According to the Moon
Sarah Albu & Gayle Young

Digital Album with 8 page pdf booklet featuring with extensive liner notes. Design by Stephen Seto with photography by Greg Locke throughout.

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“...this album is a triumph for all concerned, and leaves one hoping that further albums of Young's compositions will soon follow.”
— John Eyles, All About Jazz on 'As Trees Grow'

“...the moment that sticks with me most vividly is a portion of the frst piece played by a Montreal collective called No Hay Banda. Vocalist Sarah Albu does a long stretch of heavy, slow breathing into the microphone. Having been so aware of others' breath for the last couple of years, there is something astounding about it, full of menace, hope and ultimately a deep sense of humanity that really resonates.”
— Byron Coley, The Wire on Sarah Albu


Canadian artist Gayle Young's unusual and imaginative approach as composer and musician situates her within a long lineage of maverick experimentalists. Though Young's output does not shy away from more conventional modalities as well, since the 1970's she has variously embraced electronics, graphic/ text scores, installation, sophisticated tuning systems outside of equal temperament, the sounds of found objects and natural environments, and—perhaps most notably—instruments of her own invention.

According To The Moon sees Young collaborating with Montréal-based vocalist Sarah Albu, one of Canada's most dedicated and curious performers of contemporary and experimental music. The disc follows another release from last year for Farpoint Recordings, As Trees Grow, which featured her piano music performed by Xenia Pestova Bennett & Ed Bennett.

The works that comprise the present disc span over 40 years, including music commissioned by Albu herself. Unsurprisingly, this makes for a very diverse collection of works, however there are distinct unifying features that help to establish a trajectory throughout them. Chief among them is Young's idiosyncratic approach to text. According to the liner notes, “Albu was intrigued by the use of texts as elements of notation, suggesting an instrumental approach to the voice.” In earlier pieces, such as the titular 1978 work, this is evident in how the composer uses vowels as acoustic filters applied to frequency content of the vocal tone. Yet even with later pieces that employ more involved texts such as The State of Corn (1998) or Sweet Summer Salad (2013) Young emphasises the texture and musicality of phonemes over building narratives. On the disc's haunted 14-minute finale, Ancient Ocean Floor, the most recent of the compositions, Albu's voice intones descriptions of a river valley walk, leading the listener through a broad, rich sound palette. Accompanying her is Young's microtonal string instrument the Amaranth woven through a recording of a waterfall filtered acoustically through tuned resonators.

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A limited edition CD version of According to the Moon with a 4 panel gatefold sleeve and an 8 page booklet with extensive liner notes with photography by Greg Locke throughout is available from www.farpointrecordings.com

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About the artists:

Gayle Young cultivated her unique musical voice under the tutelage of artists such as David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, and James Tenney. Throughout her career, her enviably vast array of creative activities has included music composition and performance, intermedia art, pedagogy, and writing. Her compositional output has received several awards, and been performed by the likes of Eve Egoyan, Barbara Hannigan, Marc Sabat, Vancouver New Music, and Malcolm Goldstein and she has also worked with R. Murray Schafer, Pauline Oliveros, Michael Snow, Gerry Hemingway, David Mott, and Don Wherry among many other important names in contemporary music. Young was also a founding board member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, formed during a conference in Banff in 1995. She served as the editor of Musicworks Magazine from 1987-2006, and was also involved at its inception in 1978. In 1989 her definitive biography of Canadian inventor Hugh Le Caine, The Sackbut Blues: Hugh Le Caine, Pioneer in Electronic Music, was published by the National Museum Of Science And Technology.


Sarah Albu is a singer, composer, and performance maker based in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal, Canada). Though she specialises in new/experimental music, 20th century repertoire, and free improvisation, she can also be heard in a wide assortment of other settings including traditional Balkan village music, ancient sacred polyphony, flm and game soundtracks, noise, and psychedelic rock. She has premiered many new works and contemporary opera roles in close cooperation with composers and new media artists including James O'Callaghan, Gabriel Dharmoo, Keiko Devaux, Snežana Nešić, Sam Shalabi, Will Eizlini, Symon Henry, and Rita Ueda. As a student in Jennifer Walshe and David Helbich's Composer-Performer course, she workshopped and performed her modular participatory work FutureMoves at the Darmstadt Summer Course and Festival for New Music in Germany and subsequently toured the work throughout the Nordic countries.She performs as a soloist with ensembles such as Ensemble Paramirabo, l'Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, No Hay Banda, Architek Percussion, the Vancouver Intercultural Orchestra and collectif9. Albu holds BFAs in Theatre and Music Performance from Concordia University and an MMus from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (Netherlands).

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About the Farpoint Recordings label:
Farpoint Recordings was formed in 2004 by Anthony Kelly and David Stalling. Originally set up to act as a fulcrum for their own creative activities, both in the audio and visual arts - Farpoint Recordings has now developed into an artist-run creative project publishing works from the margins that intersect in some way with contemporary sound and audio-visual practices. Over the last number of years the label has issued many and varied releases earning positive reviews from publications including Journal of Music, Wire Magazine, The Irish Times, Sound Projector, All About Jazz, A Closer Listen, Neural, Textura, Vital Weekly, Kathodik and The Independent (UK).

www.farpointrecordings.com