Between the Air demands ears in exploration mode. TAK Ensemble’s eighth album unfolds as a dense acoustic landscape – like a cavern of sonic stalactites, rich in texture and resonance.

The five works, written specifically for the New York-based ensemble, present distinct voices in experimental contemporary music. The album opens with Eric Wubbels’s Instruments, a compelling actualization of Helmut Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale. Violinist Marina Kifferstein’s energetic scratch technique sets a raw tone, carried by the ensemble’s precise, noise-based interplay, which shapes the album as a whole. At its center lies Lewis Nielson’s Siesta Negra, a sonification of Che Guevara’s final notes, written in 1967 shortly before his execution. Its oppressive, almost nightmarish atmosphere is foreshadowed by the sharp-edged textures of Golnaz Shariatzadeh’s moon that sank | wet grass. Bethany Young’s At Midnight I Walked in the Middle of the Desert then follows as a surreal, radio-play-like, playfully exaggerated coda. The album concludes with Tyshawn Sorey’s For jamie branch, a restrained elegy for the exceptionally gifted jazz musician who tragically died in 2022 at the age of 41.

With Between the Air, TAK Ensemble once again demonstrates its remarkable sensitivity to the materiality of sound, inviting listeners to move beyond the often harsh surface of the present – and, perhaps, to breathe more freely again. 

The harp – one of the oldest string instruments – has always, to me, been closely tied to the floating threshold between sleep and wakefulness. Its quiet paving between night and day became even more palpable when Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore brought the ancient instrument to life at DR Concert Hall’s Studio 2. Lattimore’s harp playing and Barwick’s ethereal vocals inhabit a space somewhere between modern ambient and classical nocturne – like an anachronistic lullaby infused with synthesizers and drenched in reverb.

Most of the concert’s pieces were drawn from Barwick and Lattimore’s recent album Tragic Magic (2026), recorded over ten days in a basement beneath the Philharmonie de Paris, with free access to its collection of antique instruments. Both 1970s synthesizers and 18th-century harps are awakened on the album. And although Barwick noted with a smile that the old harp from 1740 unfortunately could not join them that evening, it was clear to feel the two American musicians’ passion for the span between the antique and the contemporary. This tension was most evident in their story about the first rainfall following the devastating wildfires in their hometown of Los Angeles. A field recording of that very rain introduced their subsequent cover of Vangelis’ »Rachel’s Dream« from the Blade Runner (1982) soundtrack, casting the all-consuming fires in a dark science fiction glow. Yet Barwick’s cinematic whistling and Lattimore’s harp arpeggios still found a glimmer of light within the dystopian darkness. Though both musicians have long-standing solo careers behind them, one can only hope this will not be the last we hear of their collaboration.