Back catalogue: Modern Classical

Review: Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) marks his AD93 debut with The Way Of Time, wrapping elucted echo and looping synth drift around spoken fragments of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' great 1926 novel The Time Of Man. A Midwestern gothic literary staple, Roberts' novel is about the daughter of a Kentucky tenant farmer, and Jenssen's haunting use of Joan Lorring's voice from the 1951 radio play adaptation readapts his usual icy predilections for suitably huger desert horizons. Rather than treating the vocal as ornament, he folds it deep into the mix, letting it dissolve into the melodic architecture.

Review: Different Rooms finds Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer file their patchwork method of tape-splicing, improvisation and studio play down to a fine, sharpened nib. Written and assembled between late 2024 and early 2025 in their adjoining Los Angeles studios, the album weaves live performance with granular synthesis, viola stacks, and manipulated field recordings gathered from train platforms, city streets and domestic spaces. Unlike the drifting landscapes of Recordings From The Aland Islands, their newest LP as a pair keeps rooted in a replication of deep urban listening, attuned to passer-by street textures. Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson appear on archival improvisations folded seamlessly in; though despite outside collaborations the sequence loosely mirrors itself, with motifs returning in altered form, echoing the project's core idea: though we move through different life "rooms", they are in uncanny enfilade, each ghostlily similar to the last.

Review: Composed in New York by the Baltimore-born minimalist Philip Glass and released in 1971, Music With Changing Parts was the album that put his vivid, colour-rich sound on the map, marking a shift away from the ultra minimal 600 Lines (1967) and Two Pages (1968). Performed with free instrumentation, the piece allows musicians to switch between eight staves at specified cues, generating abrupt shifts in texture and timbre. Though its melodic material remains tightly looped and minimal, changes in orchestration continuously refresh the sonic landscape. Most striking is the psychoacoustic illusion Glass observed during rehearsals: when multiple players repeated the same short patterns, sustained tones seemed to emerge on their own. He eventually formalised this in the score, permitting long notes to enhance the effect. What results is a hallucinated resonance that pulses and flickersian early indication of the harmonic depth he would later bring to works like the miestone Einstein On The Beach.