Since being founded in 2005, piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire has established itself as one of new music’s most adventurous chamber ensembles. This Yarn/Wire album features three contemplative works by Andrew McIntosh, a longstanding collaborator of the ensemble’s. It’s music that explores our relationship with the natural world – music as an ecology of sounds.

When McIntosh went on a field trip to record sounds in the Little Jimmy trail camp in rural California, he couldn’t have known that mere months later the area would be devastated by wildfire. The resulting recordings form the basis of the six-movement Little Jimmy, which has the haunting ambience of a place and time no longer in existence yet still alive in memory. McIntosh’s score invites the performers to make decisions about what to play and integrates nature recordings with resonant percussion, sprightly high-register piano and extended techniques.

The main impression is a sense of slow passing time. Early on, birds chirping in distant trees are heard alongside gentle tremolando marimba, bowed cymbals, chiming triangle and struck bowls. In the fourth movement, ‘Heart’, the piano’s strings are bowed to create a texture of spectrally rich multiphonics; McIntosh encourages the players to listen deeply and adjust their playing according to the sound’s character. The fifth movement is a steady procession of equal-tempered piano chords juxtaposed with untempered harmonics of plucked strings and struck metal, faintly dissonant yet orderly. The final movement returns us via field recordings to the Little Jimmy forest mountain scene.

McIntosh’s music has shades of Lucier, Niblock and Oliveros, but from a fresh angle. I have a lot to learn for solo piano comprises plucked piano-string harmonics followed by chords on related pitches; the long reverberant sounds are allowed to flow slowly into the surrounding silence. Learning for solo percussion, sine tone generators and field recordings again features resonant chords on vibraphone and glockenspiel, and fosters contemplation. It also sounds quite beautiful.