The three compositions on these two new – half-filled – releases (best thought of as CD singles) each explore a single, specific extreme of instrumental texture, with rather different results. The disc devoted to Michael Byron (b1953) is the more fascinating of the two, pairing a recent two-part work for two violins, Fabric for String Noise (2018), with the very early Dragon Rite (1973), a lugubrious but poetic quartet in one movement for double basses, here performed by a single, multitracked bassist, James Bergman.

String Noise is the name of the ‘Classical, avant-punk violin duo’ (as per their website) Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim-Harris, and Fabric is one of the newest of over 50 works written for them. They throw off its tightly woven micro-polyphony and polyrhythmic intricacies with jaw-dropping virtuosity, all the more remarkably since the music sticks to the very highest register of the instruments. Running for 21 minutes, this is taxing for both players and listeners, yet compels attention. Even better is Dragon Rite, operating at the other extreme of the string family’s range and adding quarter-tones to the mix. The sound for both works is a touch hard but clear.

According to the selected worklist on his website, Michael Jon Fink (b1954) has been composing unaccompanied celesta pieces since 1981 at least. Cold Blue Music’s other new issue comes with no booklet or information (not even dates of composition), but the label’s website confirms that the 12-movement Celesta is of new, unrecorded pieces and, ‘taken as a whole, as a suite, is perhaps the largest statement for the celesta as a solo instrument’, noting also – immodestly – that it was ‘Beautifully recorded on one of LA’s finest five-octave Schiedmayer celestas’.

Although a wonderfully euphonious instrument, the celesta is expressively limited, its gentle tintinnabulations smoothing out all but the most aggressive discords. It is, then, a shame that Fink has not written something more musically challenging for it. Too often, meandering melodic lines, pleasing in their own rather anonymous way, are harmonised in the most rudimentary manner. Only in the concluding, brief ‘After the End’ is there any glimmer of harmonic subtlety; too little, much too late. It is all nicely recorded but even as background music the result is curiously dull.