The Laefer Quartet’s debut album, Strata, presents a body of previously unrecorded music which explores the different ways we interact, intertwine, and impose on the natural world around us. A collaborative ethos has formed a central part of the album’s creation, which features six commissioned pieces alongside visual artworks based on a synaesthetic response to the music. The album guides listeners upwards across various ‘strata’: starting from the rumblings of the New York subway, moving through various natural, mechanical and political phenomena that form the stratum we, as humans, typically occupy, into the skies we fly through and the stars we gaze upon, before finally bursting into the ethereal and beyond, all the while exploring the varied and exciting sonic possibilities the saxophone quartet has to offer. Featuring works by Charlotte Harding, Michael Cryne, Benjamin Oliver, Clare Loveday, Anna Appleby, Denise Ondishko, and Howard Skempton, the album will be released on 1st March 2024 on the Coviello Contemporary label.

“Whether the subject is geology, oceanography, meteorology, or sociology, a stratum is a layer that is distinguished in some way from the layers below and above it …”
Tim Rutherford-Johnson – on Strata.