Cellist Ashley Bathgate releases her third solo album featuring her performance of Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint alongside three new works that take advantage of the versatile format of soloist with layered tracks. Composers Emily Cooley, Alex Weiser, and Fjóla Evans wrote works that expand on Reich’s template, exploring harmonic, dramatic, and gestural contrasts. The homogeneity of timbre inherent in works for layered tracks of the same instrument gives the listener a sense they are hearing a hyper-cello; the compositional strategy both echoes studio techniques that are ubiquitous in commercial music while also amplifying more Romantic impulses of extroverted expression and immersive textures.

The structure and motivic material in Fjóla Evans’ Augun is inspired by the traditional Icelandic song, Vísur Vatnsenda Rósu. Evans organizes overlapping motives taken from the traditional song and creates a shimmering, undulating texture, pushing and pulling between dissonant and consonant voicings. The atmospheric quality of the work tells a non-linear story, painting a complex mix of mournful and resolute emotions.

Emily Cooley’s approach to the layered ensemble was to focus on various groupings of the eight celli as they take on shifting roles in the overall texture. She writes of Assemble, “The title describes what I felt like I was doing while composing: assembling a sort of puzzle. Only at the end of the piece do the eight parts truly assemble into one voice. They all play a slow, resonant chorale that fades into silence." The work ventures through moments of insistent pulse, poignant anticipation, and exuberant lyricism, expanding beyond the bounds of mere assemblage.

Violinist Olivia de Prato releases her second solo album on New Focus, Panorama, exploring the multi-dimensionality of expression and identity. Composers Missy Mazzoli, Jen Shyu, Angelica Negron, Miya Masoaka, and Samantha Fernando contribute pieces for solo violin with and without electronics that probe questions of dislocation and return.

South African composer Andile Khumalo releases his debut portrait album, including chamber and solo works that reflect the rich tapestry of influences at play in his music. Featuring Ensemble Dal Niente, Argento Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, and several acclaimed contemporary soloists and chamber musicians, Tracing Hollow Traces captures the embedded conversation between spectralism, polyglot American aesthetic threads, European modernism, and foundational African musical principles in Khumalo's work.

Acclaimed composer Lei Liang releases "Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes", a multidisciplinary diptych that marries diverse areas of inquiry into Chinese landscape painting and folk song, oceanography, software development, earth science, and underwater acoustics. The result are two inspiring linked works that employ these varied methodologies to explore our relationship to and sonic experience with our planet.

APNM (Association for the Promotion of New Music) releases Vol. 3 of their ongoing series documenting recordings of music by their member composers. Featuring works by Erik Lundborg, Ionel Petroi, Hiroya Miura, Louis Goldford, Michael Gogins, Peter Child, Aine Nakamura, and Krists Auznieks, APNM Vol. 3 is an important chronicle of a core organization in the New York new music community.

Longtime Duke University string quartet-in-residence, the Ciompi Quartet releases "A Duke Moment" featuring three works written for them by Duke composers, Stephen Jaffe, Anthony M. Kelley, and Scott Lindroth. The three works draw some of their inspiration from different sources related to the Duke experience, including the North Carolina countryside and various athletic pursuits.

Philadelphia based contemporary music choir The Crossing releases "Carols after a Plague" in album format, a collection of works by twelve composers that responds to our collective experience of the last few years navigating the pandemic, as well as grappling with the fraught issues of our time. In characteristic fashion, The Crossing, led by artistic director Donald Nally, finds ways to create projects that connect music to our shared experience, with the beauty of human voices providing the glue for this timeless communal experience.

Composer Reiko Futing releases his fifth portrait album on New Focus, featuring performances by Longleash, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Quartet121, Noise Catalogue, SchallSpektrum, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Doori Na, and pianist Jing Yang. Futing's music engages with temporality, memory, and quotation as tools put in service of using music as a way to explore contemporary moral and spiritual questions.

Que sais-je? is a one-hour composition that explores the life and philosophy of composer Amos Elkana's father, Yehuda Elkana, through music, archival recordings, and visual media. Performed by the Meitar Ensemble, the piece integrates live instrumental performance with multichannel audio and video projections, surrounding the audience with a tapestry of sound and memory.

Ken Ueno's creative approach to composition shares an affinity with the percussion world; there is an underlying spirit of exprimentation, problem solving, and deconstruction as a path to innovation that guides them. This clear eyed perspective on the materials of sound and their possibilities makes percussion music an ideal forum to hear Ueno's work. The works on this recording share an interest in microtonality. Transformation of noise timbres into pitched material, and an investigation of instrumental possibilities.

Violist Jonathan Bagg unearths three overlooked gems of the mid-20th century chamber repertoire by Marion Bauer, Ulysees Kay, and Margaret Bonds. Joined by pianists Emely Phelps and Mimi Solomon, Bagg sheds light on well deserving repertoire by three composers whose contributions to the larger musical field went far beyond their fine music.

Ensemble Dal Niente's newest release, portrait RE / Flux / Pacific Time, chronicles their immersive collaborations with composers, featuring three works by George Lewis, Carola Bauckholt, and Igor Santos that represent the culmination of long-standing working relationships with the critically acclaimed Chicago-based ensemble.

Percussionist Greg Stuart releases "Subtractions", featuring solo works by Sarah Hennies and Michael Pisaro-Liu that reframe virtuosity, inviting vulnerability and dialogue into the context of brilliant performative display. Through his collaboration with both composers, Stuart draws analogies with the politics of agency and democracy in how their dialogue was established, embedding respect for the performer's body and preferred modes of expression into the compositional process.

Greg Stuart is a percussionist whose work draws upon a mixture of music from the experimental tradition, the Wandelweiser collective, improvisation, and electronics. His performances have been described as “a ghostly, gorgeous lesson in how close, concentrated listening can alter and enhance perception” (The New York Times).

Flutist Jennifer Grim releases "Through Broken Time," a collection of works at the intersection of Afro-Modernism and post-minimalism, by composers Tania León, Alvin Singleton, David Sanford, Valerie Coleman, Allison Loggins-Hull, and Julia Wolfe. Together with pianist Michael Sheppard, Grim performs these multi-dimensional works with characteristic precision, virtuosity, and expressive power. Hailed as “a deft, smooth flute soloist” by the New York Times, flutist Jennifer Grim has given solo and chamber performances throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. For over twenty years, she was the flutist of the award-winning Zéphyros Winds and the New York Chamber Soloists. She is a frequent guest artist with the Boston Chamber Music Society, Alpenglow Chamber Music Festival, Ensemble Flageolet, and has performed with such renowned ensembles such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, American String Quartet, and with members of the Takacs Quartet and St. Lawrence Quartet.

Guitarist Daniel Lippel's "Adjacence" features a collection of new chamber works for guitar, including works by Tyshawn Sorey, Charles Wuorinen, Tania Leon, Nico Muhly, Mario Davidovsky, Ken Ueno, Peter Gilbert, Tonia Ko, Bernadette Speech, Peter Adriaansz, and Sidney Boquiren. The works occupy a broad range of aesthetics, from modernist to minimalist, incorporating improvisation and microtonality, and featuring a variety of instrumentations with Lippel's colleagues in the International Contemporary Ensemble, counter)induction, as well as other active performers in the New York contemporary music scene.

Composer Ryan Vigil releases an album featuring two of his expansive works for violin and piano. Featuring sensitive performances by violinist Lilit Hartunian and pianist John McDonald, Vigil's music unfolds slowly but navigates a diversity of expression within it's frame.

Composer Eric Richards approached listening as an embodied activity, an amalgamation of the auditory, psychological, and emotional experience we have hearing artistic sound. This album, produced by Andy Kozar and Jeffrey Gavett, features several of Richards's entrancing chamber works performed by Ekmeles, loadbang, Gavett, and Kozar as well as a host of New York based freelancers, and shines a light on a composer whose poetic approach to compositional, observation, and technology has been widely overlooked previously.

Turkish born composer Eren Gümrükçüoglu's "Pareidolia" presents seven of his kinesthetic works for chamber ensembles, with and without electronics, as well as fixed media. Featuring performances by Conrad Tao, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Suono Giallo, and Deviant Septet, Gümrükçüoglu's music merges a rich harmonic palette with charged rhythmic gestures and a sensitivity to the interaction between acoustic and electronic elements, reflecting his background as a jazz guitarist and his electro-acoustic focused research.

Composer Michael Hersch adapts the tragedy of Medea from Ovid's�Metamorphoses�in his new opera for soprano Sarah Maria Sun, the vocal ensemble Schola Heidelberg, and Ensemble Musikfabrik. With librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. Hersch's setting underscores the profound psychological trauma at the heart of the tale with a characteristically powerful, bracing score.

Flutist and composer Wilfrido Terrazas presents Trilog�a del Dolor (Trilogy of Pain), a collection of works blending music and poetry to explore the complexities of the human experience of pain. Going beyond common idealizations, the trilogy seeks to spark conversations and challenge taboos around pain, featuring poignant texts by Mexican authors Nuria Manzur-Wirth, Ricardo C�zares, Tania Favela, M�nica Morales Rocha, Nadia Mondrag�n, and the composer, in conversation with the unique visual imagination of artist Esther G�mez Rubio. The album features the vocal artistry of soprano Mariana Flores Bucio and tenor Miguel Zazueta, and the fiery talents of clarinetist Madison Greenstone, cellist Roc�o S�nchez, percussionist Camilo Zamudio, and Terrazas on flutes and narration.

Virtuoso flutist Claire Chase continues her laudable documentation of her multi-year commissioning project, Density 2036, with a 3 CD set of the works from the 2019, 2020, and 2021 iterations. Featuring pathbreaking music for flute, in solo, electro-acoustic, and chamber settings, by Ann Cleare, Wang Lu, Matana Roberts, Liza Lim, Olga Neuwirth, Sarah Hennies, Phyllis Chen, and Pamela Z, "Density 2036: Parts VI-VIII (2019-2021)" represents a landmark addition to the contemporary flute repertoire.

Composer Kay Rhie releases�Cereus,��a portrait album of chamber works, two including voice, featuring soprano Leela Subramaniam, Winsor Music and the Aperture Duo. Rhie's music draws on her experience as a South Korean born artist living in Los Angeles, responding to the lived environment in outward ways through text setting and thematic context, as well as inward impacts on her compositional process.

Bologna, Italy based American composer and pianist David Salvage releases�Dreams of Love and Travel,�works he composed for solo piano that engage with journeys physical, literary, and symbolic. A seven movement suite inspired by Marcel Proust's�In Search of Lost Time�occupies a central role in the collection, representing the large structural gesture on the album as it is surrounded by shorter character pieces.

Brooklyn based SydeBoob Duo is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance in repertoire for soprano and flute, bringing their virtuosity to ambitious works that highlight their committment to broad representation alongside the highest aesthetic standards. On this debut full length release, they perform works by Rebecca Saunders, Eric Moe, Anthony Braxton,�Ramin Akhavijou,�Max Johnson, and�Beat Furrer that are both landmark works for the instrumentation and core works that have shaped Sydeboob as an ensemble.

Lorelei Ensemble, a critically acclaimed choir of women's voices, releases an EP of James Kellembach's "Antigone." Merging Sophocles original dramatic framework with texts from the Nazi opposition group White Rose in Munich in the 1940s, Kellembach expresses the timeless nature of resistance. James K allembach’s works have been commissioned and performed by Brooklyn Art Song Society, Chorus pro Musica Boston, Lorelei Ensemble, Lydian Quartet, San Francisco Symphony, and Seraphic Fire, among others. He has received honors from ASCAP, ACDA, American Composers’ Forum, Pacific Chorale, ALEA III in Boston, and VocalEssence. He has written extensively for the voice, producing a large catalogue of song cycles and oratorios for voices and instruments. His St. John Passion, Four Romantic Songs, Most Sacred Body, and Antigone have been commercially recorded. The Boston Musical Intelligencer praised him as “a colorful and imaginative orchestrator, word painter, and provider of singable lyrical lines” who could “wring emotion from a dictionary.”