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Three days of silence. The mountain of the stigmata
restocked ""three days of silence" is conceived as complete phenomenological experience of listening. i have been three days within the sanctuary of la verna on the top of a mountain called "the mountain of the stigmata" in tuscany. i've lived together with the monks recording and attending the ceremonies and the sounds of the place trying to penetrate in a dimension of pure contemplation. la verna, in latin alvernia and geographically known as monte penna, is a locality on mount penna, an…
Being A Firefighter Isn\'t Just About Squirting Water
Ever since the days of Leonin and Perotin, people have been trying to pin down that special something that makes music so unique, with Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio more ardent than most in his perusal. The lavishly packaged 5th instalment in this highly limited edition series of EP's, 'Being a Firefighter Isn't Just About Squirting Water' comprises a single 20 minute composition that is a dictionary definition of delicacy. Building upwards from spectral entities, …
Siete Cantos De Espana
The three cultures at the center of the songs on this recording make a joint appearance in the finale of the Siete cantos de España. They are formed into a unified whole in Ensalada, as the soprano and the baritone begin singing together texts of Castilian, Sephardic and Arabic origin. The poems’ subjects are love, agony and death; and in order to bring them to life Halffter requires a large orchestra of about 100 musicians and two soloists with the baritone singing Spanish texts and the soprano…
Ausklang / Tableau
The title Ausklang (Final Notes, or Fading Away) is intended to be understood literally. Lachenmann's Musik für Klavier und Or-chester is centrally concerned with final notes and sounds fading away. In particular, it is concerned with piano sounds created with certain techniques (playing silently at the keyboard, special ways of operating the piano pedals, etc.). It is also concerned with the fading away of sound as the sounds of the piano are being picked up by the orchestra just as they are ab…
The butterfly and the bee
Following the success of their very first performance together at the 2004 FREEDOM OF THE CITY festival (heard on Emanem 4215), Roger Smith and Louis Moholo-Moholo went into the studio to record some more. Their second meeting went so well that they recorded enough duo improvisations for a complete CD. The resulting music is heard complete, with Smith on Spanish guitar and Moholo on augmented drum set.
Un Peu De Neige Salie
Guenter's assiduous compositions favor extremely subtle variances in electro-acoustic crackle, subsonic rumble, and subliminal frequencies exploring the limits of the audible spectrum through invisible digital edits. The title of his landmark debut album, released in 1994 and reissued through Table of the Elements in 1996, translates as "a little dirty snow," an apt description for Guenter's naturally impressionistic minimalism. UN PEU DE NEIGE SALIE opens with "Untitled I/92," a degenerating ma…
Music For Mandolin And Guitar
The minor forms represented on the present recording range from the principles of the ars nova in the Sonata piccola to the weird waltzes in the Movimenti per chitarra. With the exception of the Préludes, the pieces are to be performed as cycles. The Sonata Piccola, composed in 1986 and revised in 1996, is really based on medieval compositional principles. The names of the movements of the Movimenti per chitarra and of the Partita then suggest Baroque forms of the suite. At the same time, a logi…
No Magic Man
Finally, we have managed to track down copies of one of the most revered Sunburned Hand of the Man records in existence. Originally pressed up by the prestigious Arthur magazine's own imprint, this handmade reissue (straight from the Sunburned Men themselves) takes the factory made cd and plonks it in a very plush gatefold hard-cover with handprinted artwork. 'No-Magic Man' was the first time that the band submitted a truly coherent album, prior to this their cds although insanely good were more…
Music For Keyboard Instruments
This is the first recording of Xenakis‘ music for keyboard instruments realised by computer – unplayable by human hands! Realized by computer. 'Herma' for piano (1961); 'Mists' for piano (1981); 'Khoaï' for harpsichord (1976); 'Evryali' for piano (1973); 'Naama' for harpsichord (1984). Daniel Grossmann, MIDI programming. "This is the first recording of Xenakis' music for keyboard instruments realized by computer -- unplayable by human hands! The desire to hear a composition exactly as Xenak…
American Piano Concertos
The great creator of musical novelties hardly ever departed from the melodic harmonious basis, though: his major achievements included not least the development of new techniques for piano playing, which he also integrated in his book New Musical Resources. His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928) appears to put the spotlight on the technical and musical-historical findings, whereas in pieces such as Irish Jig and Four Irish Tales he openly and merrily inquires into his Irish background, with…
Concierto n° 1 para piano y orquesta \'Atlántico\' / La Luz del
Canary folklore: the Concierto Atlántico is based on two motifs that have been "united with the almost obsessive rhythm of the tango herréno, an essential element of the oldest folk music of the island." The piano piece Latir Isleño, on the other hand, is based on a well-known Canarian folksong, Arrorò. But traditional Canarian music is merely the starting point for these works, not their destination; their structure, like that of La Luz del Aire (The light of air), is determined by exact mathem…
Ray Night 1991-1992 Live
First ever CD by this legendary and ultra-obscure Japanese psychedelic rock group. Kousokuya are from Tokyo, have donated some spectacular tracks to the first two volumes of the Tokyo Flashback compilation series on the PSF label, and self-released an extremely ltd. LP in 1991. The band has been around for quite some time; I originally was under the impression they formed around 1984, but was recently informed that an edition featuring Nanjo and Narita from High Rise existed going back to the l…
Complete Works For Clarinet
Giacinto Scelsi was both reclusive and inexact in the way that he dated and named his compositions. This rendition of Tre Pezzi (a broad title Scelsi used numerous times for different pieces) focuses on narrow ranges in the B-flat clarinet, demonstrating the thin margin of tonal range between the phrases that come sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Kho Lho, on the other hand, pairs a clarinet and flute duet so closely that the instruments' tones merge into a thick strand of sound. Maknongan is a r…
Live!
It's hard to go wrong with Fela Kuti's work from the 1970s, and LIVE!, which features the Afrobeat innovator backed by his powerhouse band Africa '70 and ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker, is no exception. Like all of Fela's recordings from the era, LIVE! consists of just a few tracks, each of which approximates or exceeds the ten minute mark. Yet the arrangements are so dynamic on these tracks, the criss-crossing polyrhythms so absorbing, and Fela's incantatory vocals so entrancing that the long ru…
Fractal Hair Geometry
The Dekorder label's boss Marc Richter is at the creative heart of Black To Comm, and he's certainly putting himself about a bit these days: there are new albums in the works for Digitalis, and in collaboration with Boomkat barnacle, John Xela, but before all that, we've got Fractal Hair Geometry to contend with, and it's a mightily entertaining three-quarter hours of adventurous and unusual drone studies. Richter combines wordless vocals and miscellaneous electronics with Casio and Farfisa orga…
Works for Soprano
Kurtág's attachment to speech is also to be sensed in the works from this first period of maturity, something which emerged more concretely in this CD maily cenetered around the Russian language, which he learned especially in order to read Dostoevsky, and which is almost "sacred" for him, in the way that Latin was for Stravinsky. In his Russian works, opp 16 to 19, Kurtág's response to Russian prosody transforms his musical dialect with a poignant lyricism; this is to be heard both in the works…
Archival Series - Musique Concréte Soundtracks To Experimental S
Second volume, focusing on the soundtracks to walerian borowczyk's early short films. One gem each by bernard parmegiani (a 10 minute hiss-noise extravaganza) and wlodzimierz kotonski (brilliant piano-themes and raw tones).
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…
FADENKREUZE
For Elmar Lampson, composition and the phenomenology of music overlap as disciplines, and attentive listening is as critical to his works' reception as is analysis of their carefully timed structures or pitch content. Lampson's String Quartet No. 2 (1992-1998) operates on several aural planes, some near and easy to distinguish, and others more remote and indistinct. The material shifts between active, atonal flurries and soft, almost lyrical passages of modal simplicity, and the extremely soft d…
des Nichts, verlorene Schatten / l\'étendue des fins éclats, épa
Concentrated chamber music: Gerald Eckert captures the world of sounds in its manifold forms and shapes with meticulous care and maximum individuality.