The Hand is an Ear [2026]
KAIROS Music [0013322KAI]
including the following compositions:
your body is a volume [2016-19] for string quartet
the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart [2022] for violin
Featuring the JACK Quartet and Austin Wulliman, with booklet essay written by Ty Bouque.
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Murat Çolak
purchase here: KAIROS
listen here: Spotify / Apple Music
reactions:
“The sheer strangeness and weight of the sound is so overwhelming that conventional aesthetic categories simply do not apply… The listener, too, finds that the music cannot be held at arm’s length; it demands to be taken in bodily, internalised, absorbed on its own terms. You do not so much listen to your body is a volume as submit to it, and the submission is not comfortable, but it is profoundly rewarding. Its physical effect on me was euphoric.
What does this disc represent? Something very large, I think. your body is a volume is not merely one of the most striking string quartets of recent times, it is a work that asks fundamental questions about what the medium is for and what four stringed instruments in proximity to one another can become. the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart does something comparable for the solo violin, finding in a single instrument and a single body an emotional range that its austere surface might seem to preclude. Between them, they confirm McCormack as a composer who matters.”
-Dominic Hartley, MusicWeb International
“It’s rare to hear music that makes you think differently about things: about the composer, the genre, music in general… I started thinking how [both pieces] delivered an emotional impact out of brutalist handling of sound… it builds a grand, encompassing statement from an entirely new language… The music teaches you a lot that you won’t understand right away. In conception and execution, it’s perfectly realised.”
-Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill
“The album’s noise – prolonged, seamless, hour-long noise – felt cleansing, bringing me back to myself. It’s a memory that returned on listening to this impressively uncompromising album…, a mountain of noise, a symphony of the granular. McCormack is a distinctive new voice. The music is an experience more than a sound object.”
-Liam Cagney, Gramophone
“Across fragile textures and moments of sudden intensity, the music invites listeners into a heightened awareness of presence, vulnerability, and transformation. This album documents a singular compositional voice for whom listening is not passive reception, but a profound, corporeal experience.”
-Anne Carlini, Russell Trunk's Exclusive Magazine
Additional reviews at Musique Machine, & Reporters Online