Zaes’ “Parallel Prints” on Best-of February 2022 List

Dear World,

Our latest release — “Parallel Prints” by Marcel Zaes — was featured today in the “Best Contemporary Classical” Bandcamp column for February 2022!

Peter Margasak writes “Illustrated in part by its unusual instrumentation (two pianists, two percussionists), the New York ensemble Yarn/Wire has always eschewed convention. However, it’s still incredible to stumble across a piece like Parallel Prints, developed for the quartet by Swiss composer Marcel Zaes. The central work on this album, “Parallel Prints #1,” is a 42-minute performance featuring all four members playing a single piano simultaneously, each hammering out repetitive sequences from a graphic score against a metronome. But within those shifting, minimal patterns, each musician produces ultra-subtle pitch variations (the score allows for any sound-making device so long as different shades of each pitch can be made). The piece is lumpy, hypnotic, random, and driving, sometimes all at once. While developing the work, the composer and the musicians recorded fragments of the score using an octave of crotales and a drum pad that received data on how it was struck but produced no sound. Zaes then created a series of 19 brief variations that follow the main work using computer software to formulate loads of permutations of source material played by the group, deploying the same rhythmic schemes.”

For now,

Jordan