Alex Ross, The New Yorker

“The Spektral’s major project of the benighted year 2020, though, has been an album titled “Experiments in Living,” which is certain to appear on my year-end list of notable recordings. It is a tour-de-force survey of repertory, classic and modern, demonstrating in almost textbook fashion how nineteenth-century Romanticism evolved into twentieth-century modernism and then into the all-devouring experimentalism of recent decades… A delicate interplay of short motives in Cheung’s “The Real Book of Fake Tunes,” for flute and string quartet—Claire Chase joins the Spektral players on the recording—is akin to the contrapuntal games of the Schoenberg…The Spektral has accomplished the signal service of obliterating the dividing line between past and present, tradition and avant-garde; chronological barriers collapse, and the sounds roam free.”

Alex Ross, The New Yorker, November 2020