Sylvia Lim’s music behaves like something photographed at the point of dissolving. Or the fading resonance of a harpsichord’s last dissonant chord in an empty room.

The London-based Malaysian-Australian composer builds each of these six pieces from a handful of unstable sonic materials – harmonics coaxed from two piano keys in the title track, a cotton-bud-prepared guitar in same but different – and then simply listens, following where the fragility leads rather than imposing a design on it. It’s an aesthetic closer to Giorgio Morandi’s bottles than to any compositional system: reduction as a way of seeing more, not less.

The performances match the conception. Kerry Yong’s account of flare holds those two piano keys in a kind of suspended argument, harmonics blooming and receding without ever quite resolving – Bachelard’s intimate immensity in miniature, vastness disproportionate to the means. Grafting, for violin, bass clarinet and cello, is the disc’s most quietly arresting piece – Michelle Hromin’s bass clarinet seems carved out of Mira Benjamin’s and Natasha Zielazinski’s near-inaudible string haze, contingency made audible as form. 

Field of Play, Lim’s collaboration with Zielazinski built from household objects clipped to cello strings, is the more surprising achievement: nocturnal and subterranean, yes, but genuinely playful, resisting the disc’s drift toward “despairing near-silence” that Another Timbre’s own commentary flags.

shadowfolds, the most texturally populated piece here, is the one place the ensemble’s polyphony feels effortful rather than found. Otherwise, this is a scrupulous, quietly absorbing portrait of a composer working at the edge of audibility – and hearing plenty there.

Available on Bandcamp

Composer: Sylvia Lim
Works: Flare, shadowfolds, Field of Play
Performers: Various performers
Label: Another Timbre AT255