Moth Quartet - Tundra (2025) Hi-Res

There is a captivating stillness that pervades during the beginning of Tundra, the new album by Pōneke-based composer ensemble Moth Quartet. No individual instrument is discernible from the sustained ethereal chords, yet the precarious quality that accompanies the group’s collaborative improvisation is still tangible. From within this stillness emerges the icy, crystalline landscape of Tundra.

For cellist Nicholas Denton Protsack, this kind of environmental exploration sits at the core of the album. “It’s not so much a question of making something that didn’t exist before, as it is a question of discovering the sort of world around you.”

This reference to a world both tangible and vivid certainly comes across in the album. Its first track, Tundra (Pt 1), patiently develops its sustained texture, often so gradually that these changes are almost imperceptible. One gets the sense of looking up at the vast, slowly shifting sky of some new world, as the quartet navigate this terrain.

Within the world of Tundra, temporality at times seems distorted, at which point the logic of what violinist Tristan Carter calls “Tundra time” takes over. Halfway into the first track I became distinctly aware that I couldn’t tell if I had been listening for minutes or hours, a feeling that became increasingly exhilarating as the album progressed.

Now might be a good time clarify that, like the quartet’s first album, Scree Scrub Mountain Sky, Tundra is entirely improvised. What this makes all the more impressive, then, is the quartet’s cohesion—nothing is out of place, no one oversteps or creates an unwanted distraction that might break the spell.

It takes an immense amount of trust and mutual understanding to successfully perform like this. Together now for just over three years, violist Elliot Vaughan points out that the group has a great deal of clarity “between [them] and what the sound is. At any given point there’ll be a set of sounds we can go to that blend.”

This is where having an ensemble made up of musician-composers is a huge strength. As Vaughan explains, “composition, if it’s notated, there’s a very slow conversation that happens where you finish a whole piece and maybe other composers hear it… In Moth, you can talk at the same time and cover a great deal of ground.”

Towards the end of Tundra (Pt 2) we hear this dialogue in full flow. A sustained, lush violin melody emerges from amidst the swirling texture of the quartet. The simple phrase—hardly a melody at all, really—is imbued with emotion only possible because it emanates straight from the composer. The other players step back, allowing these drawn-out notes room to soar, before this voice melts back into Tundra’s homogeneous landscape.