Landscapes

airborne extended conceives of chamber music as a sound laboratory, where flutes, harp, recorders/Paetzold, and harpsichord meet objects, electronics, and performance. In 2013, Caroline Mayrhofer, Sonja Leipold, Elena Gabbrielli, and Tina Žerdin invented this ensemble, for which there was hardly any repertoire—so they write their own present. From acoustic purism to electronics—the debut album "Landschaften" (Landscapes) documents twelve years of work by an internationally connected ensemble that shapes composers—and is shaped by them. "Landschaften" brings together eight composers based in Austria who have developed bespoke works for this instrumentation: in "Monadologie XXIX," Bernhard Lang sketches nervous loop cells, sliced by hyper-virtuosic lines. In "Landschaften," Elisabeth Schimana purely acoustically imitates the roaring of Mexican trucks and the chirping of Lithuanian forests. Bruno Strobl hides the initials "A B E" as spectral shadows in the overtones. With microscopic precision, Hannes Kerschbaumer turns the inner sounds of the instruments outward, while Alexander Kaiser allows lines to collide until every internal order begins to falter. In "lup fränzi III," Thomas Wally plays with repetitions in a loop-like lightness, and in "im Grunde," Peter Jakober layers tempo-polyphonic textures. Graz-based Ukrainian composer Anna Arkushyna thinks of green in "tes rêves verts" as an unstable state of becoming. Here, the 21st century sounds like breathing air, plucked strings, and struck wood—precise, physical, unmistakable.