mine but for its sublimation [2025]
Another Timbre [at239]
performed by Jack Yarbrough
purchase here: Another Timbre
interview with Simon Reynell of Another Timbre here
reactions:
Ranked as the #1 album of 2025 by Tim Rutherford Johnson
Ranked as the #2 album of 2025 by Alex Ross
Listed as one of the top recordings of the year by Dominic Hartley on MusicWeb International
“…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
“These shapes and surfaces are made of listenable air… As I listen, a tear falls from my right eye. It’s as if something in me below the level of consciousness is trying to tell me this is grief. But it is not grief, and I do not know what it is.”
-Paul Griffiths, what music!
“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.”
-Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill
“I suppose ‘extraordinary’ falls into the same category of overuse as ‘essential’, […] but I will hold out for its use in describing Timothy McCormack’s single movement piano composition mine but for its sublimation. If you give yourself over to it, the experience as a listener is transformative.”
-Dominic Hartley, MusicWeb International
"This is an especially beautiful piece and recording that rewards, as not so many pieces do, repeated listening.”
-Philip Thomas, Tempo: A Quarterly Review of New Music
“…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