Composer/multi-instrumentalist Jeff Parker's album Suite for Max Brown—named for and dedicated to his mother—features nine original songs plus "Gnarciss," an interpretation of Joe Henderson's "Black Narcissus," and John Coltrane's "After the Rain." Parker plays the majority of the instruments on the album. "I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn't really know I could do," Parker says.

The original cast recording for Dave Malloy's musical Octet features a score for an a cappella chamber choir and an original libretto inspired by internet comment boards, scientific debates, religious texts, and Sufi poetry. Octet, which premiered at the Signature Theatre in 2019, explores addiction and nihilism within the messy context of twenty-first century technology. "The most original and topical musical of the year," says the New York Times; "the sublime a cappella chamber opera is a portrait in song of perhaps the greatest David and Goliath struggle of our time."

Kronos Quartet’s groundbreaking 2002 collaboration with composer Terry Riley, Sun Rings, will be available in full for the first time on August 30. Riley incorporates into his composition "space sounds" (plasma waves) that NASA had collected from the Voyager probes, as well as a choir that represents, in his words, "the voice of humanity in its struggle to understand the meaning of our place in this unfathomable universe." Musical America calls it "a spaceship that faces ahead into the planets but also looks back toward its starting point on Earth."