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restocked: Swedish percussionist Erik Carlsson in a solo work using multi-tracking to create a set of composition ranging from ominous environments to quirky abstractions, an excellent collection of modern percussion pieces. "This is a fine album of carefully constructed, but also somehow partly unconsidered works by a finely talented musician. The six pieces each make clear musical statements, separate to one another and yet they form a well rounded, nicely balanced suite when brought tog…
Concentrated chamber music: Gerald Eckert captures the world of sounds in its manifold forms and shapes with meticulous care and maximum individuality.
“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…
It was recorded at the legendary Total Music Meeting of Free Music Production in November 2000. Dawn is a composition played off the cuff of nearly 42 minutes. All the highs and lows of a longer composition are on this recording: searching and finding, restrained groping and violent erupting.... The decisive factor, however, is that this music is played by people who have nothing or very little to do with this attitude, by Gert-Jan Prins (see his solo record Prins Live, GROB210), by the saxophon…
Recorded in Roma in March 1981. It was recorded in five days, a day per body section. No tracks were re-recorded or added to after their day. Each was immediately after recording. No tracks were pre-planned, all tracks are invented directly onto the tape.
Henry Cowell ha inventato e perfezionato la gran parte delle speciali tecniche per suonare il pianoforte utilizzate negli ultimi 70 anni; nel corso della sua vita (1897-1965) ha composto un impressionante numero di musiche sinfoniche, vocali e da camera ed ha pubblicato il pionieristico libro "New Music Resources". Il suo contributo che più ha influenzato la scena contemporanea è però la sua opera per pianoforte, considerata di fondamentale importanza per la musica del XX secolo. "New Music" pro…
The second release from this abstract trio who mingle hard electronics with acoustic and processed percussion. A more focused, subtle aesthetic here, I think, than on their last also excellent - CD. These are finely tuned and seamlessly integrated sounds that have been crafted and, importantly, performed; this is essentially played music that had been painstakingly reworked, and bears still the deep qualities of interactivity and immediacy that created it.
The renowned American architects Sullivan, Wright and Mies van der Rohe are the center of attention in the composition Ekphrasis [Continuo II], even though originally Berio had no such thing in mind: "While I was working on Continuo, it was not my intention to compose a metaphor for architecture, or write a homage to the famous Chicago architects... Neither did I refer directly to the amusing but nevertheless solid constructions by Renzo Piano... However, as the work progressed I became aware th…
"I wrote Mise en Scène between July 1992 and May 1994. Apart from the four additional clarinets involved besides the soloist (two of them as 'doppelgangers' of the soloist) having to move around in the hall during the five movements of the composition, the choice of title is also justified by a number of scenographic instructions that constituted an, albeit vague, starting point for the whole composition." For his concerto José Ramón Encinar also falls back on his own compositions for clarinet, …
Nothing is slow, deep and distressing like the music of Madrigali Magri and the voice of Mr. Succi of Bachi Da Pietra fame: Madrigali Magri have been cut their enviable space in italian rock underground scene, such to become an infuence for various italian bands. After "Negarville", "Malacarne" is their 2nd album on wallace records. They Split in 2005
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…
Aidan Baker is a musician and writer from Toronto, Canada. Classically trained in flute, he is self-taught on guitar, drums, and various other instruments. Baker has released numerous CDs on independent labels from around the world and is also the author of three books of poetry. As a solo artist, Baker explores the deconstructive sonic possibilities of the electric guitar as a primary sound source, creating music that ranges from experimental/ambient to post-rock to contemporary classical. In a…
Anne-James Chaton (voice, electronics) with Andy Moor (electric guitar, radio, electronics). Le journaliste consists of 8 pieces and is a part of a series of 100 portraits iniated by Anne-James Chaton... Most of these portraits have become large posters. Le journaliste is a journey into the texts and columns of a newspaper and radio broadcasts of a single journalist selected by Anne James. The world news, the politics, headlines, the stock exchange figures and the weather are all explored and tr…
Restocked “A trance-tape piece, constituting the entirety of the genre called Illuminatory Sound Environment, composed in the 70s in response to Catherine Christer Hennix’s “Electric Harpsichord. ” John Berdnt’s enthralling liner notes explain ISE as “an unfurling sound field of overwhelming but far from gratuitous sensuality, a highly “tuned” texture where all of the aspects are coordinated to make a deeply unusual “whole”, a new kind of perceptual gestalt... The piece has a disorienting flow t…
A wonderful CD, recorded under Kurtag's supervision: the hour-long Kafka Fragments, completed in 1986, is his biggest work to date: it's a characteristic cycle of 40 tiny movements, scored for soprano voice and violin, that adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.The text is a mosaic of quotations from Kafka's writings, diaries and letters. The cycle is divided into four parts, articulated by the two longest movements; they draw a huge range of expression from soprano Juliane …
“Art can give us a sense of the infinity of existence, the singular unity of all beings and phenomena as the apparent dualism between the inner and the outer is dissolved. Art can allow us to experience what it means to be alive. It can lead us back to our own sensuality, spirituality, and emotionality - to the very core of our selves,” said Caspar René Hirschfeld. This distinctive conception of art also informs Hirschfeld’s compositions, which are probably best described as objects of immediate…
An opera? An anti-opera? A monodrama? Whatever it may be: Neither (1977) marks the meeting of the kindred artistic souls of Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman.
Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) has featured prominently in my music writing life for a decade and a half, ever since I wrote Discovering Scelsi on my first computer for Piano Journal (Oct. 1986), one of the first UK articles about this fascinating and elusive composer.There are particular reasons why the Scelsi CD in the latest, indispensable batch from Kairos prompted a trawl of my files. Scelsi applauded my analysis of his piano music and we had a cordial correspondence, after which I met him tw…
For Bunita Marcus was written in 1985. "This work, which I have dedicated to Bunita Marcus, [...] deals with the death of my mother, and with the notion of a slow death. I simply didn't want the piece to die. So I used this unwillingness compositionally in order to keep the piece alive, like a patient suffering from an terminal disease, for as long as possible." (Feldman) It is not the loud raging, the last furious revolt of a dying human being that Feldman depicts here, but a slow nodding off a…