Antiphon Trio

Chronolucence

Protomaterial DL

Louise Gray THE WIRE, December 2026, page 47

The debut album from Antiphon Trio opens with some slow notes picked out on pedal guitar, a soft electronic atmosphere and then, like a breath, the expansive pull of an accordion drone. Opener "Orphic Idyll" establishes that whatever else is going on Chronolucence, we are also very much in the land of Pauline Oliveros and playfully so. Antiphon Trio are considerably more than the three musicians who head it: Michael Century (accordions), Chris Fisher-Lochhead (viola and pedal steel guitar) and Zach Layton( 17-string bass).

The fourth member is Oliveros's Expanded Instrument System, a set of delays and signal processers that the composer built up to produce a musical environment, what she called a sonic time machine that enables performers to play in concert with themselves. Oliveros spent many years working on the EIS. It began in the mid-1960s as actual hardware – tape machines and the like – before embracing the new digital technologies. In the years before her death in 2016 the addition of Max/MSP software made the system far more portable. In addition, she was - as are two of Antiphon, Century and Fisher-Lochhead - a faculty member of the Troy, New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (the Center for Deep Listening is situated there); Chronolucence feels like a natural development of these relationships, a continuation of the improvisational curiosity that has guided much of Oliveros's collaborations.

Chronolucence is constructed around long, expansive works and shorter, more urgent sections. Into this former category fall the huge open skies of "Sun Streak" which pulses like a Terry Riley homage, or the cavernous "After Klang" on which Fisher Lochhead's viola dances across the swathes of sound produced by the trio. The concentrated sound of "Pneuma" with swooshes of air billowing around, and the scratchy, percussive nature of "Scree" occupy the latter. The contrasts work well, creating frictions with the smoother passages and whetting the appetite for more such inventive collaborations.

: https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/51

Eyal Hareuveni,  Percorsi Musicali: https://www.percorsimusicali.eu/2026/11/02/antiphon-trio-chronolucence/

 Antiphon Trio - Chronolucence (Protomaterial, 2026)

 The American experimental Antiphon Trio - accordionist Michael Century, playing on free bass accordion and Roland digital accordion (and pianist, cultural theorist, and Professor of New Media and Music in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York), violist and pedal steel guitarist Chris Fisher-Lochhead, and bassist Zach Layton, playing the 17-string bass guitar (and Associate Professor of music production at Ramapo College of New Jersey) - is feeding its acoustic sound into innovative composer, improviser, and sound artist Pauline Oliveros's Expanded Instrument System (EIS). 

The EIS was designed by Oliveros as a “time machine” for expanding temporal perception, so that, in her words, “present/past/future is occurring simultaneously with transformations”. The EIS uses multiple delay voice lines and processing algorithms to create complex, multi-layered, and evolving, emergent timescapes and sound clouds that build an interactive call-and-response loop with the trio’s ‘live sound’, rewarding and requiring a deep listening experience. The EIS also informed the trio’s name, as Antiphon means “sounding in response,” rooted in ideas of concord and concordance, and it faithfully captures the trio’s dynamics. 

Chronolucence was recorded at the HASS Media Studio, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, between May 2024 and May 2026. The complex technical process of music production does not affect the highly immersive, surprisingly organic, often exotic, yet transformative, and asynchronous listening experience that blurs the distinction between the human-made, chamber acoustic sounds and the EIS’ elusive and expansive electronic processes and dissolves our conception of time flowing in linear dimensions. The album offers a dream-like, deep-space sonic journey within the accordion’s rich overtones, stretched and multiplied by the resonant viola, and further enriched by the 17-string bass guitar sub-harmonics, that may, hopefully, recalibrate our restless and exhausted brain’s synapses. The meditative spirit calls for heightened attentional awareness, a core tenet of Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice.