Back in stock
Being A Firefighter Isn\'t Just About Squirting Water
Ever since the days of Leonin and Perotin, people have been trying to pin down that special something that makes music so unique, with Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio more ardent than most in his perusal. The lavishly packaged 5th instalment in this highly limited edition series of EP's, 'Being a Firefighter Isn't Just About Squirting Water' comprises a single 20 minute composition that is a dictionary definition of delicacy. Building upwards from spectral entities, …
Bringing up baby
rare UK album from 1981. Musique Concret were an obscur London duo composed by Jim Friedman & Michael Mullen with a short lived musical history : their sole album 'bringing up baby' was originally released on Steven Stapleton's label United Dairies and there is also one short track on compilation. This is a great experimental power electronics works with the use of many delay and echo, tape recorder manipulations, collages, rhythms box, noise, and others studio trickery, naturally close to Nurse…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
A conductor enjoys the privilege of being able to reconsider his attitude to musical works over and over again. The composer Boulez adheres to the same maxim: of his own compositions he regards only very few as being finished; most of them are, to him, "work in progress." The first two pieces on this collage CD were actually withdrawn by Boulez after their premiere as he wished to think them over again. Later on, Polyphonie X (1951) in view of its extremely strict serial procedure appeared to hi…
Psychoneurose
Italian Avant-Noise legend M.B. and Land Use collaborate on dramatic, subterranean wall-of-noise constructions and swirling textural storms, dense and complex arrangements, shifting and shimmering tones barely under control, streaming toward some distant and indefineable precipice. Not noisy, but way too tense and corrosive to be called ambient. These vibrant monoliths of sound shift the listeners pysche into a restless sort of zen, a blissful chaos - truly mind and mood-altering. Bianchi releas…
Konzert für Violine und Orchester / Fasce
Rhapsodic, lyrical, virtuoso, and, in the end, even amusing: all these attributes come to mind as Cerha's violin concerto is finished off with a charming punch line.
Ribbons Of Dust
In La Monte Young's formulation, drone music is built on the idea of vertical composition, moving away from developmental form towards "Vertical Hearing". The danger, of course, is that layers will be substituted for composition, resulting in dissonant monolithic roars. These have their place, but tread an easy route to some ambiguous transcendence. On the four extended meditations for guitar and electronics here, Alex Cobb chooses no such route. Instead, patience and focus help him build up vas…
AR5 - Autovision
From 1974. A.R.'s fifth excursion with echo-guitar, a collection of group and solo recordings, would be his last studio album in the mind-blowing style. Available again with improved packaging.
DW 17: Doubles / Schatten II
The unfolding of the differences is succeeded by ever new ramifications, versions, series. DW 17 Doubles/Schatten II as a new phase in the DW-Kosmos.
Recitarcantando
Restocked, special discounted price: one of his best and 'more affordable' release, Demetrio Stratos live in 1979 with Lucio "Violino" Fabbri (PFM violin player).The amazing research of Stratos brings many suggestions of unexplored fields of research that are still to be studied such as the particularly stimulating and innovative pre-eminence of the meaning over the meant, and the ritual value of the voice.[12] His research into the field of phonetics (Articulatory phonetics, Acoustic phonetics,…
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…
American Piano Concertos
The great creator of musical novelties hardly ever departed from the melodic harmonious basis, though: his major achievements included not least the development of new techniques for piano playing, which he also integrated in his book New Musical Resources. His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928) appears to put the spotlight on the technical and musical-historical findings, whereas in pieces such as Irish Jig and Four Irish Tales he openly and merrily inquires into his Irish background, with…
The Sapphire Nature
"One of the world's premier noise percussionists and a learned scholar of Kabbalah, Torah and Talmud, Z'ev has been a vital force in the downtown scene since the late 1970s. In addition to his collaborations with Glenn Branca, Rudolph Grey and his fascinating solo work, Z'ev is also a prolific writer and musical thinker. He has written on subjects ranging from music composition, ritual performance and has also translated several esoteric Tibetan and Hebrew texts into English. His latest study is…
The Sea swells a bit...
Aidan Baker is one of the most important emergent artist of the last years...! Probably this is the most important "musical" Aidan Baker release..., in fact here the sound is comparable to the best (obscure) psychedelic post-rock releases including great droning, hypnotic and honeiric atmospheres. Spontaneously composed by Aidan, who plays guitar (electric & acoustic), bass, tapeloops, drum machine and percussion in his droning 'fashion soup'. In this album Aidan uses (as usual) his guitar but a…
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.
s/t
At the very beginning of Survival Research Laboratories in 1978, the group's founder Mark Pauline predicted that people would eventually start building their own technology in order to seize control of the very violence that characterizes the age we live in. Survival Research Laboratories was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception, SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of…
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…
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 …
mehrere kurze walzer
Franz Schubert may not have been an expert dancer, but he certainly was an extremely skilled composer of dance music. Most of his numerous dances – often miniatures comprising only a few chords – were improvisations created for special occasions, such as house parties. And many of these impromptu waltzes were noted down by Schubert later, including several pieces for piano four hands. Brahms, who held Schubert's music in high esteem, remained faithful to his own majestic musical language in his …
Z
“Z is about infinity and the double dimension we all live in yet don't fully understand. Z is the sound of that feeling you get when you think you're being watched or followed by the omnipotent one. Z is for believers and followers of the "Ecstatic Truth" that fuels this mysterious universe. Z has always existed and here is is as remembered and transfered solid by the people under the sun, the Sunburned..” – John Moloney, Sunburned
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…