In the last couple of years I’ve found myself writing more and more sleevenote essays. I’ve said in the past that this is one of my favourite mediums for writing: 1500 words or so is a lovely length – long enough to explore an idea; short enough to contain in one breath. And while there is a responsibility to talk about the music in question, there are no rules for how you should do that. Sleevenotes reach a reader who is already in a particularly receptive frame of mind – unwrapping a disc, putting it on, taking time to listen. They sit somewhere between the essayistic, the poetic and the critical, which is a place that gives you a lot of freedom as a writer.

Anyway, some examples I’ve been very proud to have been involved with have come out recently and I wanted to share snippets and give the artists some love.

Riot Ensemble: Patricia Alessandrini – Leçons de ténèbres (HCR)

The music of Patricia Alessandrini is heard as if submerged beneath water, wrapped in layers of fog or obscured by a series of veils. Sounds appear muffled and distant, as though they must pass through thick, unforgiving media before reaching clear air and our ears. The aural impression is apt. These sounds do reach us from far away, shrouded as if in dust or cobwebs from the archives of musical history, filtered by and through electronic processes. Alessandrini’s compositions frequently begin with an existing musical work, and often one with a rich surrounding history.

Mads Emils Dreyer: Disappearer (Dacapo)

Forsvindere 2 by Mads Emil Dreyer begins like a fairy tale. Its nursery rhyme-like quality is thanks to the gently chiming sound of the celesta and the steady, simple pulse of the vibraphone. But it is also frozen music, glistening and thawing slowly under a cool winter sun. As the layers of sound accumulate to reveal hidden spaces between them, I’m reminded of the young girl Unn’s first encounter with the ice palace in Tarjei Vesaas’s novel of the same name – a frozen waterfall swollen by the cascading river into ‘an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves and confused tracery’. Dreyer’s piece builds slowly, adding bowed vibraphone and crotale tones, short glockenspiel flourishes, and different harmonic shades. Yet as the layers of chimes and bowed metal slowly grow and thicken, there are subtle hints of something flickering just beyond, past the range of peripheral vision. A subtle magic, or an uncanny presence, perhaps, like a figure walking out of sight into the dark. But it’s OK, the music says. Listen: that minor fall is only a bluesy twist. I’m just having fun, building intricate towers and secret alcoves with the harmonies. Sorry if I made you worry.

Sarah Saviet: Spun (Coviello)

Replace your modern strings of steel and nylon with traditional gut. Warmer in sound but more wayward in tension. Tune each downwards by eight small, approximately even steps such that your instrument rings dark and unfamiliar. Choose a Baroque bow – several centimetres shorter and noticeably lighter. It dances easily as you play but requires new lines of attack and control. You will need to adjust weights and movements – and the sense of timing you have learnt through years of practice to attach to these. Your instrument writhes awkwardly, like a small animal cupped in your hands that must be continually coaxed and comforted.

Gabriel Vicéns: Mural (Stradivarius)

The last work on this CD, La Esfera (The Sphere) for cello and piano, unfolds more than one such process of disintegration and accumulation. (The title nods to the Dustin Hoffman film of 1998, the music’s serial underpinnings suggesting a sci-fi connection to the composer.) Beginning with expansive piano harmonies, these dissolve first into pointillist fragments and then again into a dry cello pizzicato pedal tone, each successive change throwing into question the apparent solidity of the one that came before. From this state of almost complete erasure, new elements are added, however—a second cello note, a piano chord, some connecting tissue—until a new kind of music, built of strident exchanges between piano and cello, is fully fleshed out. But this too dissolves away into held chords, a reminiscence of the opening, and then a last, limping C, where everything began. No matter how clear and clean the surface may be, it cannot hold forever.

Bára Gisladóttir: Orchestral Work (Dacapo)

There is something treacherous about sounds. They are unreliable narrators. For example: the music of Bára Gísladóttir appears dark and troubled to our ears at first hearing. With its apparent screams of rage, rumbles of fear and vast, obliterating crescendos, it seems to speak of the night and its terrors. But this would be an illusion. Or at least, only part of its story.