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Violence of discovery and calm of acceptance
This is his first album for touch. The highly evocative intricate and subtle guitar drones are captured in the beautiful photography of Heitor Alvelos, a Portuguese artist, and in the artwork of Jon Wozencroft. The background noise on track 10 is a recording of silence during a Space Shuttle mission real time webcast. All other sounds were released by electric guitars. The album was recorded between 1993 and 2000 and mastered at Noise Precision, Lisbon.
In Stereo
'Written and performed by Christian fennesz, Jim O'Rourke & Peter Rehberg. Recorded and mixed at Studio GOK Sound, Tokyo, October 2009. Mastered at Piethopraxis, Köln, December 2009. 'Thats right, they're back! After a hiatus of almost 9 years the legendary trio of Christian fennesz, Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg have returned with a new studio album. Technically the first studio album as previous releases were edits of live performances. They spent a week in Studio GOK Sound, Tokyo to lay down…
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…
Pollen
Recorded on 20/21 December 2006 and 2 January 2007 at Studio Z, Berlin
Oboe plus
Right at the start we are welcomed by Le sexe du noyé by Walter Feldmann, which (besides requiring exceptional technical skill) keeps a tight rein on the oboist, even as far as inhaling and minute movements are concerned. But Matthias Arter does not play the oboe only but also other members of the customary concert instrument's family, like the musette (sopranino oboe) he uses in the last part of his own composition Changes. And he has a lot more to offer even than a great variety of different p…
How To Get Started
"John Cage conceived How To Get Started almost as an afterthought -- a performance substituting for another that was previously planned in 1989 for delivery at 'Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Music' presented by Bay Area Radio Drama at Sprocket Systems, Skywalker Ranch, in Nicasio, California. In his introduction, Cage talks about the difficulty of initiating the creative process, while exploring the usefulness of im…
Hallway Of Mirrors
VHF is releasing a bunch of solo guitar dudes over the next few weeks. Here's one of 'em! It's an album from New York's Alexander Turnquist called Hallway of Mirrors. It says that above so it's kinda pointless me saying that. Having said that the New York thing was a new bit of info so it's not all filler! I've not heard this chap before but I was rather taken with him on first listen. It's not a million miles away from the likes of James Blackshaw.... ie extreme 12 string fingerpluckery which i…
Piano Pictures
Now, which are the points of contact between these two composing gentlemen? "In both composers, a childlike quality shows in their indifference (or impartiality) towards the utilizable musical material: 'sophisticated' and 'lesser' styles, ragtime and music hall, neo-gothic and bitonality, typing machine and doorbell, jocular or praising quotes – everything is linked with everything, without any previous weighing and selection, without preconditions, following a kind of anarchic play instinct. […
String Quartets Vol 4
The most recent of his compositions which Rihm called “string quartets” date back a few years already, with a gap in the enumeration still waiting to be filled (the eleventh quartet is missing). Even a cursory comparison of the three works’ beginnings reveals Rihm’s “ability to find new and distinctly characteristic solutions for each piece, which, each in their own way, put a stamp on what is to follow.” (R. Frisius) The gentle pizzicati of Quartet No. 10 and the muted, shadowy chord of No. 12 …
Our rainy season Nuilagi
“Kraig Grady: composer, metallophone. Jim Denley: bass flute, alto saxophone and wooden flute. Mike Majkowski: upright bass. Erin Barnes: metallophone. Jonathan Marmor: metallophone. 1. Our Rainy Season (49:12) 2. Nuilagi (25:54) The two pieces on this album reflect the sounds and the duality of the experiences of our rainy seasons. The first is an internal reflection sifted through memories. The second is a realization of the very music played by the people of Anaphoria to give thanks …
String Quartets Vol. 2 (Nos. 5 & 6)
That the two single-movement string quartets No. 5 (“Ohne Titel”) and No. 6 (“Blaubuch”), composed in 1981/83 and 1984, belong to the most passionate of Rihm’s quartets is due to their restless vigor. This impulsive approach is of course always present in his music. But even the tempo indications “fast, restless” and “fast und free” suggest a certain stringency - which is fully realized in the pieces. A sense of inner disquiet pulls the listener like a maelstrom into a sea of commotion, of stru…
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, …
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra / Sixty-Eight
For each of his compositions for prepared piano Cage created a specific piano preparation chart, setting out in meticulous detail the strings to be prepared, and the materials and manipulations to be used for preparing them. For the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), 53 tones of the keyboard must be prepared; and in this case Cage himself was astonished at the complexity of these preparations. The range of sounds is further expanded by an extra bridge installed in the pian…
Teenage hallucinations: 1992-1999
Teenage Hallucination is a compendium of Wiese's initial recordings as a teenager to his seminal early vinyl appearances. From pure analog bedroom havoc to intense cut-up harsh noise blasts, Wiese steadily developed his highly personal and specific style of extreme music while trying to survive the St. Louis experience. 52 tracks in nearly 80 minutes of the best material from his Catwoman 7", split LP with The Haters, split 5" with Panicsville, collaborative tracks with GX Jupitter-Larsen (T…
Lift
'It was on a night when sleep simply would not come, not matter how long I sprawled on the grass or how many pages of my book I leafed through. The black shaggy 'thing' expelled all the breath in its body. Phu phu phuu. And as it did so, something glowed softly at the crown of its head. Ahh, what a beautiful light! I should put a hat over it to stop it flying away. The black shaggy thing took his favourite hat, the one he had hung from a tree branch, and popped it onto his head. Perfect. Hirotom…
Intimate rituals
This Romanian-born composer is noted for having developed the technique of 'spectral composition' during the 1960s. According to the man himself, this is defined as a "variable distribution of the spectral energy, synthesis of the global sound sources, micro- and macro-form as sound-process, four simultaneous layers of perception and of speed, and spectral scordaturae, i.e. rows of unequal intervals corresponding to harmonic scales." If you're any the wiser as to what he's on about do drop us a …
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…
Sings Dhrupad
Master of dhrupad traditional indian chant,present an exceptional performance live in Bombay, Morning meditation. With a 20 Page booklet. "This recording illustrates Amelia Cuni's highly original musicianship... A great deal of her music's appeal rests on the resplendent luminosity of her voice, and the emotional intensity with which she charges her renditions." - Deepak S.Raja
Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989
"The great avant-garde reed player Anthony Braxton (who on this set switches between alto, C-melody sax, clarinet, flute, soprano and sopranino), bassist Adelhard Roidinger and drummer Tony Oxley play five of Braxton's complex originals, Oxley's "The Angular Apron" and the standard "All the Things You Are." As usual Braxton's improvising is quite advanced and original but is colorful and fiery enough to always hold on to open-eared listener's attention. This is one of literally dozens of …
Zombie Fela Kuti And Afrika 70
Includes liner notes by Jacqueline Grandchamp-Thiam, Rikki Stein and Mabinuori Kayode Idowu. Digitally remastered by Pompon (Translab Paris, Paris, France). With the inclusion of Nigerian master musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti's incendiary 1977 single, "Zombie," "Mr. Follow Follow," a typical anti-authoritarian exhortation, and a couple of hitherto-unreleased live cuts from the 1978 Berlin Jazz festival, ZOMBIE finds the iconoclastic singer and bandleader at his electrifying best. The title track, …