Kaleidoscope

06/05/2026

❤️🎻🎶

06/05/2026

🎶 New album released today and available on Apple Music, Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube — Breathers by Alex Dowling!

Breathers is a collection of pieces that guide your breath.

Written for string quartet, the contours of the sound bring you through a range of breathwork meditation techniques that each have a different effect on the mind and body.

Each piece begins with the inhale so hopefully it's easy to follow.

Try closing your eyes and let the music guide your breath in and out. It shouldn’t feel forced.

The music uses these breathwork techniques:

Coherent Breathing (5-second inhale, 5-second exhale) - reduces stress/anxiety and improves heart rate variability

Slow Exhale (3 or 4-second inhale, 6 or 8-second exhale) - deeply relaxing and activates the vagus nerve which helps to calm the nervous system and lower the heart rate

Box Breathing (4-second inhale, 4-second hold, 4-second exhale, 4-second hold) - helps to bring balance, improves mental clarity and focus

Breathing in and out through the nose is a good idea, although for longer exhales it’s often useful to breathe out through a small opening in the lips to help extend the breath.

And if all else fails, just keep breathing.

Released on Little Magic Records - June 5th 2026

Performed by members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra (string quartet)

Violin I: Luke Hsu
Violin II: Ann Miller
Viola: Arianna Smith
Cello: Rainer Crosett

Composed, Produced & Mixed by Alex Dowling

Mastering: Mike Tierney
Recording Engineer: Michael O'Brien
Recorded at Windmill Lane Recording Studios, Dublin

Album Artwork:
Image Credit: ©Piper Shepard, "In a World", 2022, hand-cut muslin, gesso
Photo Credit: Dan Meyers

Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon

06/04/2026

🎹 China Gates by composer John Adams is a mesmerizing journey through shifting patterns, shimmering harmonies, and constant motion. Written in 1977 for solo piano, the work unfolds like a musical landscape—simple gestures transforming into something unexpectedly profound.

🎥 Beautifully performed by Kevin Ahfat at the 2025 Santa Monica Music Festival, check out the full recording on our YouTube channel (link in our bio)!

06/04/2026

🔥🎻

06/03/2026

Have you ever gone to a concert expecting to quietly listen… and suddenly become part of the performance?

Here’s another excerpt from Peter S. Shin’s soshi so$$$hi, performed by Garrett Arney and Jeff Stern at the 2025 Santa Monica Music Festival.

🎥 Check out our full recording on our YouTube channel (link in our bio)!

06/02/2026

Here’s an excerpt from Peter S. Shin’s soshi so$$$hi, brilliantly performed by Garrett Arney and Jeff Stern at the 2025 Santa Monica Music Festival.

🎥 Check out our full recording on our YouTube channel (link in our bio)!

Program Note:
The word “baby” is one of the most frequented lyrics in K-Pop girl group songs, but that’s also true for Beyonce, The Beatles, Prince, and Aretha Franklin. What differentiates K-Pop is the specific bubblegum pop sub-genre that exhibits the Korean concept of aegyo which is not so much of a personality, but a character that forces a cute, affectionate, and often humorous and flirtatious innocence—in other words, acting and sounding like a baby.

I sample interviews from Music Bank, one of Korea’s broadcast music programs, where each performing group recites a formulaic countdown and answers questions one-by-one in rapid fire succession before performing on stage. I take vocal snippets from love songs of women pining over men and obscure the gendered aural signifiers in a queering of a genre and society that falls behind in LGBTQ advocacy and visibility. From aegyo soundbites to bizarre and campy English lyrics, I used Meta’s machine learning hybrid source separation software to isolate vocals from some of the most iconic and representative songs in this particular sub-genre by the following girl groups within the decade of 2010 to the present: SNSD (Girls’ Generation), APink, GFriend, Red Velvet, TWICE, and STAYC.

While scrutinizing the exploitation of these young women, the work also recognizes their individual artistries that continue to captivate their growing fandoms.

06/02/2026

05/31/2026

Here’s an excerpt from the world premiere of It’s Time by Pamela Z!

🎥 Check out our full recording on our YouTube channel (link in our bio)!

Program note from Pamela Z:
The idea for this work springs from a seemingly universal shift in people’s feelings about their sense of time. Since the advent of the global pandemic, I began noticing marked distortion in my own temporal perception. I frequently caught myself referring to 2019 as “last year”, even as it stretched back an increasing number of years behind us. Many of my friends and acquaintances reported similar experiences, prompting me to do some online research on the topic. Back in 2018 Benjamin Mitchell had asked me to write a piece for the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, and a full five years elapsed before I managed to compose It’s Time. When I finally got to work making this piece, it seemed appropriate to start with language about the nature of time that I had divined during my web searches. I recorded myself reading those text fragments, assembled them into a sonic foundation for the composition, and extracted pitches and rhythms from the speech sounds to compose the melodic and harmonic phrases that the orchestra plays.