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Trilogie de la mort
One of the landmarks of minimalism, Radigue's sonic investigation into life, death, and life elsewhere after death, considered to be Eliane Radigue's masterpiece. "Trilogie de la Mort is a work in three parts. The first, Kyema, was originally released by XI in 1992. The 2nd and 3rd parts, Kailasha and Koumé are being released for the first time and the trilogy now makes its debut as a whole [this 3CD set is being sold for the cost of 2 CDs to make up for the prior availability Kyema]. 'Kyema' is…
Celestial Fires
The works of Mary Jane Leach explore the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. Space is also an important concern: how sound changes when it is moved around a room. Celestial Fires features the New York Treble Singers, (Virginia Davidson, conductor) performing four 8-part pieces for a capella women's voices; Shannon Peet performing Feu de Joie for 7 bassoons; and Barbara Held and Ms. Leach performin…
Involution
From the liner notes by Dean Rosenthal: XI Records announce the release of Dave Seidel's new double-CD, Involution. The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel's second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel's own compos…
Experimenting with household chemicals
Experimenting With Household Chemicals' is a 1995 album by the laregly elusive post-minimalist Downtown experimenter Peter Zummo. Whilst possibly best known for his work on classic Arthur Russell recordings, he's been a mainstay of New York's vaunted experimental scene since the the mid-late '70s, but only released three solo albums proper. This is his 2nd, exploring "a trombone-specific method for generating melodic movement, as well as a collection of related, "spinoff" melodic material for en…
The South Shore
XI Records is pleased to announce the debut full-length release from Michael Vincent Waller, The South Shore, featuring chamber works from 2011 through 2014, with album art photography by Phill Niblock. Waller has collaborated with numerous musicians and ensembles to bring this album to life. This kind of listening is for the brain to relax and enjoy, for the soul and emotions together as art for the universal. Reveling in subtext and subtlety, a symbiotic exploration of the history and future o…
Open secrets
"Aphoristic bursts of music separated by silences played with efficiency and fleeting beauty." - New York Times Open Secrets features Mac Low and Anne Tardos performing works for multi-track voices; and Robert Bethea, Andrew Bolotowsky, Daniel Goode, and Gabriela Klassen performing instrumental pieces. Winds/Instruments for flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, and narrator, could well become a classic of new music, not only being beautiful, but also displaying Mac Low's witty use and …
Simoom
On Simoom we hear three of Lois V. Vierk's works for "big instruments," that is, multiples of the same instrument, treated more like single entities than like groups of voices: Go Guitars for five electric guitars tuned microtonally around "E," Cirrus for six trumpets, and Simoom for eight cellos. All three works employ what Vierk describes as "Exponential Structure," which utilizes exponential relationships to control time, pitch movement and rates of change. Within this system, Vierk creates v…
Electroacoustic Works
Electroacoustic Works collects three major pieces from the early 21st century New York-based composer Dan Joseph. This double CD release includes Set Of Four, a group of fixed-media sound collages using the processed hammer dulcimer as the primary sound source, two live performances of Dulcimer Flight for electroacoustic hammer dulcimer, and a 64-minute version of Periodicity Piece #6, a mixed-media work that originated as a multi-channel sound installation. With roots in early minimalism, a…
Clarinet songs
Daniel Goode's Clarinet Songs has long been a favorite on the new music concert circuit. It is a 75-minute suite for solo clarinet which Goode began writing for himself in 1979, and reached its current form in 1991. It uses all of Goode's virtuosic techniques distilled into sixteen "Songs without Words," a poetics of the new clarinet. It is made up of a series of individual pieces, each a sound world of its own, based on some unique material, perhaps a specific technical, poetic, or sonic idea, …
My Dear Siegfried
"David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as 'England's Soldier-Poet.' He had a reputation both as a war hero and …
Unforeseen Events
Unforeseen Events is the latest of many pieces Behrman has made with computer software designed to interact in real time with a solo performer. The four sections recorded here were made specifically with Ben Neill's performance style in mind. The electronic timbres are intended to complement the sounds of his instrument --the admirable and humorous mutantrumpet, with its three separately-mutable and playable bells. Refractive Light consists of three small pieces based on an interweaving and over…
Baobab
Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's Baobab and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the…
Sinopah
World Rhythms originated as a ten-channel live improvisation in which the audience was surrounded by ten loudspeakers. The recorded sounds include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, radio waves, geysers and pools, and tree frogs. These sounds are a physical manifestation of energies which shape us and our environment constantly, energies of which we are not always aware, but which powerfully influence and interact with the rhythms of our bodies."What separates her work from musique concreté is tha…
Thousand Year Dreaming-Floating World
Thousand Year Dreaming (1990) was commissioned by Essential Music and was written with the musicians on this recording, their particular strengths and inclinations, very much in mind. It grew out of an improvisatory piece, Nautilus, which Art Baron, Scott Robinson and Annea Lockwood realised in 1989. They found that the sound of conch shell trumpets, didjeridu and frame drums really flowered in the resonant spaces they were using for the piece. Lockwood started imagining the sonorities possible …
All Known All White
2024 stock. "My intention … was to explore those situations in which a loss of orientation leads us more deeply into the moment itself. There is a certain aquatic feel to the music, in which the performers are joined with a complex and sonorous fabric of computer generated sound. […] The work is twenty minutes long, divided into three roughly equal sections. In the first, the primary aim of the performers is to match, submit to and intensify the taped sounds. The second, in which the synthesized…
Process And Passion
2024 stock. This is a recording that explores the "extra"- ordinary potential of the CD not only as a carrier of traditionally recorded instrumental sound (CD 1), but also offering a different view through binaural encoding of the same materials spatialized (CD 2). - Please note: the binaural recording is only available as part of the 2 cd set. not as a downloadFirst you are presented with two solo compositions-Kokoro and Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward…-and the duo Process and Passio…
Equus
Equus is a collaborative work of musique concrète recorded in 2001-02 on a commission from the INA GRM It is truly a delight for Pogus to add this title to our catalog. As Capparos notes: Equus guides us through human memory and history. It may sound a bit strange that sound & music would appear as a vehicle, or as we had cast a lead into a labyrinth. This brings us to the question of whether we are alive or not; travelling the path throughout these soundings would drive us down and up our consc…
Peachy Keen-O
This CD has pieces with an auctioneer, a Kentucky farm with birds & clover, a jazz dancer, a quivering, vibrating, sexually tinged piece full of women saying supplication, a saint dying in flames, a drum piece about frustration, mother/daughter miscommunication, a pipe organ, and punk rap with overtones of yoga. Many of Beth Anderson's compositions from 1973-1979 use words or parts of words to make either all or part of the music. Sometimes the music is derived from the words. Some of it is cons…
Tape works
"killer disc of lo-fi tape music & electronic studies from reynols’ Anla Courtis; completely all over the map, from the electric-guitar based musique concrète of “asma de tía de alga” to the almost pietro-grossi-esque bleep-fest of “invisible clown sonata” (what a title!) to the epic closer “encías de viento.” highly recommended." (Mimaroglu)...now back to his real name Alan Courtis, this still comes out under the misspelled Anla Courtis moniker (a slight name change given to him by his former R…
Breathing
1996 release ** "In deference to this age of “environmental consciousness”, “Breathing”, says the insert, is “recycled and/or scavenged” pieces that once inhabited another form. The composer is Al Margolis, who appears on electronics, tapes, effects, piano, sampled flute, vocals, wind, cello and strings. He is joined by didjeridu, oboe and organ. The album beds itself in deep wind or breath like sounds, with an electronic, industrial, and dark edge."