Sunk 45s is a dispatch from the bottom: the below-sea-level vantage point of South Louisiana, a drainage ditch looking back up towards the rest of North America in 2025—a continent in disarray in a time out of joint. Draw a curve from San Francisco to New York City that dips as low as possible without veering into the Gulf and you’ll hit New Orleans, where you’ll find a 45-year-old composer in a slump that matches that nadir.

Think of these vignettes as sides on vinyl 45 rpm records that could have been dug out of bayou silt. The vintage vocabulary of the swamp blues is intact: overdriven harmonica, breathy tenor sax, tremolo and slapback guitar, a spinning organ, and a rusty drum kit. Daniel Lanois may have covered a few of these tunes in the 1980s, throwing in an omnichord and some pristine echoes. In Ensemble Nikel’s present-day version, instruments are retuned into a microtonal haze, digital effects are run through a laptop into both amps and makeshift coffee-tin speakers, and subtly stretching loops create a maze of temporal shifts.

Bekah Simms

Spectra, 2025*

for saxophone, electric guitar, percussion, piano, and electronics

* US premiere

Co-commissioned by The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust and Ensemble Nikel

Spectra is fundamentally constructed around one of the most omnipresent sounds from the period immediately after my son’s birth: the Spectra breast-milk pump. After an early arrival and an unplanned Caesarean section, breast-milk production proved an intense challenge. It was an exhausting physical and psychological experience. However, I managed to appreciate the surprisingly heavy sonic character of the pump itself: mechanical, rhythmic, and subtly changing in pitch and articulation with its different settings. It sounded as strong as I wanted to be in that moment.

I sent a rough recording of the pump to Ensemble Nikel, soliciting a vocabulary of sounds from them which are in dialogue with the pump. These pump-adjacent sounds make up much of the acoustic material as well as the electronic material, accompanying a boosted ‘mega-pump’: a small machine transformed into something all-encompassing, muscular, sputtering, and decaying, and coming into focus again. Of particular note are the sounds offered up by Nikel keyboardist Antoine, who had also recently become a parent and was familiar with the Spectra. Evidently, we were both musing on the dual nature of the machine—its rough and intense physical nature coupled with its symbolic character as a gentle act of love. Amongst his sounds were variations on a lullaby, which my tender parental heart could not help but use to end the piece.

Rebecca Saunders

Us Dead Talk Love, 2021*

for alto voice, tenor saxophone, electric guitar, Korg organ, and percussion

* US premiere

featuring Noa Frenkel, alto soloist

My mouth,
I want to
nurse, nurse the word
n—i—a
in my mouth
On my, on my lips, my my lips.
With my throat
I want to
map my mouth
map my mouth with the word
‘smoke’, with the word ‘smoke’.
Breathe it.
I, carefully, careful.
My mouth releases the word. . . .

The shed of skin has
drifted up to form a lens over over your eyes.
Your eyes are clogged ambient sound is translated, filtered,
compressed, chorused, distorted, bit-crushed, reverbed, etc. – The euphoric
acoustics.
Cathedral of the future! ev’rything too sharp, too
crisp, too juicy, too close, too vivid. A lucidity to the visual world, world!
Pressed on your eye, lunging straight to the brain, groping and
pummelling its surface with unmeditated bluntness
Eh! Ev’rything is gratuitously PRESENT! Excessively thesaural
Superabundance. Oh, oscillating wildly.
Gut-wrenching sub-bass and piercing treble. . . .

8.21.2025

Endlings, Yarn/Wire

False Division, 2025*

* World premiere

Yarn/Wire

Laura Barger, piano

Julie Den Boer, piano

Russell Greenberg, percussion

Bill Solomon, percussion

Endlings

Raven Chacon, electronics

John Dieterich, electronics

While we have collaborated with other musicians and artists in the past (see our work with Marshall Trammell, Jason Doell, and Vancouver New Music), this collaboration with Yarn/Wire marks our first foray into translating our mysterious impenetrable recorded language into a live performance vehicle that can accommodate the contributions of other musicians. Formed in 2010, Endlings’ work has evolved through the embrace of anti-permanence, anti-authorship, anti-logic, and anti-technique, finding the hidden chaos-magic when simple materials performed by real people are stressed beyond their breaking points. This is improvisation as liberation but also as process—a window into the unknown which is always open to evaluation, re-evaluation, and re-calibration. This collaboration with Yarn/Wire is a long time coming and we’re grateful for their willingness to explore these areas with us.

.22.2025

International Contemporary Ensemble

Ashkan Behzadi

Carnivalesque, 2014-2016

or flute, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, viola, and cello

“Carnivalistic laughter is directed toward something higher—toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders.” — Mikhail Bakhtin

Tebogo Monnakgotla

Wooden Bodies, 2020

for string quartet

The title refers, naturally, to the wooden bodies of the string instruments. The piece opens with a melancholic viola solo which is soon echoed and deepened by the cello, adding further richness and resonance to the melody. Gradually, the remaining instruments join in, and the music begins to flow with greater energy. The composition unfolds in a series of fragmentary episodes, following one another like glimpses of a moving object—perhaps a ball—bouncing through its unpredictable journey.

Corie Rose Soumah

Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs, 2025*

for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, electric guitar, violin, viola, cello, and electronics

* US premiere

Co-commissioned by Darmstadt Summer Course and The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs found itself in a period of my life where I sought moments of spirituality, in the bell hooks sense. Each word from the title is presented in its own way, collected in five distinctive tableaux, showcasing moments of personal wonders, either through vivid images or simply through a resonance that stirred something inside me. I always had an inclination towards multiplicity, which this piece doesn’t stray away from. The multiples here came to me in day-to-day small wonders. I leave here a few of them:

the poetry of Nicky Beer
the taste of clementines on the tongue
the strings of the Kora
the tip of an icy mountain
the faded light on green leaves

*5 Questions to Corie Rose Soumah (composer)

Marcos Balter

Árvore, 2025*

for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, electric guitar, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, and electronics

* US premiere

Co-commissioned by International Contemporary Ensemble, Darmstadt Summer Course, and The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

At Guadeloupe’s Mémorial ACTe, a museum dedicated to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, I stood quietly before a life-size replica of a Tree of Forgetfulness. In parts of Africa, the captured once circled such trees after hanging personal tokens on their branches, entering a trance meant to erase names, memories, and selves, softening the traumatic descent from human to cargo before the Atlantic crossing. I mourned my ancestors and felt the bitter irony of using a tree, so deeply tied to roots, ancestry, and memory, as an instrument of erasure. Árvore (the Portuguese word for tree) imagines these trees not just as keepers of a painful past but as fertile organisms from which freed versions of the captured are reborn, not emptied of self but fortified by the power of kinship and collective memories. Within the work, a quote from an Afro-Brazilian chant for the Yoruba orixá Oxumarê, often linked to movement, transformation, and continuity, underlines the idea of rootedness and regeneration, where what was meant to be forgotten instead becomes a source of new and expanded life.

Thierry Pécou

Méditation sur la fin de l'espèce, 2021

for cello solo, flute (alto flute), contrabass clarinet, electric guitar, keyboards, violin, double bass, and electronics

featuring Mariel Roberts Musa, cello soloist

The richness of the sounds of marine mammal songs and what biologists consider their creativity question the place of Man in nature, the destruction of which threatens the very survival of humanity itself. This is the question that runs through this score where a solo cello dialogues with various whales recorded by bio-acoustician Olivier Adam. It is also an attempt, following the work of anthropologist Philippe Descola, to change our view of the nature/culture opposition.