mine but for its sublimation [2025]
Jack Yarbrough, piano
Another Timbre [recorded at Oktaven]
interview with Simon Reynell of Another Timbre here
“…it has a cumulative power that left me a little dazed the first time I listened… I heard that E-flat chord as a spiritual event. It was as if no such chord had existed before or would exist again.” - Alex Ross, The New Yorker
“Timothy McCormack’s single movement composition mine but for its sublimation is the sole focus of one of the most extraordinary discs of solo piano music I have heard in a long time. In what feels like the most undemonstrative way, the writing and playing somehow rivet one’s attention from the start and when release comes just over an hour later, one feels overwhelmed, emotionally, spiritually, musically. […] It’s this sense of sustained engagement with the music, so rare at the level one experiences it here, which makes the encounter so precious. […] My appreciation has only deepened on repeated listening.” -Dominic Hartley, MusicWeb International
“Having achieved this state of otherworldliness, […] It all ends with a slow but brutal finality and I’m still knocked about by the way McCormack and Yarbrough have created a transformative piece out of chin-stroking acoustical considerations while also delivering an emotional thump.” -Boring Like A Drill
“…doomy shapes…” - Roger Batty, musique [machine]
featured (twice) on Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise blog
recommended on Steve Smith’s Night After Night blog & substack
Read a write-up from the Cornell University’s Department of Music
Portrait Disc: KARST [2020]
karst survey (Klangforum Wien)
you actually are evaporating (Christopher Otto & Kevin McFarland)
KARST (Ensemblekollektiv Berlin)
purchase here: KAIROS
listen here: Spotify / Apple Music
Chosen as one of the New Yorker’s Notable Recordings of 2020
“[ …] superbly ear-scouring […]” -Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise
“[…]intimately varied, by no means monolithic, and each of these passages of enormous presence has its own constantly changing character, for McCormack remembers this, that music, unlike features of the landscape, is in motion.” -Paul Griffiths, “Record of the Week”
“En todo caso lo escuchado aquí […] tiene no poco de revelación; podemos estar delante de uno de los compositores más ambiciosos, valientes y quebrantadores de inercias de su generación.” -Ismael G. Cabral, El Compositor Habla
Additional reviews at Botho Straussian, MusicWeb International, MundoClassico, & Nieuwe Noten.
world-line [2019]
purchase here: Huddersfield Contemporary Records (listen on Spotify)
Included in Sequenza21’s Best Recordings of 2019!
“[…] a 30-minute pitch-black spiral down into slack strings and popping pickups. A seriously dark piece […]” -"Albums to look out for in 2020", Tim Rutherford-Johnson [ The Rambler ]
"[…] the amplified instrument is a stethoscope revealing the microsonorities hiding within ostensible noise. Throughout the disc, ELISION’s prodigious virtuosity pushes beyond itself to what lies on the other side: queer, strange, insatiable vitality.” - “Group Innovation,” Liam Cagney [Gramophone]
