The Greek word “Neuma” means either “breath” or “spirit”. Based in St. Paul, MN, Neuma Records is trying to breath new life into music by creating a catalogue for inquisitive minds, mixing acoustic instruments with electronica and beyond. Check out these latest for releases and listen to some new wines for old wineskins.
Agnese Toniutti creates various exotic tones with 
her “timbre piano” in a collection of pieces from various composers including herself. On her own, her “A Really Lovely Piece made For & By Agnese” and “Small Pieces Of A Fluxus Reality” mixt tensile tones and deep throbbings, with her “Man In Field” reaching pitch levels that could perk up a cat. Tan Dun’s “C-A-G-E” is a tribute to the famous avant-garde composer, mixing harpsichord picks and zitherlike strums, before smashing a piano with a hammer on Philp Corner’s “Toy Piano”. Lucia Dlugosewski’s four part concerto has the piano strings strumming out Oriental themes and harmonies with a dots and dashes. Toys in the attic.
Pamela Z does some clever things with her voice and various household items, pureeing them through tapes and various forms of electronica. Voices mixed and match team with a vintage Remington on the synth “Typewriter” while fragments of a sentence are sliced and spliced on the wall of mirrors “Declaratives”. The “Star Bangled Banner” gets a case of static electricity with vocal vibrations on “De-Spangled” with a suite of three sounds get sped up, slowed down and stretched to and fro on ”Timepiece Triptych”. It’s quite amazing how simple syllables can be worked through with programming and come up with ideas such as “He Says Yes” and the owl hooting tones of “Other Rooms”. Musical mental exhibitions.
Ken Field teams his alto saxophone with producer Erdem Helvacioglu to mix acoustic brass and various lops, layers and effects. Field’s warm tone opens up pieces like “Transducer” and “Transoceanic”, eventually being osmotically transformed into echoes and mechanizations. The reeds create a liturgical choir on the multi-layerd “Translucent” and Gregorian like chants are contemplative on “Transparent”. A powerful trans-mission.
Composer Erik Griswold uses the hands of four pianists to explore his environmental musical themes. Anna Grinberg plays the four piece “Mt. Nebo” with moods ranging from a dark Bartokian “Leapfrog” to chiming and chirping high pitches of “Bell Birds”. The four movement “Cunningham Gap features Stephen Emmerson bold and assertive on the resonating “Bliss” and elegant during “Waltz”. Liam Viney does some Satie-like tones on the clever “Spring 3” and gallops along on “Leapfrog 2” with Griswald himself stretching out on the 14 minute opus of “Condamine” that strolls up and down the valley in various inclines and pitches. Ansel Adams on ivories?