Albums
Strange Machines
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Kareem Roustom: Shades of Night
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Kyle Werner: Kairos
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Strange Machines ❋ Kareem Roustom: Shades of Night ❋ Kyle Werner: Kairos ❋
STRANGE MACHINES
Voices of a new generation, powered by dreams of the future.
In a world where it feels like technology is tearing us apart, the Balourdet Quartet illustrates how it can bring us together. After commissioning Strange Machines through the Chamber Music America’s Classical Commissioning Grant, and concurrently witnessing the exponential rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence), the Balourdet began to take on the intermingling of modern technology and the future of the string quartet. This recording spans nearly 600 years of music, ranging from the Renaissance to the present in new commissions, some of which utilize generative and predictive AI. If the string quartet itself is the ultimate superhuman device, this album explores extending this device beyond its traditional limitations through new dimensions of language and emotion.
When the Balourdet Quartet first began imagining Strange Machines, they expected to make an album about technology.
What emerged was something deeply more personal.
Across six centuries of music, the composers on this recording continually return to the same human concerns:
love, memory, grief, hope, curiosity, and wonder.
The machines change. The questions remain.
Looking back, the quartet sees the project not as a statement but as an invitation.
…the conversation, as the quartet discovered, is only beginning…
Strange Machines traces a continuous thread through human history: our enduring desire to build tools that help us better understand ourselves. In the end, the strangest machine on this album may not be artificial intelligence at all. It may be the string quartet itself—four individuals becoming something greater than the sum of their parts, transforming wood, wire, and human imagination into meaning.
Kareem Roustom: Shades of Night
Roustom’s new collection expands the Western classical repertoire in notable ways, creating rare opportunities to experience Palestinian and Iraqi folk songs in the language of string quartet. Serving at once as a reflection on his multifaceted Arab-Western identity, and on the current tumultuous time for American democracy and the planet, his music observes and transcends cultural borders, allowing us to recognize and connect with one another.
Leading with “Four Dances from Clorinda Agonistes,” Roustom crafts a bold new retelling of Monteverdi’s 1638 opera, Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. He shares: “Unity (We Dance Together)” is based on an Iraqi line dance called Chobi. Though refugees often carry very little with them when fleeing violence, they can carry knowledge and memories of song, dance, poetry, and art. This movement is an homage to both the things that are left behind and those that are carried in the heart.”
Kyler Werner: Kairos
I have chosen the title Kairos for my debut album of compositions as this richly meaningful Greek word conveys a sense of a significant moment or season of time. While the word Chronos refers to quantitative, measurable time, Kairos refers to a deeper, qualitative view of time. This music is the fruit of a season in which I turned over a new page as a composer, digging deeper into the forms and vocabulary of the historic classical music tradition, and delving into some of the most vital themes of human existence – time, birth, life, death, and love.
Kairos was recorded at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in December 2024, was produced and engineered by Konrad Strauss, and was released by Centaur Records on February 27th 2026.