Composition / All styles

**2015 edition. 504 pages big book, edited by Larry Polansky**Essential music-theoretical writings from a giant of avant-garde composing  One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music, tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch arranges, edits, and revises James Tenney's hard-to-find writings into one indispensable collection. Selections focus on his fundamental con…

Foliage is a long-form graphic music score by Elliott Sharp, consisting of eighty risograph prints offered as abstract instructions open to any number of realisations by any instrumentalist or ensemble. Sharp works in the lineage of post-1945 graphic notation but with a contemporary twist: the score was produced by routing his own conventionally written music through graphics editing software, distorting, layering, inverting and blurring it until notation explodes into retinal artwork.

*200 copies limited edition* Jun-Y Ciao (born in 1978 in Shanghai) is a musician whose main instruments are sax and clarinet. Having studied in Dusseldorf and Mainz, Germany, in the second half of the 2000s, he is currently based in Shanghai and Dusseldorf. He has numerous releases on Zhu Wenbo's cassette label Zoomin' Night. Beijing-based Zhu Wenbo is known both for his own performance activities and for running Zoomin' Night, which plans events and releases cassettes. A musician with many conn…

*200 copies limited edition* Philadelphia-based artist Morgan Evans-Weiler performs on violin and is known as a member of the contemporary classical music ensemble Ordinary Affects. Percussionist Carlo Costa, who was born in Rome, has lived in New York since 2005. "Object, Monochord, Circle," a collection of works composed by Evans-Weiler for violin and percussion, is made up of 12 pieces under 10 minutes long (almost all are between 1 and 5 minutes). Sustained violin and percussion sounds flow …

*2025 stock* Renowned Japanese composer Jo Kondo unveils his captivating album “Near And Far,” performed by The Cambridge New Musik Players and conducted by Paul Hoskins. This distinguished release, first presented in 1996, features five transcendent works that invite listeners into Kondo’s unique sound world across 47 minutes of meticulously crafted chamber music. With a deep sensitivity to both space and sonority, “Near And Far” balances subtle instrumental interplay with Kondo’s signature min…

*2025 stock* Renowned Japanese composer Jo Kondo is celebrated for his unique and refined approach to contemporary classical music. This recording offers an intimate journey into Kondo’s distinctive musical world, marked by clarity, restraint, and subtle yet powerful expression.   In Yokohama brings together a collection of works that exemplify Kondo’s lifelong exploration into sound, silence, and the delicate spaces in between. Throughout the album, the listener is invited to experience music t…

This album features two film scores by Satoshi Satō. Scooping Water, the Moon in Hand is a documentary film tracing the life of legendary poet and Chinese literary scholar Ye Jiaying (1924–). It won the Best Documentary Award at the 33rd China Golden Rooster Awards (2020), often referred to as China's Academy Awards. Ye Jiaying is also a scholar of Du Fu, and Satō Sōmei set Du Fu's poem “Eight Poems on Autumn Feelings” to music at the request of the film director. Director Oguri Kōhei's Foujita …

Japanese guitarist Tsunehito Tsuchihashi, celebrated for his versatile artistry across both classical and contemporary repertoires, proudly presents his debut solo album, “Crypte.” This extraordinary recording, released in April 2025, brings together the visionary works of five contemporary composers, most written on commission and premiered by Tsuchihashi himself, showcasing his commitment to expanding the guitar’s expressive potential through innovative collaborations. “Crypte” is a testament …

Hardback cover edition, 1070 pages (!) Cornelius Cardew was a musician of genius for whom Life and Art were as one. He was a radical, both artistically and politically, becoming a tireless activist and uncompromising Marxist-Leninist. Passion and imagination governed all he did: his boldness and humanity continue to intrigue and inspire. John Tilbury, whose close friendship with Cardew dates from their first concert together, in January 1960, has worked for many years on this biography, and brin…

"I remember the first time I sat at a piano, my feet dangling over the edge. As I tested the keys, I felt a wonder and joy at the sound coming out of the instrument. I still feel that joy every time I sit at a piano. In the two drone works in this release: "December" and "Thomas," I was intrigued in the contrast of the rhythm of the hammers striking the strings with the rhythm of the swelling overtones. On "Thomas", the trumpet tones blend and contrast, sometimes revealing the piano, and sometim…

*200 copies limited edition* “Songs of Erosion” is a project by Clara Levy & Victor Guaita Igual revisiting the 13th-century Spanish songbook “Cantigas de Santa María” through the lens of erosion. Rejecting a historicist interpretation, Clara Levy and Victor Guaita Igual develop a set of instructions inspired by geological processes. These serve as a basis for approaching pitch and rhythmic material, shaping it into new compositions. Among the cantigas explored by the duo, this record focuses on…

*200 copies limited edition* Michaela Turcerová’s compositions unfold in slow motion. The saxophonist and composer’s glacial music zeroes in on the granularities of each note as it rings, soaking in every subtle shift in texture and pitch. Šumum exemplifies this patient approach to writing music, branching out from themes of loss and togetherness into an intricate tapestry of introspective sound. These four pieces invite deep collaboration between performers, who together shape the music through…

*100 copies limited edition* Transparent duo, for 2 string instruments. On transparent paper. One set of pages indicates bowing. The second indicates the direction and length of mostly inaudible glissando. Players overlay pages and play any number of combinations. Field recordings were taken one morning and evening, in the summer of 2025 around Narrowsburg. "Through my music, I create situations for people to play and be together, to sustain a community, to share sounds and ideas in a welcoming …

** 2026 Stock ** Satie is the point where Erik Satie’s so‑called “furniture music” stops being background and becomes a way of listening to the world. In these recordings, Aldo Ciccolini approaches Satie not as a quirky footnote to Debussy and Ravel but as a composer who quietly rewired 20th‑century music from the inside. The repertoire typically centres on the iconic cycles - Trois Gymnopédies, Trois Gnossiennes and companion pieces like the Nocturnes and Trois morceaux en forme de poire - work…

On Pax, Arvo Pärt’s most emblematic pieces are gathered into a single, quietly radiant anthology, turning his tintinnabuli language into a long meditation on stillness, vulnerability, and the possibility of peace in a noisy, fractured world.

Unreleased material composed by Bernard Parmegiani in 1992

On Reich/Richter, Steve Reich joins Ensemble Intercontemporain and conductor George Jackson for a single 37‑minute arc of pulsed colour, a chamber‑orchestral score conceived in dialogue with Gerhard Richter’s moving stripes, where pattern, blur, and return become musical form.

On Black Angels, Kronos Quartet turns George Crumb’s Vietnam-era nightmare into the axis of a stark, haunted program, binding early music, American modernism and Shostakovich’s war-torn melancholy into one of the group’s darkest, most enduring statements.

On Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet turns four string quartets into a self‑portrait of the composer, charting his path from theatre and film scores to music written directly for the group, all in a language of pulsed clarity and slowly deepening harmony.

A collection of writings with 2 CDs of sound examples, based on talks presented over several years, describing in some detail the compositional approaches and working methods involved in the production of many of Trevor Wishart's musical works. Includes a discussion of sound diffusion, and diffusion scores (with worked examples) for most of the electro-acoustics works. Sound Composition is a collection of writings with accompanying sound examples detailing the composition of musical works where …

Original 1991 LP edition! Stepping into the territory of Gavin Bryars is like coming home, so familiar are the morphemes with which he composes his musical language. One of the most significant recordings in the Bryars catalogue, this disc offers a fine condensation of his spirited and nostalgic sensibilities. After the Requiem dates from 1990 and follows his Cadman Requiem of the previous year. After completing the latter, which was written for the Hilliard Ensemble in memory of Bryars’s friend…

In the new work ''Shlimazl'' by the Swiss composer Michael Wertmüller, symphony orchestra and big band merge into a virtuoso, polymetric organism that not only transcends styles, but also a perceived linearity of time. In doing so, he explicitly takes up the rich tradition of the big band, and revitalises it within the symphonic context under new auspices and allows it to take off. All the soloists act like a picture within a picture within the big band, which oscillates between musical nucleus,…

Rand Steiger’s Introspective Trilogy is a series of string quartets with electronics composed over a period of eight years for the JACK Quartet. Reflecting on emotional states through musical expression, the quartets explore intense feelings of anger, frustration, and despair in response to alarming political developments in the U.S. and globally, from 2016 when the project began, to catastrophic recent developments. Steiger relates the resurgence of xenophobia and well-known elements of authori…

The pianistic writing of Giorgos Koumendakis represents a rare encounter of delicacy, intellectual concentration, and profound compositional coherence. It belongs to a free post-modernity, rooted in the continuity of certain Eastern European composers who developed an independent and original modernity. The cycle Mediterranean Desert, which forms the central axis of this album, is a work for piano consisting of 22 pieces inspired by Mediterranean flora and fauna. It offers a distinctive sound ma…

This album is intended to be a retrospective view of Luigi Manfrin’s compositional journey. Rather than following a chronological order, it identifies loops that run through his musical production: recurrences, foldings and returns that never replicate the same pattern, but instead reactivate structural tensions in different contexts. At the core is the idea of sound as an immanent experience. The unity of the album lies not in the identity of its materials, but in the constant questioning of th…

*150 copies limited edition* Composer Vasco Mendonça presents his third album “Third Places”. The album brings together a collection of landmark performances and features some of the leading names in international contemporary music, including countertenor Iestyn Davies, mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj, the Porto Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble Het Muziek, and conductors Brad Lubman and Ernest Martínez Izquierdo. More than just a record, “Third Places” stands as a space for artistic…

Founded in 1997 by Cyril Secq and Yvan Ros as a guitar/drums duo, Astrïd subsequently expanded and settled around the violin player Vanina Andreani (1998), followed by the clarinet player Guillaume Wickel (2005). The core of the group is based in Nantes, France.  Astrïd’s instrumental and expansive music has been inspired by improvised music, folk, post-rock and jazz, as well as by classical and contemporary composers, from Ravel to Arvo Pärt. Their work has been released across a number of albu…

Apartment House presents seven works from John Cage's early period, before he began his systematic exploration of chance procedures. This repertoire captures a transitional moment when Cage had moved beyond traditional methods but before he devised new formal systems—a period when, as pianist Kerry Yong notes, he was "forced to be guided by their instincts and intuition" producing "extraordinary music." The program balances what Yong calls "simply gorgeous / gorgeously simple pieces like 'Dream'…

What happens when electroacoustic thought migrates into the physical realm of acoustic instruments? Visiting Cloud documents a three-year collaboration between Finnish composer Marja Ahti and Italian ensemble Blutwurst, where two of Ahti's electroacoustic works - Fluctuating Streams (from The Current Inside, 2019) and Chora (from Vegetal Negatives, 2018) - undergo radical transformation into acoustic versions that stretch, deepen, and reimagine their original forms. Initiated by Blutwurst in 202…

Morton Feldman's Intermission 6 (1953) is a sparse piano piece that typically lasts between 3 and 12 minutes in standard performances. Finnish experimental musician Antti Tolvi has created a radical 72-minute realization that extends the work's meditation on silence and resonance to an unprecedented duration. Tolvi discovered the piece through Philip Thomas's five-CD Feldman Piano box set on Another Timbre, becoming fascinated by Intermission 6 as "the piece which has the most silence in it, and…

James Opstad is probably better known as the double bassist with Apartment House than as a composer. But this should change with this release—the first CD of his music as a composer. Five beautiful pieces tracking the evolution of Opstad's work as it moves from textural electro-acoustic music to pieces exploring the layering of instruments playing at slightly different tempi. The album begins with "Nymphaea" (2020), performed by the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys, piano; George Barton, vibraphone), follow…

Ark Hive of A Live is a 4 CD set of recordings by Andrew Poppy, along with a 128 page book, including writing by Andrew Poppy; an introduction by Paul Morley; other writing by Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English; and archival photographs.

The second part in a collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces, cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965.

2026 Repress. Mega-Tip! Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint. The Sinking of the Titanic, Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic…

2025 repress. For five decades, Harold Budd stood on the forefront of the West Coast avant-garde. Born in Los Angeles, he studied with Schoenberg-pupil Gerald Strang and began teaching at CalArts in 1970. While searching for his own voice, he was influenced as much by abstract expressionist painters as by John Cage and Morton Feldman. In his work, Budd brought delicate, slowing-moving melodies to the foreground – creating a new musical language based on “eternally pretty music” and smooth surfac…

Many Many Women by Petr Kotík is a large-scale composition for voices and instruments from 1975-78 on the text of Gertrude Stein's novella of the same name. It was published in Paris in 1910 as part of the book G.M.P. - Gertrude, Matisse, Picasso. In 1972, the book was published again by Dick Higgins in his publishing venture Something Else Press. Kotík used the complete text, which determined the length of the piece. Inspired by his close collaboration with the composer and singer Julius Eastma…

**LP version. Individually hand numbered strictly limited edition 300 copies in premium white audiophile virgin vinyl** "Exclusive sleeve notes by Paul Roland, John Greaves, Michael Tanner and Max Marchini. Produced by Max Marchini. A decisive step forward, a new milestone in the extraordinary discography of Lino Capra Vaccina. An album of iridescent introspectivity; a mandala of unheard sounds, a new way for contemporary minimalism. My collaboration with Lino has led me to discover recesses, re…

*300 copies limited edition* "Keith was a dear friend firstly. He was a generous, wonderful person and, of couse, a genius, a true artist. We all owe so much to him for we started our label with his critically acclaimed piano solo “Mujician IV - Live in Piacenza”, way back in 2015. We welcome this album as a real blessing for the soul. So long dear Keith: your music shall live forever." - Max Marchini Music for Labyrinths is an open live project for a soundtracks of labyrinths around the world a…

**CD version. Individually hand numbered strictly limited edition 300 copies in golden audiophile cd** "Exclusive sleeve notes by Paul Roland, John Greaves, Michael Tanner and Max Marchini. Produced by Max Marchini. A decisive step forward, a new milestone in the extraordinary discography of Lino Capra Vaccina. An album of iridescent introspectivity; a mandala of unheard sounds, a new way for contemporary minimalism. My collaboration with Lino has led me to discover recesses, reflections and ref…

'When I first had the chance to listen at Markus Stockhausen performing live at Conservatorio Nicolini in Piacenza, some years ago, I immediately had the intuition of this musical meeting. I was sure that the poetry of Lino Capra Vaccina will melt with Markus’ one in a completely intuitive, spontaneous way, creating something really unusual, really new. When, some months later, I had the chance to produce then meet the great Santoor player Alireza Mortazavi for the album Hamdelaneh (with Markus,…