For those unaware, Timothy McCormack presents a sequence of compositions that explore music as an embodied act of writing and listening.

McCormack’s meticulously notated scores unfold through the performers’ physical engagement, where touch, breath, and attention become integral to form. Rather than representing external ideas, these pieces trace how sound emerges from the intimate encounter between body and inscription.

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.

The work opens on the fifty-minute opus that is your body is a volume (2016–2019) for string quartet, which, for the most part, is a much quieter, stoically balanced, yet at other moments primal work than the latter piece. A cunningly created, artfully crafted set of sounds and movements, it is both evoking and yet passively innate at near enough the same time.

The other work is the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart (2022) for violin, a near twenty-minute piece that is more jagged from the off, perhaps even more evolved to its surroundings than the former. Whereas that other work gently strides, looking, pulsing, this secondary one eyes you up from the very beginning, knowing exactly what it wants to do to you, and what emotive sounds are going to work best to hypnotize you into a lulled state of impassioned being.

1. your body is a volume (2016–2019) for string quartet [50:54]
2. the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart (2022) for violin [19:16]

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