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The ins and outs
This is a studio recording, and thus somewhat different in approach and tone to the group's continuous live sets; an example can be heard on a compilation from the 2003 Freedom of the City festival. Here the emphasis is more on developing specific ideas with a consistent logic than on modulating between passages of tension and climax. On the longest track, the 13-minute Absolute Xero, the logic is sure and compelling; Skzypce is more playful, with Wilkinson vocalising through his reed and Noble,…
Oboe Concertos
The oboe more than suited Maderna's partiality for clear structures and sensual-concrete sounds. It was not without good reason that at a time when the supply of music dedicated to the oboe was anything but plenty, Maderna wrote, not one, not two, but three concertos (besides several other works for oboe) for this "nasal" sounding member of the woodwind family. The first oboe concerto (1963) seems almost classical in its character, in the interplay of oboe and orchestra, or involving other instr…
Sugar tip
Last winter, when BLOODYMINDED was preparing to go on tour in the U.K., I was put in contact with Lee Stokoe, who was touring at the same time as us, under the name Inseminoid, with George Proctor of Mutant Ape. Not only was Lee beyond accommodating about letting us piggyback on the Inseminoid/Fecalove tour, but he was kind enough to also drive us around the U.K. for several days. I returned to the States with a thick stack of Culver CDs, which took some time to get through. I was most pleased t…
A Priori
“Once some music dropped through my letter-box; let’s summon their sounds into our world now, and deliver their names as Roses or Stations. The picture they imagined was both clear and cryptic: the certainties of the 17th century holding tight the ugly beauty that we now see scattered around us. I loved these CDs by Jozef van Wissem, A Rose by any other Name and Stations of the Cross. And then I received a new album, A Priori, and I immediately played it and heard its stark and repetitive intens…
Cipher
It has been Chicago, not New York, that has been the confluence of music of Europe, jazz of the Americas, and improvised music. Whereas NYC claims all things to be "New York" (sort of like Al Gore inventing the internet), music makers in Chicago identify and defer to varying regional influences.Such is the case on Cipher, where seemingly disparate forces come together to create heady and engaging music. But then leader Josh Abrams has made a career of such things. He began with the Philadelphia …
Einem Luftigen Akustischen Kosmos Entgegen
Collaboration performance by this two infamous german visual artists, writers & sound-poets, recorded at Lyrik-Kabinett München, June 1991. This is Carlfriedrich Claus' only sound-collaboration ever. Both artists prepared a 60-minute backing-tape and wrote a detailled score for live-performed poetry and voice-operations. In addition to these fixed compositions they left room for spontaneous improvisation and the use of small cymbals ('tschinkas'). This is like nothing else. Very serious, …
Quilisma
The succinctness of his work will first become fully apparent when it becomes possible to view the second half of the twentieth century from something more like a bird’s-eye view.
Piano Works 1
Composer and neurologist Diego Minciacchi is as likely to publish a paper on motor skills as he is to compose music that mixes scientific and poetic ideas; yet this fact should not intimidate listeners new to his work, who might worry that the compositions on this 2005 release from Col Legno are too cerebral or complicated to appreciate. What they should know upfront, however, is that Minciacchi is a product of the generation of composers who absorbed the lessons of the 1960s and '70s avant-gard…
Electronic music
Iannis Xenakis is without a doubt one of the major figures in the development of music in the 20th century. In 1957, he joined Pierre Schaeffer and others at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and it was there that Xenakis composed his early works for electronic tape. Xenakis' distinct sound is already apparent in 'Diamorphoses' (1957) which incorporates sounds of distant earthquakes, car crashes, jet engines, and other 'noise-like' sounds, and 'Concret PH' (1958), based on the s…
The boys
Sound-track to the prize-winning movie. The Necks break with convention here and put several shorter pieces on one CD. All gems and all pared back to the reiterative imperfection that is the Necks' unique and glorious signature. This a band that seems to be coming into its golden age. Prodigious music and highly recommended.
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
Hardly any other composer has ever been as far removed from conservatism as Helmut Lachenmann. In all his oeuvre his listeners are never permitted to lean back comfortably even for a moment in expectation of the well-known and familiar. Again and again Lachenmann succeeded, and still succeeds, in shaking the "aesthetic apparatus," the system of conventional formulas and phrases established throughout decades and centuries, to its very foundations. Intérieur I (1966), a piece for percussion solo,…
Enviromental Meditations
The fact that Maurizio Bianchi is back is something that is known. I think the new age muzak he created right after his return should be seen as a false start, as since quite some time now, he returned to the world of noise and that is a territory that we can safely call his territory. Bianchi here teams up with one Maor Appelbaum, who is a member of various Israeli project such Poochlatz, Vultures, IWR and who has various solo projects Screening , Vectorscope and Plated Steel – not that I heard…
Night Studies
Somewhere between Alex- ander Rodchenko, Jackson Pollock and Charles Ives: Marino Formenti's piano studies based on an instal- lation by Florian Pumhösl as a listening experience! The brilliant Italian pianist has placed compositions by Charles Ives (»Thoreau« from the Concord Sonata, the song »Tom Sails Away«, and »Study 11«) under his magnifying glass and studied them, has taken them apart, searched them for resonances, assonances and silences, and confronted the results with Ives’ own methods…
Une Soirée Vian
The Soirée Vian, a kind of meta-cabaret created in 1991 based on a commission by the WDR, develops along the narrative red thread of Boris Vian's novel The red grass and turns into a dizzying journey through the absurdly crazy worlds of Vian's universe. The fullness and polystylism of this venture undertaken by Denys Bouliane might indeed almost make the listener dizzy, not least due to the fantastic performance by the electro-acoustic ensemble "Série B." Their "musical roller coaster ride from …
Vita di San Francesco
When, in the summer of 1992, Lutz-Werner Hesse visited St. Francis’s hometown in Umbria, he was deeply moved by Giotto’s frescos in the Basilica. Using prints of the frescos, Hesse later developed a dramatic sequence, which was meant to serve as the basis for a composition revolving around the life of the saint. Gongs had always held a special fascination for Hesse. So, for this piece, he pitted 13 gongs against one organ: “The organ, I thought, is a particularly suitable partner for the gongs s…
The Rara Requiem
Added to these are bits and pieces of first names of real people and opera characters, and numerous quotes from older works by Sylvano Bussotti – who combines it all to a work that is also a grand opera: The Rara Requiem was written as the third part (acts 4 and 5) of Lorenzaccio (1968-72), the story of a renaissance man. A pandemonium of sounds, the subtotal of Bussotti's previous oeuvre – and the celebration of a proud renaissance man who confronts death with the courage of contempt. "The musi…
Orchestral Works
The second CD of col legno's Wien Modern Edition is dedicated to Luciano Berio, who throughout his life kept on searching for new sounds, and new instrumental and orchestral organizing principles in his work. His Sequences for solo instruments are among the most important landmarks in recent music; later on, Berio decided to "comment" on some of these notoriously complex solo works from an orchestral perspective. Chemins and Chemins IIb are adaptations of the Sequences for harp and viola. "The b…
Guitar Album
This enterprising programme of 20th century music, recorded in England by the distinguished Japanese guitarist Azusa Shimizu, contains first recordings of pieces by Højsgaard and Mamiya, as well as offering a rare opportunity to hear the sonata by Antonio José, who was brutally murdered during the Spanish Civil War. An outstanding CD for all guitar music enthusiasts.
Opus 3.1
special price offer: Opus 3.1 consists of 20 tracks divided into five acts. Each cut--or scene--represents a different percussion instrument. Some are quiet, others cacophonous, but even the slow, stark resonance of a ringing gong maintains a sharp level of intensity. The sole drawback is inconsistency: After being soothed into a reflective trance state, the listener is occasionally jolted by the strident opening clang of the subsequent cut. Ghost Stories, a 1-track, 68-minute live recordi…
Piano Duet
Before the epigones take over the stage we are given a chance to hear out Bach himself: the unfinished four-voice Contrapunctus XIV from the Art of the Fugue marks the starting point of Andreas Grau's and Götz Schumacher's remarkable exploration of the Bach cosmos. In the Berlin autograph of the Contrapunctus XIV the place where the score breaks off is marked by an inscription: "At the point where the name BACH is introduced in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died." Even though fr…