Things Suspended Converge and Fall by Katherine Young is seven interrelated pieces with a variety of settings. This is contemporary classical music in the academic tradition, though from an academe (Wesleyan) that has long employed no less outward bound a musician as Anthony Braxton as a professor. There’s the full ensemble, which calls for 20 musicians on several more instruments, ranging from viola and violin to trumpet and percussion to Wurlitzer electric piano and Max/MSP-powered “live electronics.” And there are numerous chamber-music subsets, including several that employ the typewriter.
“Archery Instead of Bowling (DeLuxe Edition)” is scored for typewriter, piano, and live electronics, though the latter two materials are almost invisible against the only recently familiar but today antique sound of keys triggering the imprint of letters, digits, and punctuation on paper (MP3). There’s something uniquely pleasurable in hearing the typerwriter eke out its rudimentary semblance of rhythm and melody, punctuated, expectedly but entertainingly, by the ping of a carriage return.
Also recommended is a duo for electric piano and tuba, titled “Underworld (Dancing),” in which both instruments play fragile baubles that hint at melody, each occasionally providing a drone-like backing to the other (MP3).
The music was recorded live in performance at Wesleyan University Crowell Concert Hall, on April 13, 2008, and recently released on the netlabel mandorla.com.mx. Performers include Emily Manzo on electric piano, Phillip Schulze and Ivan Naranjo on live electronics (Max/MXP and Supercollider respectively), and Brian Parks on piano and typewriter. (Two additional typewriters are employed on other ensemble pieces.)
More on the composer at katherineyoung.info and katherineyoung.blogspot.com.
The Russian netlabel 
The piece “Candle” by Saito Koji is a single track, and the track could easily be mistaken for a single sine curve. It slowly wends its way back and forth with a regularity somewhat belied by its relaxed pace. It has the gentle curve of the path of a teenage bicyclist taking advantage of an underutilized suburban street on a lazy, sun-dappled weekend morning. In time, as with anything perceived for an extended period, details within “Candle” make themselves apparent. There’s the way an underlying tone appears to separate from the main one as the drone — for that is what this piece of music is, a drone, a long, gently undulating swell of singular sound — hits its peak. There is the matter of the curves within the curve: the inevitable and much quicker little wave that makes up the overarching wave. And then there’s the tone, this lush fume of middle-range sound, one that never tops off nor sneaks below the range of human hearing. The latter is a compositional decision on Koji’s part that keeps “Candle” in focus throughout its half-hour life.
Michael Palace likens the sound of his nearly hour-long drone work, Curuá Una, to “the slow loss and decay of the research station to the forest.” Palace, who records under the name Horchata, is referring to the almost reverential solitude of the piece, which was recently released on the Dark Winter netlabel (