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New Saxophone Chamber Music
Featuring compositions by Hanspeter Kyburz, Christoph Staude, Isabel Mundry, and Walter Zimmermann.
Realites Servomecaniques
CD album, high-end Super Jewel Box limited edition of 500 copies. “Réalités servomécaniques” is an improved version faithful to the original recordings with visuals specially reworked, answering to a categorical assertion, theoricaly and practicaly on Vivenza's bruitist point of view, who presents sounds, « noises », under their rawest and genuine aspect: sounds are machines / machines are sounds. Thus Vivenza captured the essence of factories with a strong sense of austerity, radicality, vertic…
Yesterday night you were sleeping at my place
Flute, harp and percussion are the principal instruments on this recording, though you’d be hard pressed to identify them during the opening measures of “Hamida”, the longest track on the CD. But the buzzing, pulsing drone with which it begins gradually opens out into flute articulations that sound like jets of steam, a barrage of muffled percussion, and various harp-generated supplementary drones. The MUTA soundworld gets richer, louder and more pressurised as the track progresses, and…
Music for a Summer Evening / A Little Suite for Christmas / Five
Music for a Summer Evening (1974) is the third part of the "cosmic drama" Macrocosmos, which investigates the relations between the innermost human soul and the vastness of the cosmos; relations that also determine the temporal, dynamic and tonal dimensions of the composition. Its immense material extravagance is reflected by a range of some 70 percussion instruments; in addition, the two pianists are required to perform a variety of different techniques, such as pizzicatos, flageolets, etc. A s…
Violin and Orchestra / Coptic Light
Morton Feldman dedicated a whole series of compositions to the relationship between solo instruments and the orchestra: after Cello and Orchestra (1972), Piano and Orchestra (1975), Oboe and Orchestra (1976) and Flute and Orchestra (1977/78) his Violin and Orchestra (1979) marks the conclusion of these "relationship works." The variety of sound accumulated around the violin, or through the violin, in less than an hour's time ranges from delicate whispers to cantilenas in rich tones and sharp rep…
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…
Aerial # 2
This release is the second (Volume 2) in the three-part Aerial series. Tod Dockstader is one of the all-time great figures in the world of musique concréte composition, with his "organized sound" works from the 1960s being amongst the most radical ever conceived -- in league with Schaeffer, Henry, Stockhausen, and Varese. Aerial is a rare new work in the realm of shortwave radio, from one of America's most experimental composers. Volume 1 was released in March 2005 inside a slipcase. Volu…
Whitehouse
This project involves the unique German avant-garde orchestra performing a selection of tracks from the Whitehouse catalogue. The rehearsals and mixing were done in collaboration with William Bennett but he doesn't actually perform on the recordings. Anyone familiar with Zeitkreitzer's Rendition of Lou Reed classic Metal Machine Music will be fully aware that these guys can magnificently translate noise music and in this case electronic music through acoustic interments. Bennet's compositions h…
Dead City Radio
In 1988, genius producer Hal Willner (best known, perhaps ironically, for his Disney tribute album STAY AWAKE) traveled to Lawrence, Kansas and taped NAKED LUNCH author and Beat Generation legend William Burroughs performing excerpts from his ... Full Descriptionwork. He then enlisted the likes of Donald Fagen and Sonic Youth to create accompanying musical collages. To this end he also unearthed Aaron Copland-esque music recorded in the late '40s and '50s for various radio shows by Toscanini'…
Out
Janek Schaefer is an architect. This might explain his vision on his music. A good building closes up into your memory without you even noticing it. The same goes for Schaefer's soundsculptures. Clearly structured soundloops baffling their way into perception. You can use his music in art-galleries, train-stations, living-rooms: anywhere really. Each time/place conducts his work to a different perception. Even a high volume or low volume defines another way in the listening experience which unfo…
Speak no more about the leaves
This cd contains 3 pieces inspired by Arnold Schönberg's 'The Book of the Hanging Gardens' and in particular the poems by Stefan George that Schönberg used as lyrics. Track one uses Steve Roden's voice reading/singing part of the text as the only sound material. Track two uses the vowel structure from the text as a score for striking five tones on a small chime. Track three uses samples from the Schönberg work as well as Roden's voice singing the same text as track one.
Les Maledictus Sound
(Originally released in 1968) this is one of the most bizarre records ever released and one of the most sought after titles on the collectors' market. The Maledictus Sound are to instrumental rock what Frankenstein was to science... a laboratory monster... a strange creature assembled from a mish-mash of diverse musical sounds. Psychedelic pop, romantic ballads, musical tongue-in-cheek, drugged out chipmunks, near-delirium sound effects, horror movie screamadelia and a mega-twisted '60s vibe. Ec…
Natura renovatur
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…
14 Récitations
A songbird that stops singing must die. Georges Aperghis demands a similar degree of self-sacrifice of the performer of his 14 Récitation.
Allegro Sostenuto / Pression / Dal Niente / Intérieur I
Both Sostenuto and Dal niente were composed for the clarinetist Eduard Brunner. “As in the earlier Ausklang for piano and orchestra, the musical material is determined by the interplay of the experiences of resonance on the one hand and motion on the other. Both aspects of sound encounter one another in the conception of structure as a multiply ambivalent ‘arpeggio’, i.e. as a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction – experienced in temporal succession – which is conveyed both…
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,…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
Dmitri Shostakovich was to encourage the young Gubaidulina, for instance when he told her in his official function as the chairman of a board of examiners: "Keep on composing on your errant ways." Her intuition was based on her profound religious faith as well as on literature and philosophy. In her String Trio of 1988 she accomplished a particularly impressive motif transfer in the finale. The motif, which has been powerfully completed before, sneaks in again through the first violin, endures, …
For Bunita Marcus
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…
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.
Las Orillas
“It seems most important to me not to stop being a connoisseur; I freely confess that I would rather be considered a hedonist than an analyst.” This statement by Luis de Pablo is reflected in his music; not in violent yet superficial currents of sound but in finely differentiated sound as de Pablo’s Las Orillas (1990) demonstrates: “The composition is very linear, particularly in the slower parts. The orchestration has therefore been planned especially thoroughly such that each voice has a meani…