Die thematischen Cluster, die sich hin und wieder aus dem mal absichtlich gesuchten, mal eher zufällig und glücklich scharfgestellten Fokus auf bestimmte Szenezusammenhänge und Länder ergeben, beschränken sich gerade nicht nur auf Jazz. Im frankophonen Teil Kanadas arbeitet etwa der Komponist Isaiah Ceccarelli an einer hochinteressanten Transformation neutönender Orchestermusik in großer Besetzung zu minimal und intim wirkenden, mitunter sogar Dark-Ambient-nahen elegischen Drones, die ohne jegliche Nostalgie nach der Disruption auskommen, die sich die Neue Musik einmal vorgenommen hatte, und dennoch nicht zu neoklassischer Einfalt drängen. Toute clarté m’est obscure (Ambiances Magnétiques) kommt so bei einer rauen, schartigen Schönheit an, wie sie etwa Pan Daijing vom Noise herkommend vor Kurzem ganz ähnlich für sich definiert hat.

Inspired (loosely) by different underwater depths, Jean-François Primeau builds interconnected worlds of intricate harshness and beauty. Echoing digital swells grow and attach to the seafloor as bubbling arpeggios zip back and forth through light streams in the water. Glitching blurs fade into the black depths, sending sonar pings as disparate points of light. Drones stretch to the breaking point before circling a metallic drain, turning into humming crystals in the blink of an eye. Primeau’s digitized expanses are wondrous.

What a magnificent album from a label (Ambiances Magnétiques) that very much has my attention. Joane Hétu is a composer, saxophonist, and vocalist and her work is always inventive and sonically captivating. Tags collects four ‘orphans’ — pieces that didn’t have a home elsewhere — and shows everything that makes Hétu great. Lithe woodwinds dance across simmering floors while voices shoot upward like ancient machines hidden underground come to life. Beautiful guitar tones gloss through blank corridors, flitting between resonant drones and rippling splurges, interconnected with an underlying sigh of relief. It’s amazing that these four pieces weren’t written with each other in mind because Tags works as a wonderfully cohesive album. Recommended.

Tom Johnson is a new composer for me, apart from his Chord Catalogue, a work I still have to listen to. Born in 1939, he privately studied composition with Morton Feldman. As a music critic, he wrote for The Village Voice. You can find an anthology in his book The Voice of Music, published in 1989. He coined the term minimal music in 1972.

The music collected on this disc is his complete works for the string quartet. Sixty-six minutes spread over four pieces. The oldest piece is from 1994, and the youngest is composed in 2009. And what music it is. His approach to music is logical, mathematical, not whimsical or sterile. He later collaborated with mathematicians to find formulas to apply to music (or vice versa). The resulting music is lovely. The first few pieces comprising Combinations are in the vein of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Highly repetitive motives. But: the sequences are always the same, just varied on the different string instruments. This might be an oversimplification of the score. But the way Johnson organizes the material is logical, using only the notes heard in the beginning and mathematically permutating them. The overall pattern becomes apparent after a few rounds. And that is just the first piece. The next one is sparse, only using the same note in different octaves, almost sounding organ-like. Piece number 4 of combinations utilize silence in a cheeky-sneaky way. Tilework for string quartet is a version of this work for string quartet. There is also a version for solo instruments, including bassoon. I might track down the sheet music. The fifteen pieces comprising Four Note-Chords in Four Voices are just that. Voicings of four chords across the four-string instruments. The kind of voicing creates some sort of melody or monody in the different permutations of the chord. I didn’t read much about his theorization on his music to have an unbiased ear.

The different pieces have enough variation to not become a tedious listening experience. That being said: the music is wonderfully performed by the Bozzini Quartet. Recorded in a church, the music played has a vibrant quality, although the quartet doesn’t use vibrato on the strings. Also, the players’ enthusiasm for this music results in some minor speeding up in the first few pieces in some solo sections, adding to the liveliness of the music. Well done! Now, where did I put that Chord Catalogue?

Isaiah Ceccarelli is a percussionist and composer. Toute clarté m’est obscure (2013 with a revision in 2018) consists of three long pieces, each over fifteen minutes long, three written interludes, and two shorter pieces. Bourdons is a kind of group meditation on long sustained notes with fluttering dissonance in several instruments. Intermede 2 is scored for the lower registers in the ensemble, which creates a brooding atmosphere. The title piece is a setting of a fourteenth-century ballad.

Again long-sustained notes with ever-so-slowly shifting notes, creating chords that slowly evolve, but with added notes to create a moving sound carpet. This is not meant to be background music or muzak. The shortest piece lasts just 2 minutes, and it’s the most uplifting piece on the recording. It contains a jolting melody sung by the soprano accompanied by gentle and soothing chords. But the text counters this by stating that death surrounds us even in our lives. Seventy minutes long, it’s quite worthwhile to take the plunge and immerse yourself into Ceccarelli’s sound world.