Austrian-born composer Clemens Gadenstätter's music often provides a dense tapestry of sound which transcends mere contrapuntal design and technique and marries a keen sense of timbral control with an unfolding that maximizes the clarification of cogent perceptual relationships. This is quite apparent in this month's clip, an excerpt from the third section of his startling 1997 composition, ballade 1, for voice and piano. Set to a text by Lisa Spalt, itself dense and somewhat opaque, the marriage of the piano and voice—they really do form a new singularity together—is remarkable, and the entrance of the voice in this excerpt sounds more like a Theremin than a voice. Der kopf kreist, indeed, if not die augen kreisen at it.