For the Record: March 14, 2025.

Cinematic creations by improvising composers Amy Denio and Ted Reichman, plus more new arrivals and future releases of interest.

For the Record is a weekly column that rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community – contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined – on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.

This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts,  and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)

These listings are not comprehensive—nor could they be! If you’d like to submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, please email information to nightafternight@icloud.com. (Streams and downloads preferred.)

All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not reflect the views of my employer.

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Topspin.

Amy Denio (Photograph courtesy Bandcamp)

I can’t recall exactly what it was that made me pay attention in 1990 when Tone Dogs, a Seattle band I’d never heard of, released a new album with a weird title, Ankety Low Day.

It wasn’t because of the late Fred Chalenor, a bassist who went on to work with Wayne Horvitz in Zony Mash, and with Peter Buck, Matt Chamberlain, Robert Fripp, Bill Rieflin, and Hector Zazou in Slow Music Project. It wasn’t because of Amy Denio, then and now a prolific, eclectic, and consistently engaging composer and multi-instrumentalist. It wasn’t because of drummer Matt Cameron, active already with the expressly different Soundgarden, but yet to achieve stratospheric renown with that band or, subsequently and currently, with Pearl Jam.

If I had to guess, I probably investigated because of special guests Fred Frith and Hans Reichel. Anyway, whatever it made me check out the album, I was charmed instantly. The band was quirky, tight, and expansive, with a signature sound rooted in the pairing of both Chalenor and Denio on electric bass. Byron Coley linked Tone Dogs to Rock in Opposition fare like Etron Fou Leloublan; me, I heard more connection to New York groups like Hugo Largo and Curlew—with whom Denio would later collaborate on A Beautiful Western Saddle, setting and singing poems by Paul Haines.

Tone Dogs released another fascinating record, The Early Middle Years, in 1991, with a different drummer, Will Dowd, providing distinctly Stewart Copland-esque propulsion. (It’s possible I heard this one before Ankety Low Day, but my memory fails.) The band concluded soon after. Denio went solo and established the Billy Tipton Memorial Sax Quartet (later The Tiptons), a quintet with Dowd on drums. With another former Tone Dogs drummer, Henry Franzoni, Chalenor formed Caveman Shoestore, a punky prog trio that sometimes hooked up with Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper as Caveman Hughscore. Cameron, meanwhile, became very famous.

I had no idea I’d be writing any of this today, but this morning the Austrian label Klanggalerie dropped a new Amy Denio album into my email inbox. Or not quite new: Denio issued Varieté on her personal Bandcamp page last September, and Klanggalerie – best known for issuing old and new music by Fred Frith (him again), The Residents, Renaldo & The Loaf, and Charles Hayward, among others – picked it up for wider circulation and CD release.

The music, composed for a 12-piece chamber orchestra, was commissioned by Seattle Theater Group to accompany Varieté, a 1925 German Expressionist silent film by Ewald Andre Dupont also known as Jealousy and Vaudeville. The performance was held at Seattle’s Paramount Theater during a February 2019 “snowpocalypse,” and in 2023 Denio reassembled the ensemble to record the score. Denio’s score evokes and embraces a variety of familiar sounds and styles, creating music that’s compulsively listenable – even danceable, I’d reckon – and her players invest it all with elegance, life, and charm.

The music is an unalloyed delight—and a welcome antidote to the pervasive grimness that otherwise surrounds us. Warmly recommended.

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Ted Reichman (Photograph: Matthew Kamholtz

Bonus tracks.

• Ted Reichman - The Border Land – Selected Film Music 2020-2023 (self-released)
  Speaking of music for film, this anthology of cues by composer and improvising accordionist Ted Reichman – which arrived shortly after I published my Feb. 28 newsletter – is profoundly rewarding. Scored for films dealing with immigration, isolation, peril, and loss, the music is somber and contemplative, and beautifully played by Reichman with violinist Dina Maccabee, violist Tanya Kalmanovitch, cellist Yi-Mei Templeman, and guitarist Juanma Trujillo.

• Strong recommendations this week include Dream Brigade, a spontaneous, kinetic debut from a duo of the same name, pairing improvising composers Phillip Golub on piano and Lesley Mok on percussion; Moving Parts by Kaisa’s Machine, a breezy quintet session by Finnish bassist and composer Kaisa Mäensivu with vibraphonist Sasha Berliner adding abundant sparkle; and Pictures of the Warm South, a sound-art work as elusive, mysterious, nostalgic, and profoundly personal as a novel or film, by the always compelling Vanessa Rossetto.

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New this week.

Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson (Photograph: Caroline Mardok)

March 14.

Nels Cline - Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note)

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson - Bone Bells (Pyroclastic)

Anthony de Mare with Conrad Tao - Liaisons II: All Things Bright and Beautiful – Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano - arrangements by Timo Andres, Mark Bennett, Stephen Hough, Jon Batiste, Ted Hearne, Conrad Tao, Christopher Cerrone, Marc Schubring, Meredith Monk, Paola Prestini, Jeff Beal, Max Richter, Kevin Puts, and Anthony de Mare (Avie)

Amy Denio - Varieté (Klanggalerie)

dream brigade (Phillip Golub & Lesley Mok) - dream brigade (Infrequent Seams)

Silke Eberhard Trio - Being-a-Ning (Intakt)

Fuubutsushi - Harmony of Irrelevant Facts (Whited Sepulchre)

Hayes Greenfield - Gravity Unplugged (Sunnyside)

Judith Hamann - Aunes (Shelter Press)

Sean Hickey - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Vladimir Rumyantsev (Sono Luminus)

Inturist - Tourism (Incompetence)

Eunhye Jeong-Michael Bisio Duo with Joe McPhee and Jay Rosen - Morning Bells Whistle Bright (ESP-Disk’)

Kaisa’s Machine - Moving Parts (Greenleaf Music)

Mary Kouyoumdjian - Witness - Kronos Quartet (Phenotypic Recordings)

Charmaine Lee - Hard Boiled (Live) (self-released)

Wynton Marsalis - Blues Symphony - Detroit Symphony Orchestra/Jader Bignamini (Pentatone)

Owls - Rare Birds (New Amsterdam)

Steve Reich - Collected Works (Nonesuch; 27CD box including first recordings of Jacob’s Ladder and Traveler’s Prayer)

Vanessa Rossetto - Pictures of the Warm South (Erstwhile)

Jeremias Schwarzer - New Recorder Concertos - compositions by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Liza Lim, Dai Fujikura, and Iris ter Schiphorst (New Focus)

Gregory Spears - Seven Days - Pedja Mužijević (Bright Shiny Things)

Michael Tippett - New Year - Rhian Lois, Ross Ramgobin, Susan Bickley, Roland Wood, Robert Murray, Rachel Nicholls, Alan Oke, BBC Singers BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins (NMC Recordings)

Chaz Underriner - Moving (Deadland)

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Upcoming releases.

David Murray (Photograph: Gregg Greenwood)

March 28.

Myra Melford Splash Trio - Splash (Intakt)

April 4.

Nicolás Melmann - Música Aperta (Umor Rex)

April 11.

Gerald Clayton - Ones & Twos (Blue Note)

Sam Sadigursky - The Solomon Diaries Vol. IV (Adhyâropa)

Sam Sadigursky - The Solomon Diaries Vol. V (Adhyâropa)

Third Coast Percussion - Standard Stoppages - compositions by Jlin, Tigran Hamasyan, Zakir Hussain, Jessie Montgomery, and Musekiwa Chingodza (Cedille)

April 25.

Ciompi Quartet - A Duke Moment - compositions by Stephen Jaffe, Anthony M. Kelley, and Scott Lindroth (New Focus)

David Murray Quartet - Birdly Serenade (Impulse!)

May 9.

Cole Pulice - Land’s End Eternal (Leaving)

Ringdown (Caroline Shaw & Danni Lee Parpan) - Lady on the Bike (Nonesuch)

May 16.

Ben Frost - Under Certain Light and Atmospheric Conditions (Mute)

May 30.

Joe Morris & Elliott Sharp - Realism (ESP-Disk’)

Yoga Nugraha Usmad - Gurnida (Phantom Limb)

Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.

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Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.