Under the direction of founder and artistic director Robert Geary, the twenty professional singers that make up Volti lead the nation in the discovery, creation and performance of new vocal music. They are the only six-time winners of the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Pro-�gramming of Contemporary Music. On their new album, House of Voices, they introduce six 21st-century works from American composers of dazzling range and diversity, including five Volti commissions.

Matteo Liberatore is a boundary-pushing guitarist and composer from Italy, living in Brooklyn, NY. His avant-garde style explores the crossroads of free improvisation, contemporary classical music and noise using guitar and electronics. Matteo studied classical guitar under Maestro Marco Salcito at Conservatorio di Foggia and philosophy at University of L'Aquila. As part of a duo releasing records and performing in Italy, he won competitions such as Concorso Nazionale di musica “B.Barattelli” in Popoli (PE), (2005), Concorso Nazionale di Musica Capitanata in Apricena (FG) (2005), and Teramo International Chamber Music Competition (2005). Matteo's current solo project draws from his early experience of life in America - the rawness of a world where incredible art and expression flourish alongside money market-driven politics and where tense capitalistic ambition reigns supreme. Matteo’s sound and performance is abstract... deconstructing sound, expectations and beauty in form.

Monuments Emerge chronicles the work of Asian-American composer Nicholas Vasallo. Fusing Western classical music, Asian classical music, and heavy metal, Vasallo's work plumbs the inner depths where these traditions unite, finding their roots in order to draw them out into vast sonic landscapes. Vasallo is pulling threads together, even as he seeks to push at the boundaries that have traditionally separated musical traditions.

British singer and sound artist Viv Corringham creates works that incorporate conversations with residents on walks, recordings of ambient sounds and her own improvised singing. These relate to her very successful ongoing project, Shadow-walks that's been widely presented from New York to Portugal to Hong Kong. Now the works are gathered together for this album.

Mark Applebaum has never been one to shy away from making connections, even odd ones. In fact, one could argue that’s what composing is all about. In his latest assemblage, Speed Dating, five smartly absurd works (three of which deal with history in some wry fashion) are presented for your kind consideration. The album opens with a tip of the hat to pioneering soundpoet Charles Amirkhanian, who in 1972 famously made a rhythmic tape piece out of the words rainbow, chug, bandit, and bomb. In Applebaum’s Three Unlikely Corporate Sponsorships, he uses his own voice contrapuntally, ranting ever more hilariously about the injustices of the world today. Biting socio-political commentary has rarely been more foot tapping. Applebaum reached into his home storage space and fired up eight classic analog synths from the 80s. Skeletons in the Closet uses a randomizing digital Max patch to operate on these dusty treasures, no doubt frustrating purists while delightfully mangling the past. In Clicktrack, a dozen percussionists make a quiet Cageian racket, following precise rhythms in their headphones while the audience hears scratchy noises and fragments of text. The humorous and provocative album is vintage Applebaum; not for the unprepared. Especially the third track, Halliburton, that comes with a Parental Advisory warning for strong language.

Burtner's third innova album is his first chamber music album, and it features Noise ensemble from San Diego. This is his first published collection of his chamber music, and an album that bears the fruit of these collaborations: three substantial compositions that each explore a unique approach to Noise in Burtner's evocative and thoughtful music.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Respiri (breathing) is Juri Seo's second album with innova after Mostly Piano. Focusing on string writing, the works explore themes of life, death, memory, and change. Seo represents a rare breed of contemporary classical music that lives at the edge of old and new. Seo freely navigates through colorful sonorities of string instruments that merge in and out of kaleidoscopic harmonies. Her intricate melodies blend in dense counterpoint. Argus' extraordinary versatility shines in every track. They effortlessly move between warm tones and noisy harmonics; they dissolve a tight canon into a hazy texture in a heartbeat. Listeners will experience the full range of human emotions and feelings, from agony to bliss. Juri Seo, a Guggenheim fellow and a Koussevitzky Commission recipient, is a composer and pianist based in New Jersey. She teaches music at Princeton University. The Argus Quartet is a first prize winner at the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, as well as the 2017 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition, and has served as the Graduate Resident String Quartet at the Juilliard School and the Fellowship Quartet in Residence at the Yale School of Music.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Macedonian-born composer and violinist Mihailo Trandafilovski has performed all over the world as part of the celebrated Kreutzer Quartet and in collaboration with many other artists. + On his new album FIVE, he presents a collection of recent work revolving around several different ideas: networks, the physical properties of sound, and the way in which polarity can be an organizing principle. + Full of mercurial energy and richly nuanced sound worlds, his debut innova album shows Trandafilovski’s compellingly hallucinatory music in dazzling detail.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Evoking the work of composers and artists as varied as Eno, Ligeti, Zappa and early Kraftwerk, Mike Olson’s new album Six Projects spans the thirteen years since he began working with fragment-based composition. • The half-dozen works run the gamut from choral music to analogue modular synthesizer work, but all began as fragments, sometimes thousands of tiny acoustic building blocks. • By integrating elements of composition, performance and recording, Olson has created a process yielding through-composed pieces possessing an ethereal, cinematic quality; almost but not quite performable live.