Album, (2025)

There is a captivating stillness that pervades during the beginning of Tundra [...] 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.

– Raf Hosking, Five Lines

Tundra is the second studio album of Aotearoa New Zealand's Moth Quartet, comprised of composer-performers Tristan Carter (violin), Salina Fisher (violin), Elliot Vaughan (viola), and Nicholas Denton Protsack (violoncello). True to its namesake, it is a meditation in contrasts; vast, expansive, and gradually shifting harmonies pervade the work—yet contained within these textures are delicate and complex timbres, creaks and ethereal sweeps of bow hair. This sound-world invoking both expansive topographies and intricate botanical microcosms, treats tundra not as an object of musical depiction, but as a living environment that each member of the quartet must collectively navigate through sensitive and deliberate applications of free improvisation.

Read Moth Quartet: Spectres of Whenua, an essay about Tundra by Noel Meek

Album, (2025)

Partial Forms is a sonic journey through shifting terrains of sound and space, featuring acclaimed Canadian composer-cellist Nicholas Denton Protsack alongside preeminent New Zealand composer Michael Norris on live electronics. Together, they blur the boundaries between acoustic and digital, natural and artificial, offering an immersive suite of works shaped by environmental themes.

With evocative titles such as ‘Aeolian Fields’, ‘Written in Sand’ and ‘Spectral Cascades’, each track invites the listener into a world where nature, memory and technology intertwine. From the meditative cloudscapes of ‘Cirrus Drift’ to the subterranean echoes of ‘In the Refuge of a Cave’, Partial Forms is a meditative and multisensory exploration of place and environment.

Album, (2024)

Embark on a lush and daring auditory voyage with Moth Quartet's debut album, Scree Scrub Mountain Sky. Comprised of composer-performers Salina Fisher (violin), Tristan Carter (violin), Elliot Vaughan (viola), and Nicholas Denton Protsack (cello), the Wellington (NZ)-based ensemble reimagines the modern string quartet as a vehicle for bold, spontaneous composition. Moth Quartet composed Scree Scrub Mountain Sky in the rugged landscapes of Tongariro National Park on New Zealand’s North Island, immersing themselves directly in the natural environment, where they listened and collectively responded to the water, trees, land and weather, bringing these ideas back to a makeshift recording studio at night. The album's title serves as a portal into this reactive style of composition—one that aims to transport listeners directly into the heart of the mountains, rivers, forests, and even skies of Tongariro. The result is a transportive journey, where unbridled creativity transfigures itself into the raw beauty of the New Zealand wilderness.

Album, (2023)

From genre-bending, screeching highs to delicate, filigree lows, Far From the Tree, the debut album of Branchroot Ensemble, delivers an unapologetic and volatile mish-mash of experimental improvisation. The trio, comprised of Andrew Stauffer (drums), Darren Williams (tenor sax), and Nicholas Denton Protsack (cello), creates bold, unreserved, and unique sounds that defy categorization and challenge expectations. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes chaotic, the album showcases the eclectic influences of the musicians, ranging from free jazz and contemporary classical to avant-rock and folk. Each track is spontaneously created in a single take, without overdubs or edits, capturing the raw energy of the trio as they weave intricate textures and melodies as a singular unit. Far From the Tree is a daring and adventurous debut that invites you to join the Branchroot Ensemble on their sonic explorations.

Album, (2021)

FIREBIRD is a full-length album of spoken voice and experimental music by Kythe Heller (text and voice) and duo Sounds Like Things: Andrew Stauffer (composition and percussion), and Nicholas Denton Protsack (composition and cello). The work, a realization of Heller’s Massachusetts Book Award-nominated poetry collection of the same name (Arrowsmith Press), FIREBIRD draws from a vast array of sonic resources that include spoken verse, vocalizations, cello, pitched and unpitched percussion, hammer dulcimer, bells, found objects (including boiling water, gardening gloves, fire, and snow), and field recordings. This sonic world probes the capacity of the human spirit to endure under extreme conditions. Here, fire is both a destructive and a unifying force, altering people and landscapes. Runaways, the sick and the poor, a forest and a smoldering mattress—these stunning images burn themselves into the listener’s imagination. The female body becomes the site of trauma and myth, a place where “everything is burning, has been and is always burning.”