Founded in 2019 by American musician, recording engineer, producer and designer Joseph Branciforte, the New York label Greyfade has so far released nine albums by artists working “at the intersections of procedural composition, acoustic and electronic minimalism, alternative tuning systems and digitally mediated forms of improvisation”. The label is known for its meticulous sonic and design standards, which match the quality, originality and restraint of the music.

All of Greyfade’s roster is represented on this playlist, including composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist Branciforte himself, who compiled the selection especially for The Wire. Several are excerpts from longer tracks, such as the final two choices, which are unreleased and exclusive to the magazine (you also won’t find any of this music on streaming platforms).

The first is part of Berlin based experimental and contemporary classical composer Catherine Lamb’s new album Interius/Exterius, performed by New York’s Ghost Ensemble, out on 9 May; the second is a section from Iterae, a Fender Rhodes plus processing and effects dialogue between Branciforte and Belgian keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin, to be released in the autumn.

Branciforte thinks of each Greyfade release as “a complete conceptual universe unto itself – integrating sound, compositional architecture, visual design and text into a single object”. The music itself often stays in one specific spatial or structural zone. “They are albums you can get lost in, that have their own centre of gravity,” he suggests.

Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann
“6.15”
From LP1 (2019)

Greyfade’s debut release was this collaboration between Branciforte and German born, longtime New York based vocalist and new music composer Bleckmann, once aptly described as “the angel voiced muse of the avant garde”. Landing in a liminal realm “between improvisation and composition, live performance and studio production, human and machine generated sound”, Branciforte’s compelling Fender Rhodes and electronic soundscapes and Bleckmann’s evocative wordless vocals combine symbiotically to create music that is immersive, somewhat disquieting and supremely visual. It’s like being taken on an aural journey to deep ocean or outer space. A companion piece, LP2, was released in 2023.

Kenneth Kirschner & Joseph Branciforte
“April 20, 2015” (excerpt)
From From The Machine Vol 1 (2021)

This excerpt from the first of two 20 minute tracks on the debut volume in an ongoing partnership between American experimental and electronic music composer Kirschner and Branciforte examines “the application of software based compositional techniques to the creation of new music for acoustic instruments”. “April 20, 2015” started out as an electronic composition that digitally manipulated fragments of piano and string recordings; Branciforte then “reverse engineered” the piece into a notated score for small chamber ensemble – in this case the trio of pianist Jade Conlee and cellists Mariel Roberts and Meaghan Burke. The resulting music is dark, measured and slowly surfacing, yet also full of air and space and abstract beauty.

Christopher Otto & JACK Quartet
“rag’sma q1q2q3” (excerpt)
From rag’sma (2021)

This is an extract from the first of three sections of Otto’s debut full length composition, featuring the American violinist with fellow members of the acclaimed JACK Quartet: Austin Wulliman on violin, John Pickford Richards on viola, and Jay Campbell on cello. Otto has studied both composition and mathematics, and some of the exacting rigour and elegance of construction found in the latter is powerfully present in this piece. With its “harmonic language bridging just intonation and triadic tonality”, “rag’sma q1q2q3” sounds a strangely spellbinding alarm; the sedately pulsating strings are dense, dissonant and almost brassy, like some kind of amplified and otherworldly heartbeat.

Greg Davis
“Irregular”
From New Primes (2022)

This is another Greyfade album that takes its inspiration both from mathematics (well, prime numbers) and just intonation (a system of musical tuning in whole number ratios), this time by Vermont based American electronic musician Davis. Using custom written software to translate prime number sequences into oscillating sounds that surge, fluctuate and seem to have a life of their own, Davis uses a network of overlapping pure sine tones to create music “ranging from the almost tonal to the harmonically alien”. This longest track on the album feels strangely elastic and subliminal, a throbbing organic sound world lurking beneath the surface of things.

Taylor Deupree
“Recur”
From Sti.ll (2024)

As well as offering limited edition vinyl, in 2024 Branciforte introduced a format he calls Folio, a linen covered hardback book with a digital download that is “equal parts album release, critical text, making-of narrative, study score and collectible art object”. This second Folio edition is an acoustic reimagining of American multidisciplinary sound artist Taylor Deupree’s classic 2002 electronic album Stil. Arranged by Branciforte for a New York creative music chamber ensemble, “Recur” is typical of the album’s offbeat appeal: repeated patterns of glitchy percussion, strummed guitar chords, plucked cello, low clarinet sounds, rooted double bass notes and ringing vibraphone and flute tones gradually change and develop, becoming bigger, louder and more complex, before falling away again to a windblown silence.

Phillip Golub
“Loop 7” (excerpt)
From Loop 7 (2025)

You never know quite what you’re going to get with Greyfade, in the best possible way, and this new album from Brooklyn based American pianist, improviser and composer Phillip Golub, released in February, is a typical example. A 28 minute work for piano and small ensemble that forms part of a set of acoustic “loops” created by Golub for live performance, “Loop 7” features the pianist on a pair of MIDI controlled Yahama Disklaviers, retuned to 22 notes per octave. The synchronised piano sounds form repeated, descending and dissonantly chiming clusters and phrases that are augmented by the swells, textures and tone colours of scordatura electric guitar, microtonal vibraphone and Branciforte on live electronic processing. The result falls somewhere between chamber performance and studio creation.

Catherine Lamb & Ghost Ensemble
“Interius/Exterius” (excerpt)
From Interius/Exterius (2025)

This latest work from the Berlin based American composer Lamb, one of the leading voices in contemporary experimental music, was developed in close collaboration with New York’s Ghost Ensemble. The piece for chamber nonet consists of tones that move in “interior” and “exterior” directions, “shifting between inward balance within the ensemble and outward expansion towards new harmonic possibilities”. Long, dense and intensifying layers and microtonal arcs of sound subtly shift and evolve, occasionally transitioning into resonant notes on hammered dulcimer and deep harmonic overtones and convergences.

Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin
“I” (excerpt)
From Iterae (2025)

A new duo project between Branciforte and pioneering Belgian keyboardist Dumoulin exploring the sonic possibilities of the Fender Rhodes. Over the course of two improvised pieces totalling 70 minutes, the duo apply a fascinating array of processing and effects, including Branciforte’s custom live editing system, which captures and reconfigures both musicians’ output in real time. The expansive results “hover between form and abstraction, precise sonic architecture and dream like flow”; they are glitchy, fragmentary, repeating and arrhythmic – and about as far from 1970s Herbie Hancock as it’s possible to imagine.

Read Philip Watson’s full Unlimited Editions column on Greyfade in The Wire 495. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.