In a compact parallel to micro-fiction, liner notes have not so much gone away as been reduced to bare essentials. Liner notes more often than not these days take the form of a complementary blog post, or a brief text accompanying a track posted online, or — in the perhaps most constrained format — just a series of tags. Such is often the case with Alarm Will Sound, the highly regarded chamber ensemble, which regularly posts performances it does of works outside the standard chamber literature. Not that standard chamber repertoire is its modus operandi. This is the group that made its name initially with an album of Aphex Twin covers. The group’s [SoundCloud page](https://soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound) gives a false impression of its activity. The “spotlight” section up top focuses on music released about a year ago, if not longer. But down below more recent items pop up, including [“Half-Glimpsed” by composer Jay Lin](https://soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound/half-glimpsed). It was posted just today. Recorded live at the Mizzou International Composers Festival on July 27, 2013, it is primarily built around a frenetic series of organized cacophonies. Even the quieter moments early on are antic, with strings and horns playing against each other in a swarm-like manner: individually at their own pace, but collectively forming something spacious and very much alive. And for context, there is just that datestamp and this brief collection of tags:
#sinfonietta
#noise
#textural
#dense
#contemporary classical
#chamber orchestra
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound](https://soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound/half-glimpsed).
