Ensemble for These Times has championed marginalized, exiled, and/or forgotten creative voices in our programming and recordings from their beginnings in 2007 — and El Tiempo Latine is no exception. Inspired by the music we encountered while working on their fourth album, The Guernica Project (Centaur 3946), and also by conversations with a dear friend, Cuban-American GRAMMY Award®-winning producer and musician Kenya Autie, E4TT wanted in this new album to focus more directly on music by some of the fabulous contemporary classical Latine composers in their repertory. 

For El Tiempo Latine, they have chosen favorites by nine composers, ranging from major prize winners — Mexican Gabriela Ortiz and Argentinians Claudia Montero and José Bragato (GRAMMY®), Cuban-American Tania León (Pulitzer), and Californians Gabriela Lena Frank (Heinz) and Carla Lucero (Opera America) — to rising stars — Puerto-Rican Angélica Negrón and Andean-American inti figgis-vizueta — and emerging San Francisco talent, half-Peruvian Brennan Stokes.

Digital booklet: download here

Pre-order/stream: Bandcamp | Apple Music

Proper Nostalgia, the third, wondrous album from San Francisco-based Friction Quartet

Showcasing an innovative spirit of making music, a studio art piece free from analog constraints, and transfigured by an era of technology, this release features four new commissions by composers Michi Wiancko, Andrew M Rodriguez, Alex Dowling, and Isaac Io Schankler. Given no restraints for creative process than “treat the studio and production as part of the art,” the composers were able to create freely and fiercely. Proper Nostalgia, the album title, is that of Andrew M Rodriguez’s piece, and it is quite evocative of that freedom.

Download the digital booklet

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