Extreme expression and fragile beauty meet in the music of Jonah Haven. The composer understands his work as an exploration of his own life and existentially human experiences such as despair, loss and isolation.

Driven by a constant search for the new, Haven draws from a broad palette of sounds. In the mostly small-scale works of the portrait, there are microtonal shifts in the accordion duet i burn a million years, for example. Elsewhere, remnants of tonal, traditional music shine through under distorted and perforated sounds generated largely by multiphonics, as in slip letting by hand, a duet for violin and cello.

Many of the pieces audibly push the musicians to their physical limits, as in aren’t wet for prepared bassoon and violin with prepared bow, in which the two dissimilar instruments converge sonically through the preparations and amplification. In the large ensemble piece gasser, likewise the title of this portrait, high registers and the lack of pauses for breath create a barely avoidable “gasping” when the instrumentalists take in air. Booklet author Gordon Kampe resumes: “In gasser, supposedly austere beauty tilts into a human – because imperfect – beauty through various sonic contaminations, a process which links nearly all the pieces with each other.”