We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience.Most of these are essential and already present. We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits.Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
Trumpeter Marco von Orelli's piano-less quartet with Tommy Meier on tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, Luca Sisera on double bass, and Sheldon Suter on drums is caught live at Theater am Gleis, in Winterthur, Switzerland in 2018, and at Boudoir au Revoir, the same year, performing von Orelli's compellingly clever compositions, plus one each from Adam lane and Tommy Meier.
After introducing his new trio with pianist Paul Bley and double bassist Steve Swallow in two 1961 albums on Verve, clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre embarked on a tour of Europe, this recently discovered, well-recorded concert in Graf, Austria the perfect example of his unique concepts yielding intensely focused, harmonically challenging, rhythmically abstract, and exquisite chamber jazz.
"As our ears wander into the cacophony of a saturated world, drowned by the dissonance and excess of noise that besieges us, Rien Virgule invites us to explore sonic interstices, to slow down and resist the frenzy. With ‘Berceuses des deux mondes’ (‘Lullabies of the two worlds’), the deafening fires of the din are extinguished, the volume of the over-amplified world calms down, and music becomes a refuge. We listen as we contemplate a flickering candle flame, tinged with a luminous melancholy. T…
2003 release ** "Pekka Streng's music was fundamentally far from rock or pop; his intimate and reflective songs were more reminiscent of folk, vocals and often even children's music (Tove Jansson was one of Streng's great idols). Love Records' brilliant insight was to have Tasavallan Presidentti accompany his first album. This synthesis gave rise to music that, instead of acoustic folk, was influenced by prog, psychedelia and sometimes even jazz. However, the arrangements did not banish the deli…
2004 release ** "In 2003 Milo Fine joined forces with his father and percussion teacher, the legendary Elliot Fine and the great mystic drummer Davu Seru. Percussion Music; Improvised, a mammoth double CD grew out of this iconic clash of drummers. Exploring the possibility of creating monumental, pulseless music made up of great blocks of seemingly static, but subtly changing, textures whose components parts flowed seamlessly in and out of each other. Right through the endless-sounding “Impressi…
2005 release ** "Matt Heckert has been working as a performance and sound artist since 1978. In the 80"s he worked as one of the directors of Survival Research Laboratories building robots and designing soundtracks for the performances and for film. In 1989 he began working on the Mechanical Sound Orchestra, a group of computer controlled mechanical sound instruments. He has presented this in the USA and in Europe since that time, working solo and in collaboration with others."
Double CD, expanded edition. Snakefinger surely needs not much of an introduction. Born Philip Charles Lithman in London, he moved to San Francisco in 1971. His roots lie in the British blues scene, but he soon became friends with The Residents who also gave him the name Snakefinger based on a photograph of Lithman performing, in which his finger looks like a snake about to attack his violin. In 1972 Lithman returned to England and formed the pub rock band Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers. A…
2005 release (RARE) ** Curated by Jaap Blonk this is volume 15 in the Leonardo Music Journal CD series. Selections include ‘Kana’ by Tomomi Adachi, ‘O Som Que Circula Nas Veia’ by Americo Jorge M. Rodrigues, excerpt from ‘Mushroom Clouds’ by Christian Bok, ‘Vielleicht’ by Sprechakte X/treme, ‘OOA’ by Vincent Barras and Jacques Demierre, ‘… due Giorni Dopp’ by Ricardo Dal Farra, ‘Al Amin Dada’ by Jelle Meander, ‘En Do’ by Jorg Piringer, ‘Eighteen Earrers’ by Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Voix Imprrsonel’ b…
1992 release ** "A wonderful view of what is "American" in contemporary American music from an Italian producer's perspective, with a nice cover photo of Joey's Navajo Cafe and Dining Room framed by several pickup trucks parked outside. Including rhythmic-based music and sound-text rhythms from ordinary speech (Allen Ginsberg's works), some dreamy electronic music by Pauline Oliveros, and solo jazz by Steve Lacy, this is an interesting collection of new recordings and reissues of tracks from out…
1992 release ** A complete new work plus 'Death In The Blue Lake'. Combines playing and through-composition with manipulated and environmental sound in dramatic, narrative, psychological constructions. Quite unique. 'Death' based on a novel; texts in new works by Chris Cutler.
Habibi Funk is thrilled to share a second collection of deep grooves and unreleased songs from Algeria's Ahmed Malek, often compared to Italian heavyweight Ennio Morricone. Malek's music effortlessly switches between thematic jazz, funk, reggae and Algerian folk – creating indelible soundscapes that intersect the musical innovations made in African jazz by Mulatu Astatke, Bembeya Jazz National along with some of Europe's finest experimental composers like Piero Piccioni and Janko Nilovic. "Musiq…
A sparse and subtle jungle comprises the pieces that make up "Pietra e Oggetto". It is subtle, as such it remains in the memory. Thanks to the device of silence, which is like the air in between things, it allows time for what we have heard to imprint on our acoustic sketchpad. Like closing your eyes to preserve a memory and then moving on to the next. We feel a certain privilege in listening to these undecidable environments; these composite and hybrid objects filled with synthetic biodiversity…
This historic collection gathers together the four seminal solo albums recorded by Alvin Curran (b. 1938) in the 1970s. Two, Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri and The Works, are making their first appearance on CD. Author-critic Tim Page, an early advocate of these works, writes, 'Curran weaves electronic technology, an occasional acoustic instrument, voices and musique concrète ('found' music) into a multi-hued tapestry of sound. He holds these dissimilar elements together with a compelling subliminal …
“... in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds.” — John Cage The most characteristic features of American music are its eclecticism and innovation. The works presented here are perfect examples; their only common feature is that they were written for a piano altered in some way.
The disc opens with the eerie, wailing cries of Henry Cowell’s (1897-1965) The Banshee. In order …
The guitar is the popular instrument par excellence. As apt for Brazilian sambas for Irish ballads or American blues, the guitar has also recently been adapted as a surrogate for plucked instruments from non-Western musical traditions; no idiom seems beyond its reach. When social history of the second half of the twentieth century is written, it may be seen that the guitar is as central to this era as the piano was to the nineteenth century. But while the piano was an emblem of upward social asp…
Acoustic jazz recording featuring Holcomb's eleven-minute title-track, Lenny Pickett's ten-minute Dance Music for Composer Orchestra, Elliott Sharp's eight-minute Skew and Horvitz's nine-minute Paper Money and an eleven-minute composition by Anthony Braxton.
Underwater Princess Waltz is a bold and imaginative project by the Belgian/Dutch electric guitar quartet Zwerm, featuring a vibrant collection of “one-page pieces” by leading figures in American experimental music: Karl Berger, Earle Brown, Alvin Curran, Nick Didkovsky, Joel Ford, Daniel Goode, Clinton McCallum, Larry Polansky, and Christian Wolff. The “one-page piece” is a unique compositional format-each work fits entirely on a single sheet of paper, whether in traditional notation, prose, gra…
Music for violin and resonator guitar by Robert Ashley, Lainie Fefferman, Paula Matthusen, James Moore, Larry Polansky and Ken Thomson. Longtime friends and collaborators James Moore and Andie Springer began performing as a duo in 2011 while on tour with playwright Richard Maxwell's Neutral Hero. This anthology comprises compositions by their friends and colleagues, all written or adapted for the duo and their unconventional instrumentation of violin and steel-string resonator guitar. Lar…
The immersive sonic textures that characterize Michael Winter's (b 1980) music are crafted from comprehensive lists of data, with each composition encompassing a musical question that is addressed algorithmically. A performance lasts for as long as it takes to "answer" the question, expressing all results as efficiently as possible. Winter leaves room for unanticipated results by keeping things open, notably in the instrumentation, which, rather than specifying instruments, tends to designate ce…
Fairy tale opera has been a challenging genre for composers, with even some of the musically most successful examples, like Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel of 1893, more often presented for children than for adults. Scott Wheeler’s (b. 1952) Naga, working from a text that lies between fairy tale and mythology, stands much closer to Mozart’s marvelous exemplar, The Magic Flute, in its musical account of a restless man setting out on a spiritual quest in a world polarized between good and evil for…