The title looks like a list of places until it quietly stops behaving like one: Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow, Losoncy. Three cities and then one person, with no grammatical signal announcing the change. Gabi Losoncy is not presented merely as another contributor to a compilation. Her name becomes a location, another distant territory from which sound arrives. The title redraws the map so that a private artistic consciousness can occupy the same geographic rank as three European capitals.
That strange promotion contains the central idea of the entire double album. Amsterdam . Berlin . Moscow Losoncy was assembled from relationships stretched across cities, rooms, recording systems, histories, languages, and differing ideas about what music should be. Curator Dante Boon does not pretend that these distances have been defeated. The album instead explores what kinds of togetherness become possible when people are not fully together.
Much of the material was realized during the pandemic, when musicians who might ordinarily have rehearsed, adjusted their tuning in one another’s presence, or responded to the same room had to work separately. Parts were recorded in homes and studios across several cities, then combined later. This was not merely a technical inconvenience surrounding the compositions. Separation entered the music itself.
A conventional ensemble shares air. Players hear the same resonance, watch one another breathe, and make tiny unconscious corrections while a note is sounding. A remote ensemble replaces some of that bodily information with instructions, trust, memory, files, and delayed decisions. Nobody hears the complete performance while producing their individual part. The whole exists first as an idea and only later as a recording.
That resembles faith more than rehearsal. Each performer contributes to a future event they cannot yet experience. Their sound travels outward without immediate confirmation that it has found the others. Only after the pieces have been assembled do the separated rooms become one acoustic proposition.
The album does not conceal those seams. Tiny differences in pitch, attack, room tone, and bodily timing become expressive precisely because the performers were not gathered beneath one tuning standard or one ceiling. Distance does not simply weaken the ensemble. It supplies another form of counterpoint.
Dante Boon’s “the heart’s size” opens the first disc with music of almost weightless concentration. Dylan Thomas’s language enters through voice, piano, and the peculiar intimacy created when a song seems to be discovering how little support it needs. Its brevity is important. The piece does not construct a grand gateway into a double album. It opens a small human aperture through which the rest can pass.
The voice throughout this collection is rarely asked to behave like the commanding center of a song. It appears beside instruments rather than ruling them, carrying poems while leaving space around individual words. Text is not fitted into a dramatic conveyor belt. A phrase can remain exposed long enough for its sound, uncertainty, and physical delivery to become as important as its literal meaning.
Germaine Sijstermans’s “M” expands that attention across more than twenty minutes. Its sequence of dyads is interpreted by several smaller groupings whose resonances overlap and complement one another. The music grows through placement rather than accumulation. Notes are breathed into existence, allowed to remain, and then released without the usual pressure to convert each sound into forward motion.
This is one of the qualities commonly associated with Wandelweiser, although the album immediately demonstrates how broad that association can become. Silence is not treated as empty real estate between meaningful notes. It is the condition that permits a note to possess edges. We hear when a sound begins, how it occupies the room, when another resonance touches it, and the exact moment when its absence becomes newly audible.
“Sparing” music is sometimes mistaken for music without abundance. “M” demonstrates the opposite. A restricted number of tones can produce a huge field of relationships when listeners are given time to hear their interiors. Each dyad contains beating frequencies, breath, touch, decay, memory of the preceding sound, and expectation of whatever may follow. Fewer objects create more room around every object.
Seamus Cater’s “tree space: the trees they do grow high” approaches an old folk song by turning its materials into a branching score. Rather than treating tradition as a fixed melody that must be preserved beneath glass, the composition allows performers to move through it as they might move through a tree. A branch can be followed, abandoned, revisited from another direction, or perceived as part of a structure too large to see all at once.
The folk source gives the album a relationship to transmission older than digital files. Songs also travel without remaining identical. They pass through bodies, regions, memories, missing verses, altered pitches, and people who learned them from someone whose name may already be gone. The remote recordings on this album are new technological versions of an ancient condition: music reaching another person through an incomplete chain.
Boon’s “depression (herbeck)” sets a compact poem by Ernst Herbeck, whose language can feel simultaneously plain, wounded, logical, and impossible. The voice and piano do not dramatize depression as a swelling emotional spectacle. They sound as though ordinary musical movement has become difficult and each gesture must discover a reason to continue.
A major scale appears almost estranged from itself. Something learned at the beginning of musical education, supposedly neutral and effortless, now carries the awkwardness of a body being asked to perform a familiar task under unfamiliar weight. The simplicity does not reassure. It exposes how much effort can hide inside an action that appears simple from outside.
Rishin Singh’s “trauermusik” creates grief through disagreement rather than melodic lament. The participating musicians were instructed to tune their A individually to something other than the standard 440 cycles per second. Each begins from a slightly different foundation. When their sounds meet, the mismatch produces beating, pressure, tenderness, and an inability to settle into one communal certainty.
That is an extraordinary image of mourning. Grieving people may gather around the same absence while remaining internally tuned to different realities. One person feels numb, another furious, another relieved, another devastated. They appear to inhabit one ceremony but cannot occupy exactly the same emotional pitch.
The piece does not force reconciliation. Its beauty comes from allowing the individual tunings to coexist. The ensemble is created through difference rather than through eliminating difference. Unity is no longer everybody agreeing on A. It is everybody continuing to sound while hearing that the others began elsewhere.
The remote-recording process deepens that condition. Some participants supplied their sounds from separate cities without hearing the assembled result. Their tuning decisions entered a future collective space. The music became a meeting organized around mutual absence, which is also one of the structures of grief.
Boon’s “for what” brings the first disc toward its close through dyads, solitary notes, and chords that seem to ask how little can be said without saying nothing. The score dates from June 2020, when protests spread after the killing of George Floyd. The title does not pretend that a piano composition can resolve political violence. It remains a question, possibly directed toward music itself.
For what is this sound? What can concentrated listening accomplish while injustice continues outside the room? Is beauty a retreat, an act of mourning, a means of sustaining attention, or simply another privilege exercised while others are endangered? The piece does not answer by becoming louder or rhetorically heroic. It permits the question to remain inside fragile intervals.
Then the first disc ends. The listener crosses a physical boundary, changes CDs, and enters Losoncy.
“Tighter” begins the second disc like an object dropped into a carefully arranged room. After voices, poetry, piano tones, winds, strings, harmonies, and breath-shaped silence, Losoncy presents a dry field of repeated impacts and clattering activity. Reviewers have compared it to a typewriter, but identifying the exact source is less important than hearing what its arrival does to the album.
Her sound appears to possess none of the social etiquette surrounding the preceding compositions. It does not introduce its materials, reveal a score, cite a poem, or explain what relationship it has to the performers gathered elsewhere. It simply begins happening.
This is not a rejection of the album’s sensitivity. It is another test of it. The earlier pieces ask listeners to attend to tiny differences within restrained tones. Losoncy asks whether the same quality of attention can be extended to an unidentified everyday sound that has not been polished into recognizable musical dignity.
The clatter is repetitive but not regular enough to become a dependable beat. Each impact sounds related to the others while retaining its own pressure, spacing, and surface. The ear searches for a mechanism. Is somebody operating an object? Is the sound produced intentionally, or has Losoncy discovered an activity already occurring? Is “tighter” an instruction, a condition, a description of physical pressure, or a wish that the pattern would finally close around itself?
The title alters the sound without solving it. Tightening suggests drawing separate parts together, reducing slack, increasing tension, closing a gap, or making something fit more securely. During the pandemic, life became tighter in several contradictory senses. Movement narrowed. Domestic space carried more weight. Social structures strained. People were kept apart while communications networks pulled their images and voices into unprecedented proximity.
Losoncy’s piece may have no literal connection to any of those circumstances, yet its placement allows them to resonate around it. A repeated physical action occupies an enclosed duration. The sound seems close, almost without acoustic distance, while its cause remains inaccessible. We are connected to it and excluded from it simultaneously.
That makes “tighter” an ideal center for this collection. The other contributors frequently create togetherness from shared compositional systems. Losoncy contributes an event whose system remains private. She is included not because her work resembles theirs on the surface, but because it reveals another boundary around the same question: how can one person’s experience reach another without surrendering its difference?
Her name in the title now makes perfect sense. Amsterdam, Berlin, and Moscow indicate locations where musicians, scenes, and practices have formed. “Losoncy” indicates a fourth location governed by another set of conditions. It is not a city one can visit physically. It is an artistic jurisdiction where found events, private logic, bodily action, mundane technology, and withheld explanation possess their own laws.
Calling Losoncy a place also avoids demanding that she become an official representative of herself. A person is expected to explain intentions and provide biography. A place can be entered without being exhausted. Visitors notice surfaces, weather, recurring structures, and local customs while understanding that most lives inside it remain unknown.
“Tighter” lasts long enough to reorganize the ear. Initially it appears alien to the program. By its conclusion, the pieces surrounding it begin sounding different. Piano attacks reveal their percussive bodies. Instrumental mechanisms become more noticeable. The click of a key, movement of a valve, impact of a hammer, and physical labor required to create every delicate tone can no longer remain completely hidden.
Losoncy does not destroy the album’s refinement. She reveals the objects underneath it.
Kirill Shirokov’s radical arrangement of Josef Matthias Hauer’s “atonale musik nr. 1” follows immediately, creating a remarkable transition. Hauer’s historical twelve-tone thinking is not treated as untouchable doctrine. Shirokov receives the composition across a century and allows it to enter his own musical language. After Losoncy’s unexplained impacts, even this conversation with European modernism sounds newly material, as if notation itself were another object being handled.
Hauer is sometimes remembered as the “other” inventor of twelve-tone composition, standing beside and outside the more dominant history attached to Arnold Schoenberg. His presence suits an album concerned with networks that do not necessarily pass through the officially recognized center. History, like geography, changes according to which route is followed.
“2019IX26 (quintet)” opens a much larger field. Its pointillist harmonies shift gradually while the ensemble’s separately recorded components create the sensation of perspectives arriving from different rooms. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” stands behind the composition, another text in which the individual self expands until it contains relations, strangers, bodies, landscapes, and contradictions.
The quintet does not present collectivity as massed agreement. Sparse notes enter a shared area, meet briefly, and retreat. Tiny pitch differences become emotional information. The musicians may not have occupied the same room, but the completed recording permits their sounds to discover one another after the fact.
This posthumous quality belongs to all recorded music, though remote construction makes it unusually visible. A musician plays toward collaborators who are not presently audible. Later, an editor or mixer permits the sounds to meet. The encounter occurs after each person has already finished performing.
A recording can therefore create a social event that never happened in ordinary time. The participants become an ensemble only inside playback.
Shirokov’s “a dream,” drawing upon William Blake, compresses another journey into a few minutes. Blake’s lost ant, glow-worm, beetle, night watchman, and search for home fit the album’s geography beautifully. Small beings navigate darkness through signals supplied by other small beings. Guidance does not descend from a commanding celestial authority. It glows near the ground.
That is also how this collection understands connection. No single composition explains the whole. One work provides a tiny light by which the next can be approached. A folk melody illuminates remote transmission. Separate tunings illuminate grief. Losoncy’s clatter illuminates instrumental matter. A historical score illuminates the instability of official histories.
Samuel Vriezen’s “linking” closes the second disc with a system built from cards containing short motives. Performers attempt to connect those motives through shared pitches, but Dante Boon realizes the composition alone at the piano. One musician becomes an ensemble by distributing several voices beneath his fingers.
This is the album’s final and most elegant paradox. After so much effort to create ensembles across distances, the concluding ensemble contains only one body. Polyphony does not require several people to be physically present. Difference can occur inside a single performer, just as isolation can persist inside a crowd.
The short motives in “linking” meet through common notes, form temporary relationships, and then separate. That procedure provides a model for the entire release. These composers do not share one obvious style. Their materials range from folk song and poetry to sustained tones, distorted tuning, historical modernism, private sound recording, and solitary piano. The common pitches appear between them only when the sequence is heard.
The album is therefore less a compilation than an experiment in curatorial counterpoint. Boon does not prove that every contributor belongs to one movement. He allows the listener to discover connections that may not have existed before the works were placed together.
Wandelweiser is often described through silence, duration, and reduction, but this collection reveals something broader: a culture of trust. Composers trust limited materials. Performers trust tones that are not immediately directed toward climax. Remote musicians trust parts they cannot yet hear together. Curators trust that difference need not be corrected into uniformity. Listeners are trusted to remain without constant instruction.
Losoncy tests that trust most severely. “Tighter” offers no clear bridge into the surrounding language, yet it receives the most conspicuous position possible: her surname completes the album title, and her track opens the second disc. The apparent outsider becomes a structural hinge.
This may be why “Losoncy” feels more important than the usual “featuring Gabi Losoncy” credit. Featuring would imply a guest temporarily entering somebody else’s established territory. The title performs the opposite gesture. It redraws the territory around her.
The cover supports that interpretation through its network of lines, names, separations, and implied routes. The cities are not presented as stable monuments. They function as nodes through which people, recordings, scores, and files pass. Losoncy becomes another node because artistic identity can organize relations as powerfully as geography.
The two-CD format matters. A playlist could make the eleven works feel like individually accessible selections, each available for extraction according to taste. The physical divide asks the listener to experience a first gathering, stop, then enter another. “Tighter” stands on the far side of that interruption like customs at a new border.
The RUTracker FLAC preserves the double-disc sequence while also removing the need to handle the discs. That makes the track divisions easier to cross, but it introduces another form of virtual meeting. A German physical edition organized by a Dutch curator, involving musicians across several countries and one American sound artist, was transferred by an unknown participant into a Russian file-sharing network and eventually arrived here.
The route resembles the album’s own production. People who may never meet contribute separate actions to a shared future object. One person composes. Another performs remotely. Another mixes. Another manufactures the CDs. Another acquires them, extracts the audio, creates a torrent, and seeds it toward strangers. Later listeners assemble the meaning at the far end.
None possesses the entire network. Each keeps one section functioning.
This also explains why the album belongs naturally within an archive interested in multiple transfers and physical histories. Amsterdam . Berlin . Moscow Losoncy is already about versions of presence. The ensemble exists across local rooms and combined recordings. The CD exists as a physical edition and as files. The music is both carefully composed and dependent upon accidents of distance, tuning, equipment, and timing.
“Tighter” remains the unanswered object at its center. We do not need to identify the source in order to recognize its function. It is the sound that refuses to become fluent in the album’s language, thereby revealing that the language was never singular.
A weaker compilation might have used Losoncy as a novelty, placing her abrasive little mystery between elegant compositions for contrast. This sequence grants her greater authority. She changes the meaning of elegance around her. After “tighter,” restraint can no longer be confused with refinement, and noise can no longer be confused with excess. Both may result from listening closely to a small number of events.
The double album ultimately proposes a form of community that does not require everyone to become alike. Some participants share scenes, ensembles, compositional ideas, or long-standing relationships. Losoncy appears from somewhere else and remains somewhere else. Her distance is not corrected. It is given a place on the map.
That may be the most hopeful thing about this pandemic-era recording. Togetherness is often imagined as the elimination of separation, but much human connection depends upon respecting separateness. Another person does not need to become fully understandable before their presence can change the room. Their sound can arrive from a distant city, an unfamiliar practice, or a private logic and still alter what becomes possible for everyone around it.
Amsterdam, Berlin, and Moscow are cities connected by travel, history, technology, and art. Losoncy is a city connected by attention. Its buildings are recordings, its streets are incomplete explanations, its weather is physical sound, and its border remains open without pretending that entry grants total knowledge.
By the end of “linking,” the map has folded inward. One pianist contains several voices. Several cities occupy one album. Separate tunings create one grief. Old poems enter new bodies. A woman making unidentified clattering sounds becomes a capital.
The musicians were not quite together, the album is not quite a portrait of a scene, and the title is not quite a list of locations. That persistent “not quite” is not a deficiency. It is the space where relation becomes possible. Complete fusion would erase the very distances through which these sounds learn to speak to one another.
Anyone who knows the physical source or original circumstances of Losoncy’s “tighter” may possess one of the album’s missing street names. Yet the piece does not need that information to perform its deeper work. It enters an established network, remains unmistakably itself, and proves that belonging need not require assimilation.
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