Although Jamilia Jazylbekova has very strong ties to her native Kazakhstan, her creative urge cannot be boiled down to the local musical culture. “What's new and exciting about her music”, says Kasper de Roo, who conducted the music on this CD at Deutschlandfunk with the Ensemble Modern, “is its distinctive and inimitable language”.

With varying forces and a broad range of expression, this “inimitable language” shines forth in the five works on this CD. In “Voci” (“Voices”), where Jazylbekova herself sings the vocal part, touchingly song-like traits are transmuted into the naked gesture of a scream. In “Aspan” (“Heaven”), strange brass figurations congeal into eruptions of sound only to rapidly dissolve like dream images, despite their urgency.

Seemingly raw and fragmentary sounds correspond with structural elements, while proportions of intensity and density within the composition, as in “Le refus de l’enfermement IV“, become the focus of attention.

Jazylbekova views each instrument as a separate “being” to be brought to life by the performer. In “Nuit de mars” and “Aikyon”, rather than pursuing the ideal of “pure beauty of sound”, she incorporates “pollutants”’: “It’s like the water of a mountain stream in whose bed we can see plants, rocks and soil: the admixtures in the water correspond to the proportion of noise in the sound.”