Rebecca Saunders - Stirrings Still: MusikFabrik (2008) CD-Rip

London-born, Berlin-based Rebecca Saunders, who turned 40 last year, is a composer enraptured by sound in the moment and manner of its creation. She's like a poet obsessed not just with the resonances of vowels or the textures of fricatives, but also with the strange in-betweens, where the strangeness of the sound blurs all possibility of conventional meaning. Saunders's works are trajectories of exploration, opening on this CD with Blaauw for double-bell trumpet (played into the resonating chamber of an open grand piano with the sustaining pedal down) and Bl ue and Gray for two double basses, extending gradually to the even stranger, almost unearthly five-instrument world of Stirrings still . Stirring stuff indeed. -- Michael Dervan