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Pietra e Oggetto
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…
Aube Reworks Maurizio Bianchi Vol. 2
2006 release ** "Static music, suspended by a thread of silence. Circular flowing audio structures. Archeology of sound. Mind expanding texture. A new fascinating operation of disassembly and restructure of sonic material by Maurizio Bianchi (the entire album The Testamentary Corridor), by incomparable japanese 'audio sculptor' Aube."
Aube Reworks Maurizio Bianchi Vol. 1
2005 release ** "A superb work of re-editing and re-composition of original material by Maurizio Bianchi, that saves the distinctly experimental aim of the music by the hystorical Italian artist, renewing it in surely less extreme and hard but equal new form, unquestionably catching and sure effectiveness."
Electrostatic Deflection
2007 release ** "Electrostatic Deflection" is a new industrial-music masterwork, created through collaboration with Maurizio Bianchi, and Israeli musician Maor Appelbaum. It's represents Bianchi's more extreme direction... a sample of whats comming in the future from the historic Italian composer. Amazing impact, immense slabs of industrial sound in motion. Sweeping vistas of intense static energy, storm-fronts moving across the stereo field, an acoustic tidal wave approaching landfall, breathta…
Ludium
2009 release ** "A long and almost solemn track built with reverberated piano notes, a slow and rhythmical flow leaned on a background made of clashing hisses and vague, distant, rustling ambient noises. A brief interval based on obscure drones moving in circles, inexorably entangled on themselves. Then another long piano-based track, this time more dilated, confused, ethereal and prim, so much that it takes the distinguishing features of an indecipherable sonic mass, abstract and booming, estra…
The Epidemic Symphony No.9
2006 release ** "We've long championed the work of Maurizio Bianchi, the grim electronic sculptor whose work in the early '80s paralleled the likes of Whitehouse, Ramleh, and Matthew Bower's early power electronics project Total. As much as we would like to ramble on about Bianchi's intriguing musical and existential history in reference to this record, it's almost a moot point as it's really hard to discern any sounds that bear the signature of Mr. Bianchi. Don't let that caveat scare you off f…
Psychoneurose
2005 release ** "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-alterin…
Alienation
2008 release ** "Maurizio Bianchi's second artistic season continues to be enriched with new releases, often the result of collaborations with other authors, as in the case of "Alienation", a work performed together with Claudio Rocchetti, a skilled audio manipulator with an evident interest in the analog sounds of the past. In line with other recent products by Maurizio, this album also has its fulcrum in an interiority that explodes towards the surrounding world through electronic and abstract…
Apokalypsis XXIII
2011 release ** "In August 2010, Maurizio Bianchi officially announced his retirement from musical scene. "Apokalypsis XXIII" is his last ever electronic music album, recorded in Summer of 2010. All the latest albums appeared after that are in fact re-issues of older works or the collaborations with other artists using his sound sources. Like other solo albums of Maurizio Bianchi, "Apokalypsis XXIII" has religious roots and consists of four long tracks, each of those divided into further section…
Oidiconeg
2012 release ** Decomposed between the 1981 and the 1982. Originally titled Genocidio 20 and self-released on cassette in the 1980s.
Solo Works : The '70s
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 …
Sound Forms for Piano: Cage/ Cowell/ Johnston/ Nancarrow
“... 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 …
New Music for Four Guitars
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…
The New York Composers Orchestra: First Program in Standard Time
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
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…
Gertrudes
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…
Two Orchestra Pieces
This recording is the first ever devoted to the orchestral music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) and thus documents a little-known aspect of his wide-ranging work. John, David (1998) introduces in its second part a prominent role for solo percussionist, playing a wide range of pitched and non-pitched instruments, including marimba, glockenspiel, a variety of drums, wood and metal instruments and other sources, the exact choice left to the performer. Rhapsody (2009), in contrast, uses instruments of…
Lower Limit
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…
Naga (2 CD Box)
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…
Dialogues and Contrasts / Colloquy
The title Dialogues and Contrasts describes the nature of the exchange which takes place between the performer and the materials committed to tape. In the first movement the exchange is more in the nature of an argument. Though initially each side appears to favor an independent thematic course, as the movement progresses the performers engage in direct response to the statements on tape. The second movement is more subdued and reflective, with many solo passages, particularly from the French ho…