Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls
Five works exploring what sound remembers, what it carries forward, and what remains unheard.
About the Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls
Phantomnesis brings together the ideas of a phantom and a memory: something absent that continues to make its presence felt. Within this project, the term describes sounds that return as traces, fragments, or altered recollections. What survives may be recognisable, distorted, or detached from its original context.
Residues and Recalls, the first Phantomnesis compilation, brings together five works that approach these traces through different forms of listening. Early jazz recordings, anonymous street voices, mechanical noise, fossilised imprints, and environmental sounds become material for contemporary composition. Rather than simply restoring the past, the works explore how its remains can acquire new meanings.
The sequence moves from recorded musical history to the overlooked voices of public space, through mechanical processes and deep-time imprints, and finally into the encounter between instruments and landscape. Across these distinct approaches, memory emerges not as a fixed record but as something continually reshaped through listening.
Pieces and Voices
Francesco Fiorenzani is a guitarist and composer based in Florence, Italy. His roots are in contemporary jazz and rock, and his work now also reaches into folk and contemporary classical music. He holds a master's degree in contemporary classical composition and is a doctoral researcher in composition at the Hochschule Luzern (HSLU).
Hommage a R.Mutt draws heavily on early jazz traditions. It engages a forgotten, or near-forgotten, sound world: the clichés, timbres, and instrumental practices of 1920s jazz. The foundation is a tape part built from samples of recordings from that era. The live instrumentation imitates and reinterprets those idioms through a contemporary lens.
In doing so, the piece explores how the expressive language of early jazz can be recontextualized within a modern compositional framework.
Hommage a R.Mutt by Francesco Fiorenzani
Ali Balighi is a composer, electroacoustic musician, and educator. He is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in music composition and serves as a graduate part-time instructor. His music is often based on the traditional and folk music of Iran, with a main interest in microtonality and new perspectives on instruments.
The Mute Choir of the Streets is built from sounds and traditions that are present in everyday life yet function as if they had been erased. They exist acoustically, but not politically or symbolically. The piece treats the soundscape of the street as a suppressed archive. Urban noise is full of speech fragments, arguments, prayers, announcements, and casual conversations. These rarely register as content and are treated as background interference. Diffused in multichannel space, they gain no new message, and the work amplifies what is already there but habitually ignored. The "mute choir" of the title describes a condition in which people are talking but their speech never becomes socially legible.
The Mute Choir of the Streets by Ali Balighi
A fragment of a psalm by Arvo Pärt is subjected to granular processing and folded into the city soundscape. Liturgical choral traditions once held a central place in communal and spiritual life. Today they are often displaced to concert halls, recordings, or private devotion. Here this historically dominant voice becomes a distant, almost eroded residue, one texture among many, without its privileged clarity and authority. Marginal voices are rendered inaudible, and even once-central sacred traditions risk becoming faint, abstract echoes.
The use of 31-tone equal temperament brings in another nearly forgotten layer: alternative tuning systems that were proposed, explored, and then sidelined by the dominance of 12-tone equal temperament. This microtonal system offers subtler, less stable harmonic relationships. It parallels the incomplete, "out-of-tune" state of free speech, which is legally present but practically constrained and unevenly distributed. The tuning is not a technical novelty. It reactivates a marginal tradition whose potential has largely been ignored.
Anonymous street speech, a processed psalm, and a non-standard tuning system together examine and re-voice what is structurally present yet functionally forgotten in our acoustic, cultural, and musical environments.
Paul A. Oehlers is an American composer and associate professor of audio technology at American University. He is best known for film scores that Variety called "extraordinarily evocative," and films with his music have won Grand Jury Prizes. His concert works have been performed across the United States, Canada, Latin America, South America, Europe, and Asia, including at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). He was the first composer commissioned by the Nature Conservancy to write a concert composition about prairie conservation. He was also named the Margaret Lee Crofts Fellow by the MacDowell Colony.
Automaton was written as an homage to unending Rube Goldberg devices. It employs different sounds according to Luigi Russolo's classifications in roughly equal amounts. The composer recorded the sounds remotely and assembled them in the construction of the piece. Additional sounds come from the convolution of sounds and from resonant filters.
Automaton by Paul A. Oehlers
Susan Brewster is a UK-based composer and songwriter. Her current focus is ambisonic composition, or immersive environments, exploring the human relationship to technology.
Recent discoveries of fossilised human footprints prompted this piece, along with the idea of aeonic imprints. These are things that seem lost or forgotten but last indefinitely, from fossils to DNA. The idea offered many images during composition. Whether it is a footprint in the sand or an unconscious memory, an event may suddenly or gradually reveal what has been hidden for a long time. These ideas are reimagined in a composition for reimagined instruments, which draws on familiar patterns and motifs.
As an ambisonic work, the piece aims to place the listener inside an immersive environment of sound textures. They unfold and develop through spatial positioning and interaction. Combinations and patterns oppose or align in different places within a three-dimensional space. This creates dynamics and an evolution, and the result is an abstract experience of sound along overlooked aesthetic pathways.
The Nature of Persistence and the Other Way Round by Susan Brewster
Georgia Kalodiki was born in Athens in 1975. She studied classical guitar, advanced theory, and composition there. She holds a master's degree and a PhD in composition from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a second PhD in electroacoustic composition from the Ionian University of Corfu. She is a professor of music and a freelance composer.
Nature Instrumentale is a mix of contrasting sounds trying to fit together. Through acousmatic composition, it builds an acoustic bridge between instruments and the wasteland of the Troizina region of Greece. Sounds of nature, such as wind, animals, and phonemes of the human voice, are mixed with experimental material from flute, violin, cello, classical guitar, recorder, and piano. These sounds are constantly transformed into new forms of expression in a mimetic process of distorting patterns.
Nature Instrumentale by Georgia Kalodiki
Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls grew out of an international call from Cambiata Arts for contemporary music, experimental composition, and heritage-rooted works. The call sought pieces that explore the forgotten, the near-forgotten, and the reimagined. It welcomed works that bring neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures, or overlooked aesthetic pathways into today's listening.
Each submission was reviewed by an international jury of six professional composers, performers, and researchers. Their own careers embody the premise of the call, and each has spent years bringing overlooked musical systems, regional practices, and reimagined traditions into contemporary listening. The jurors work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok, and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz, and Klagenfurt in Austria. Their practices range from electroacoustic composition and open-source technology to somatic voice and live electronics, traditional Thai instruments, artistic research, and jazz scholarship. They considered each work for its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness, and its artistic conviction. The five works here emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
About the Phantomnesis Call
Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls
The first Phantomnesis compilation · Five works
Release date: October 30, 2026
Curated and published by: CambiataArt Records
Rights: Each artist retains full ownership and rights to their work.
Release Details