its changes passing through their hands as naturally as breath. “Body and Soul,” meanwhile, locates nostalgia at the microscopic level. You cannot see it with the naked eye, yet you feel it unmistakably in the clothed heart. Pasqua’s solo dips a tentative toe into a river down which the trio’s vessel has been gliding all along. Such hesitation, held within an otherwise unbroken trust, becomes its own measure of beauty. Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” spreads its soft, creamy abundance into every nook and cranny of the imagination until it ceases to be visible. Even “Smile,” the balladic offramp, offers something considerably grander than a fond farewell, its tenderness ambulating with an unsettling lucidity.

Pasqua’s originals sit comfortably alongside these tried-and-true companions. From the opening gestures of “Barcelona,” we are in masterful hands, guided through fluid changes of light and scenery. Its urban touch is wonderfully unobtrusive, and Oles’s bubbling solo wells up from someplace deeper than the street beneath it. “Vienna” opens with another masterful introduction, verdant with the tenderness of an embrace postponed for years. As it slides into a mid-tempo anthem, the city of the title seems to surrender its physical coordinates and become an address within.

“Highway 14” extends into motion, with Lina Brunkell’s wordless vocals lending the open road a reflective sheen that doubles the sky along with the possibilities of arrival. Pasqua floats with the ease of a leaf surrendered to its own trajectory. Underneath, Oles shoulders much of the melodic weight while Erskine quietly clears the path, each rhythmic gesture offering reassurance without dictating a destination. The road becomes an unwritten sentence belonging equally to departure and anticipation. Through Brunkell’s voice, language itself momentarily forgets its vocation to explain and evokes the peculiar eloquence of having nothing to prove.

The title track is a timeless ballad seemingly created in the moment of its telling. Pasqua’s organic soloing traces the fine line between what has been remembered and what is being invented, until the two become inseparable. “One More Once” occupies a more askew rhythmic terrain, every slide and sudden turn handled with such mastery that even its darker shades feel necessary. Pasqua’s gorgeous runs find every necessary current in the rhythm section. “Stick Slap,” meanwhile, is a romping good time that speaks in smiles, displaying the trio’s coherence at its most exuberant. Even here, virtuosity never becomes a contest for the foreground.

I am admittedly late to the party in placing this recording on my virtual turntable, but perhaps lateness is precisely the point. Those who come to Between Sound and Space for more than ECM should by all means seek this one out. Few recordings make generosity sound quite so rigorously intelligent. What stays with me most is the quiet ethical possibility concealed in the album’s title. To call someone an old friend is to acknowledge a history; to call that same person new is to admit that history can never exhaust a human being. Knowledge of another person can become a beautiful form of captivity. Pasqua and his companions open the door of that captivity from within, allowing recognition to remain open to surprise. Perhaps this is the most difficult kind of fidelity: granting those we love the right to exceed the person we have made of them. The music poses a question whose consequences reach into every human encounter. What if we listened to strangers with the patience we reserve for old friends, and to old friends with the astonishment owed to strangers?

An Evening of Music and Theater for Collin Walcott

| Tyran Grillo

Collin Walcott (1945–1984) belonged to that rare constellation of musicians for whom the boundaries of an instrument were never quite synonymous with the boundaries of its tradition. Among the earliest artists to bring the sitar and tabla into sustained conversation with jazz, he approached the possibilities of intercultural improvisation with a curiosity grounded in years of rigorous study, including apprenticeships with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. Yet his genius resided equally in the silences he allowed to gather around those instruments, where the inherited structures of one musical language could become welcoming to the intuitions of another. That sensibility found one of its most enduring expressions in Oregon, the extraordinary quartet he co-founded in the early 1970s with guitarist Ralph Towner, woodwind specialist Paul McCandless, and bassist Glen Moore after their shared experiences in the Paul Winter Consort. Together, they fashioned a vocabulary whose intricacies were inseparable from its apparent effortlessness, allowing jazz, Indian classical music, European chamber traditions, and the folkways of distant cultures to coexist within an ever-expanding matrix of mutual attention.

Walcott’s association with ECM Records gave this vision an especially resonant home. His first album as a leader, Cloud Dance (1976), brought together guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Jack DeJohnette in a series of intimate exchanges whose rhythmic intelligence seemed to emerge from the very grain of their instruments. Perhaps the fullest articulation of his restless musical imagination came through Codona, the remarkable trio he formed with Don Cherry and Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos. Across three ECM albums, their collective inventions suggested an entire geography of sound liberated from the cartographic constraints of genre. Walcott’s contributions to recordings by Egberto Gismonti, David Darling, and Meredith Monk, whose early ECM projects he also helped produce, further testified to a musician whose most recognizable signature was his willingness to disappear into the shared intelligence of an ensemble.

The suddenness of Walcott’s death remains almost impossible to reconcile with the sense of continuity that animates his recordings. On November 8, 1984, while touring East Germany with Oregon, he was killed in a road accident near Magdeburg. He was thirty-nine. For his collaborators, the tragedy meant something more immediate than the disappearance of an artistic voice: the interruption of friendships and musical possibilities that had become integral to their understanding of themselves. On May 12, 1985, six months after his death, musicians from across Walcott’s overlapping creative circles gathered at New York’s Irving Plaza for an evening of performance dedicated to his memory. In returning to one another through the medium he had helped them explore, they gave audible shape to an absence that no individual could adequately express.

Organized by Walcott’s widow, Lanny Harrison Walcott, the benefit concert assembled an extraordinary community of artists whose intersecting histories offer a revealing portrait of the man at its center. The resulting evening, documented in Burril Crohn’s film An Evening of Music and Theater for Collin Walcott, moved through a succession of configurations, each one suggesting another possible arrangement of memory. Its proceeds established a scholarship fund in Walcott’s name. What emerges from this gathering is an understanding of remembrance as a generative instability, a condition in which inherited relationships must discover new ways of inhabiting themselves. The concert occupies a strange temporal aperture, simultaneously preserving the final reverberations of one musical world and anticipating the birth of another.

The evening begins with Trilok Gurtu and Vasconcelos performing Walcott’s “Margueritte,” a beautiful and humbling introduction that reaches immediately into the depth of his influence. Gurtu shifts from conga to tabla, lighting flame after flame within the composition’s unfolding interior, while Vasconcelos adds a West African talking drum whose vocal inflections seem to awaken some ancient narrative lodged beneath the skin of time. Vasconcelos eventually begins mimicking the drum with his own voice, dissolving the distinction between the human body and its acoustic extensions. His subsequent singing with the berimbau accompanies Gurtu’s movement into an earthen, mid-tempo groove whose humanity remains inseparable from its mystery. The encounter invokes something central to the proceedings, preparing the stage as a ritual of remembrance while refusing to confine that remembrance within a predetermined emotional register. Particularly striking is the implication that Walcott’s musical presence might survive through gestures he never personally made. Gurtu’s playing inhabits an inheritance without attempting to reproduce its former owner, introducing a freedom that makes the performance both an offering and an inaugural declaration.

Abercrombie, Holland, and DeJohnette follow with a trio performance of extraordinary tenderness and hard-won conviction. Abercrombie’s guitar sings over Holland’s peregrinations while DeJohnette traces the periphery, articulating an expanse in which the sands of time seem to slow sufficiently for us to contemplate the fragility of life. Holland’s solo is particularly moving, descending deeper into grief as though it were soil being prepared for planting, its subterranean wanderings uncovering small reservoirs of unexpected illumination. The trio’s subsequent, groovier number reverses the trajectory, emoting from the outside in as Abercrombie’s synth-inflected sound electrifies the proceedings. Having participated in Cloud Dance a decade earlier, these musicians carry Walcott’s history within the very architecture of their responsiveness. Their performance makes palpable the peculiar intimacy of collective improvisation, whereby the memory of an absent collaborator continues to inform decisions that appear entirely spontaneous.

That intimacy assumes an especially consequential form when Towner, McCandless, and Moore take the stage with Gurtu for Oregon’s “Waterwheel.” McCandless’s fluttering oboe is a vibrant and organic presence, endowed with spindly legs and remarkable agility as it navigates its immediate environment in search of sonic treasure. Towner’s gorgeous arpeggios provide a shimmering foundation, while Gurtu’s backbeat and Moore’s depth charges establish a wide berth of textural possibility. When McCandless shifts to soprano saxophone and Towner to electric keyboard, the ensemble opens into a richer and more fluid sound, its familiar contours becoming beautifully estranged from themselves. Gurtu would subsequently join Oregon, helping its surviving members establish a new chapter in the ensemble’s evolution. Hearing them together here, before that future had fully declared itself, reveals the music suspended between bereavement and renewal.

The subsequent duo improvisation between Vasconcelos and Cherry offers another intimate reckoning with Walcott’s legacy. As the surviving members of Codona, these musicians carry a particularly concentrated residue of his creative imagination, and their meeting becomes an exquisite negotiation with the spectral third presence inhabiting their exchanges. Cherry’s doussn’gouni lends a meditative undercurrent to his cathartic singing before he invites the audience into a call and response. Their dialogue recalls Codona’s radical generosity, its understanding of musical customs as an inexhaustible conversation whose participants need never relinquish the particularities of their own histories. This generosity expands into a formidable collective encounter featuring Jim Pepper, Steve Gorn, Baikida Carroll, and Marty Ehrlich alongside McCandless, Gurtu, Moore, Holland, Abercrombie, and Vasconcelos. Gorn’s wooden flute is a fluid and spiritual presence, threading its way through the ensemble with the delicacy of light entering a forgotten sanctuary. Carroll shatters that translucence with throaty cries amid a dense tangle of reeds, transforming the music into a turbulent organism whose conflicting impulses somehow sustain its coherence. An ensuing upbeat passage introduces an exuberance that complicates the evening’s elegiac foundations. Grief, after all, has its own capacity for unruliness, and here the collective body momentarily discovers the exhilaration of refusing to behave according to its presumed emotional obligations.

Meredith Monk’s solo appearance changes the scale of the proceedings, drawing listeners into a universe whose dimensions seem impossible to reconcile with the modest means of her keyboard and voice. Performing pieces that were particular favorites of Walcott, she begins with “Travelling,” a guttural and flowering example of ancient hymnody that seems to predate its own body by eons. Her detailed inflections and colorful programmatic turns evoke an entire civilization of imaginary vocal beings, each carrying some fragment of an ancestral language whose meanings have been lost while its emotional grammar remains intact. In “The Tale,” unbridled revelry breaks through these primordial structures, offering a glimpse into Monk’s extraordinary ability to transform the smallest vocal gesture into a complete theatrical cosmology. “Do You Be” subsequently introduces a more somber register, its funereal keening suggesting an intimacy between the birth of expression and its inevitable dissolution. Walcott understood Monk’s work as few musicians could, recognizing in her exploration of the human voice an extension of his own refusal to submit sound to conventional systems of belonging.

The quartet of Cherry, Holland, DeJohnette, and Pat Metheny brings an entirely different sort of intensity to two Ornette Coleman compositions. “Turnaround” goes deep and refuses to let up for the duration of its bluesy ride, Cherry moving between pocket trumpet and melodica with fluid care while Metheny navigates the shadows with pale fire. His solo gradually unfurls into a spider’s web of brilliance, its intricate connective tissue supported by Holland’s inexhaustible inventiveness and DeJohnette’s mercurial rhythming. “Congeniality” sharpens the proceedings into something altogether stranger, possessing the texture of a sea urchin whose innumerable spines have become independent conduits of electricity. The music’s incendiary energy becomes compelling within the evening’s larger context, suggesting that devotion to the departed can express itself through risk rather than retrospection. Coleman’s compositions offer particularly fertile ground for such a proposition, their restless interrogation of musical hierarchies resonating with Walcott’s own understanding of improvisation as an emancipatory encounter.

David Darling’s solo cello performance returns us to a more concentrated emotional terrain. Beginning with pizzicato figures that acquire the character of an almost raga-inflected prayer for healing, he moves into groovier strums and arpeggiated wonders before the bow fertilizes that soil with cathartic wavering. His extraordinary technique is inseparable from an equally astonishing sense of color, the instrument assuming the dimensions of an entire acoustic landscape. As the performance gathers momentum, Darling begins singing to reveal melodies concealed within the cello’s increasingly frenzied articulations, at one point matching the velocity of his bow with flickering movements of the tongue. There is something profoundly vulnerable about watching a musician allow his instrument to become an extension of those involuntary motions through which the flesh registers feelings that consciousness has yet to comprehend.

Abercrombie and Towner’s duetting on “Ralph’s Piano Waltz” is a gem of almost preternatural ease, their interplay revealing an understanding of musical friendship in which complexity becomes indistinguishable from affection. Pepper’s subsequent duet with Vasconcelos moves into more openly vocal territory, the saxophonist’s singing endowed with such depth of feeling that the distinction between lamentation and laughter gradually loses its authority. These performances prepare the way for the assembled musicians and audience to join in “Witchi Tai To,” whose Native American provenance becomes the occasion for a boisterous communal affirmation. The collective singing is overwhelming in its generosity, transforming Irving Plaza into a single, gloriously imperfect instrument. Contemporary accounts also recall Lanny Harrison Walcott performing a mime dance to “Caledonia,” a deeply personal gesture absent from the circulating film. Its unrecorded presence introduces another dimension of the evening’s history, reminding us that every surviving document contains its own allegiances to disappearance.

Across these performances, remembrance gradually acquires the character of an unfinished grammar, one whose rules must be invented anew with every utterance. Perhaps this is where the concert finally takes us, beyond the intimate circle of those who knew him and into the far more mysterious territory of those who never would. The scholarship fund established in Walcott’s name introduces an almost imperceptible reversal into the logic of remembrance. What begins as an attempt to honor a vanished musician becomes an investment in someone whose music does not yet exist, whose hands have yet to discover the instruments through which they might one day articulate their own impossible understanding of the world. Within this gesture lies an ethics of listening more profound than preservation, because it grants the future permission to exceed the memory from which it emerged. Walcott’s greatest legacy may ultimately reside in this beautiful relinquishment of ownership, this willingness to make audible a world from which he himself has disappeared.

As of this writing, the concert is available to watch here.

Rafael Anton Irisarri: Points of Inaccessibility

| Tyran Grillo

The distance between two points is ordinarily a problem for geometry. On Points of Inaccessibility, it becomes a pathology of attention. A chance encounter at MUTEK in Mexico City in 2024 brought Ibero-American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri into conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, whose invitation to the Uncloud residency in Utrecht the following spring led their inquiry into the abandoned carcass of the Pieter Baan Centre. Once a forensic psychiatric prison, the building had specialized in extracting intelligibility from captivity; now its emptied rooms hosted a different form of interrogation. Irisarri stretched bowed-guitar notes through looping circuitry until each gesture acquired the dimensions of a corridor without an exit, while Schilp’s custom point-cloud software translated the live sound into visual constellations perpetually failing to hold their shape. Here, the apparatus designed to render experience legible produced its own exquisite illegibility, a digital Rorschach in which perception caught itself manufacturing evidence. The building’s carceral history seeped into the circuitry, lending each disintegrating image the afterlife of something forcibly remembered.

Returning to New York, Irisarri approached those improvisations as ruins still inhabited by their makers. He mapped fragments into MIDI, insinuated Prophet 5 harmonies and Moog undertows beneath the bowed strings, then enlisted Abul Mogard’s editorial ear to preserve the encounter’s original volatility. The album’s title borrows from remote coordinates whose identities are determined by distance, but turns the cartographic conceit against our supposed culture of perpetual contact. Every algorithm promises a shortcut to intimacy while manufacturing fresh interiors of estrangement; every simulated acknowledgment arrives carrying the faint bureaucratic odor of an absence already processed and filed. Irisarri calls these compensatory rites “digital shamanism,” although their sorcery belongs to capitalist realism, which has taught alienation to impersonate its own cure. Across four movements, Points of Inaccessibility listens for the human pulse inside that recursive deception, excavating a hauntology of suspended futures from the detritus of technological communion. Memory persists as interference in a system increasingly incapable of remembering what its connections were meant to connect. Presence becomes the vanishing point of its own transmission, leaving consciousness to wander the immaculate circumference of an intimacy whose center has been quietly outsourced.

“Faded Ghosts of Clouds” is the voice of an unborn generation emanating from a realm that, despite being right beneath our feet, is all too easily ignored in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. The painful irony is that, while technology blinds us to the details of existence that make it so beautiful, it remains the apparatus by which such music becomes possible, gathering otherwise estranged elements into an orbit so internal that we have forgotten how to make physical contact with it. Drones of electronics and string-borne songs creep toward the edges of our collective waking dream. Across their slow ebb and flow, we are implicated as mere driftwood in the cosmic tide, reaching our arms out in slow motion toward the shore but coming up with only sand slipping through our trembling fingers. And while the textures mount and the notes appear to go skyward, our bodies sink in proportion, never knowing what light might await above the surface. There is something embryological about this inversion of gravity, as though the music were gestating an entire civilization within the amniotic darkness of its own forgotten origins. Each swelling frequency brings us closer to an inheritance we cannot claim without first acknowledging how much of ourselves we have surrendered to the machinery of recognition.

“Breaking the Unison” emerges as a child thereof, possessed of its own rebellious streak and a grittier electric guitar sound that magnifies its voice beyond fleshly containment. The more it cries out to be heard, the less defined it becomes, drowning in a sea of its own making as the world swarms inward over and over, until the face ceases to function as an individual marker and identity becomes one final exhale of illusory fixity. Yet there is a strange tenderness in this erosion, a willingness to inhabit the wound of differentiation before language cauterizes it with a name. Irisarri allows distortion to assume the dimensions of an unfinished autobiography, its pages written in the granular debris of sensations that never achieved the dignity of recollection. What remains is a kind of prenatal dissent, the terrible freedom of a consciousness discovering that the boundaries protecting its singularity might also be responsible for its loneliness.

With parent and child brought under the same galactic umbrella, their home is constituted by “Signals from a Distant Afterglow.” The title is prophetic, speaking in a language of arcs and pulses that, ordinarily too minute to be held and regarded, suddenly become knowable in human terms. The music extends its feelers into the interstices of perception, where every vibration seems to contain a small archaeology of the future. Then something miraculous happens, as vocal loops provided by Karen Vogt permit the possibility that something familiar may yet be found in the great unknown. Although wordless, her presence speaks volumes about the soul and its tender cage, suggesting that even the most intimate utterance must pass through a labyrinth of estrangement before reaching another consciousness. Her voice acquires the fragility of an artifact excavated from a future extinction, bearing the fingerprints of someone whose existence has yet to occur. The resulting intimacy is almost unbearable because its object remains suspended just beyond our capacity to identify it. We recognize the yearning before we can remember whom we have been yearning for.

The bars of that tender cage are comprised of “Memory Strands,” whose enveloping textures seem to originate in a place that has already held us in its hands from conception. As tender as it is clear in its delineation of heart from mind, the piece provides just enough order to arrest our fear of falling over the cliff of uncertainty. A portal within a portal, it opens a pathway into itself, ad infinitum, serenading us through its recursive slipstream. There are echoes here of Stephen Scott’s bowed piano works enmeshed with William Basinski’s loops and filtered through Tim Hecker’s incandescent abrasions, although such coordinates offer only provisional access to an interior that continually redraws its own perimeter. So much depth resides in these pieces, so many corners in which we might cower in awe at the immensity of this reality in which we find ourselves. Their beauty emerges from the possibility that memory, in preserving our intimacy with what has vanished, also perpetuates the original violence of its disappearance.

Perhaps this is where Points of Inaccessibility makes its most unsettling proposition. The Pieter Baan Centre was once dedicated to determining the contents of human interiority, converting the bewildering opacity of another person into something admissible as knowledge. Its former inhabitants were subjected to an institutional faith in the legibility of the soul. Irisarri returns us to that predicament through the spectral machinery of a world increasingly devoted to making every consciousness available for inspection. Yet the music carries within its fractures a quietly radical possibility: that our deepest obligation to one another might involve protecting what cannot be accessed. What if the ultimate intimacy were the recognition of another’s right to remain unknowable, even to those who love them? The geography of isolation would then disclose an unsuspected ethics of hospitality, one in which distance becomes a form of tenderness and the uncharted core acquires the sanctity of a home. At the remotest coordinate of this extraordinary album, we discover that the first act of love is to leave something in another person forever undiscovered, so that even the universe, with all its instruments of detection, must learn the humility of approaching a closed door without turning the handle.

Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners (ECM 2868)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fearless Five
with Joe Lovano
Corners

Enrico Rava trumpet, flugelhorn
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Matteo Paggi trombone
Francesco Diodati guitar
Francesco Ponticelli double bass
Evita Polidoro drums, vocals
Recorded July 2025
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ennio Morricone, Rome
Recording engineers: Angelo Mincuzzi, Massimiliano Cervini,
and Roberto Catucci (supervision)
Mixing engineer: Stefano Amerio
October 2025, Udine
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2026

On Corners, Enrico Rava’s lyricism acquires fresh contours in the collective imagination of his Fearless Five. Melody enters a studio whose occupants can move the walls, and the trumpeter’s familiar eloquence discovers unfamiliar dimensions within its own breath. Formed after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, the quintet takes its name from a composition on his 1978 Enrico Rava Quartet. Guitarist Francesco Diodati, trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli, and drummer Evita Polidoro bring distinct compositional identities to the ensemble’s ECM debut, joined by guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose partnership with Rava yielded Roma in 2019. Diodati alone had worked with Rava in other groups; their intuitive rapport helps make freedom a practical condition of the music. Recorded at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 21–23, 2025, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album gathers contributions from every participant. Shared authorship becomes an invitation to alter the terms of belonging. Rava’s language passes between generations, acquiring shadows with anatomies of their own.

His flugelhorn introduces “Certi angoli segreti” with a supple assurance that lets the melody reveal itself by degrees. There is something clandestine in its poise, a private staircase descending through the center of a public gesture. Diodati’s delicate marbling deepens the rhythm section’s contours, giving Lovano ample space to carve airborne trajectories without losing the grain of his sound. The tenor’s robust delicacy holds ascent and gravity in the same phrase. Around Rava’s unraveling lines, the ensemble adjusts its proportions, allowing a melodic turn to become an opening through which the whole group can pass. Paggi’s solo burns through that space with exhilarating conviction, its lower register lending physical force to the gathering intensity. Diodati, too, pursues distortion, summoning a brilliance reminiscent of Terje Rypdal: the guitar’s radiance has teeth. Across nearly 12 minutes, the piece establishes how freely this ensemble can change direction while keeping each player’s presence sharply audible. Even the most fugitive line leaves a pressure mark.

That expansiveness makes the intimacy of Diodati’s “Sin peso” especially arresting. Its cinematic sensibility allows the open distances of a western to fold into noir’s troubled interiors. Rava’s muted trumpet moves with the composure of a figure carrying an undisclosed past; each phrase seems to know which door would be dangerous to open. The guitar supplies a landscape whose horizon has been confiscated, leaving the melody to negotiate distance through touch. Polidoro’s “Le mie gambe” draws that inward movement closer to the body. Sung by its composer, it is one of the album’s most affecting performances, her voice finding a passage through the instruments that seems scarcely wide enough for speech. Slinking guitar and tender bass give the song a palpable warmth, while the horns bring its emotional implications forward through their intimate harmonies. Feeling becomes audible at the point where the individual timbres begin to soften into one another. The voice inhabits that threshold, lending the ensemble’s abstraction a pulse beneath the skin.

Lovano’s “Sun Rava” unsettles the ground again. Its abstract blues opens onto freer exchanges, with momentum repeatedly finding and relinquishing its footing. The tenor’s conversation with drums and bass is particularly enthralling: Polidoro and Ponticelli make motion responsive enough to accommodate Lovano’s changing inflections, so that each rhythmic decision has consequences for the next breath. Freedom here involves the vertigo of being heard with such precision that an impulse can alter the entire group’s direction. Rava’s “Hitchcock at the Beach” concentrates its drama into a much shorter span, Polidoro’s vocals adding a silver sheen to its nostalgic atmosphere. Lovano’s melancholy points toward tragedy with remarkable restraint, leaving grief suspended at the threshold of articulation. The ache resides in that withheld disclosure. On “Tone, Shape and Colours,” a collective improvisation sparked by a Lovano motif, the tarogato gives contemplation a reedier edge. Bells and gongs float across the surface as tensions gather beneath them. Their eventual surrender to rest feels almost anatomical, a clenched hand discovering the space inside its palm.

Ponticelli’s brief “Ça va sans dire” distills these roaming impulses into a melodic aphorism. Its nocturnal wanderings leave Diodati a generous surface on which to work, the guitar giving depth to a statement whose brevity invites close attention. Rava’s “Bowery Dance” then turns toward the remembered streets of his New York years. Guitar fuzz and pliant bass introduce an abstract opening before a harder groove assembles itself, interrupted by stops and starts that keep its momentum alert. Lovano and Rava exchange phrases with lived experience in their jaws, allowing memory to find fresh musculature in the present tense. Their ease carries the knowledge of musicians who can recognize an opening before it has fully formed. Paggi’s “Mamma” brings this restless company into a tender close. Its gentleness gives the ensemble’s responsiveness an unexpectedly vulnerable meaning, reaching beyond the bandstand toward the strange beginnings of personhood. A child enters a language already in progress, addressed long before it can answer. Someone lends significance to a cry; a sound acquires a place in another person’s life. The musicians’ mutual attention gives that ancient transaction an adult complexity, their experience deepening the risk of allowing a phrase to need an answer. Fearlessness becomes unexpectedly fragile here, entrusted to another pair of hands. Rava’s lyricism, so articulate throughout Corners, approaches the obscure tenderness from which articulation first emerges. The first person begins in the second.