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Ray Night 1991-1992 Live
First ever CD by this legendary and ultra-obscure Japanese psychedelic rock group. Kousokuya are from Tokyo, have donated some spectacular tracks to the first two volumes of the Tokyo Flashback compilation series on the PSF label, and self-released an extremely ltd. LP in 1991. The band has been around for quite some time; I originally was under the impression they formed around 1984, but was recently informed that an edition featuring Nanjo and Narita from High Rise existed going back to the l…
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
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…
From The Kitchen Archives No. 2: Steve Reich and Musicians, Live
Steve Reich, one of the foremost composers of our time and an important 'first generation' minimalist composer has performed at The Kitchen Center for the Arts many times during his career. The Kitchen, an interdisciplinary organization known for its commitment to experimental work, has an archive of audio and video recordings that cover its three-decade existence. Orange Mountain Music in collaboration with The Kitchen's curators has found several wonderful recordings and among them are these m…
Between The Whiles
One of the world's most creative harpists, Zeena Parkins has contributed her inimitable playing style to the work of artists like Bjork, John Zorn, Yoko Ono,Sonic Youth and Matmos, whilst also recording a number of wonderful solo albums (including the timeless Nightmare Alley) and a couple of Phantom Orchard collaborations with electronics guru Ikue Mori. What most immediately sets Parkins apart from her peers is a roving appetite to look beyond the ordinary constraints of her instrument. While …
Way Out
The Books have a terrific sense of humor-- and it makes The Way Out, an album built on eccentric vocal samples, a good-natured discovery instead of a cheap piece of mockery. Imagine if a blog had posted these clips of goofball hypnotherapist and meditation consultants, or found a tape of a boy and a girl swapping violent threats with each other: You'd chuckle and move on. But when the Books use these samples, they give them integrity. You find yourself engrossed with people …
Icarus
This 1972 classic captures saxophonist Paul Winter and his ensemble at the height of their improvisational powers. Winter was one of the first artists to incorporate such exotic instruments as the sitar and tabla into his music and the result was memorable chamber jazz-folk played in the wonderfully experimental, post-hippie way only Winter and his merry band could. The title track, one of guitarist Ralph Towner's compositions, became famous for its pensive melody and soaring soprano sax. "Whole…
Arbete Och Fritid
Much needed reissue of this long-lived Swedish band's fourth album, from 1973, with an excellent 20' bonus track from 1974 tagged on. Terry Riley's 1967 visit to Sweden and his work with these musicians when they were still just young ones in High School resonates here, and you get a weird and vibrant mixture of Riley, the Third Ear Band, bits of free improvisation and ancient Swedish folk music all blended into an excellent, droney whole.
Chamber Works
One of the mysteries surrounding Jesús Rueda is the question how he was able to find a voice of his own, the various influences to which he was exposed during his development as a composer notwithstanding. He bid farewell to the constructivist rigor of Francisco Guerrero, and his pieces to do not immediately betray influences by Luis de Pablo, Giacomo Manzoni and Luigi Nono. Characteristic of his compositions are fast tempos, present in “slower” parts as brisk figurations, his sense of harmony a…
Sinfonía n° 1 \'Canarias\' / Tocata vieja en tono nuevo / Los e
The Sinfonia n° 1 "Canarias" is dedicated to the composer's father, an old Canary Islander aged 94 at the time it was written. He was the reason why Cruz de Castro decided to focus the composition's middle movement wholly on the Canarian Folía. This special, important form of Canarian folk music appears both in its original form and in variations: "That's the way it should be: from the simple to the complex, from the melody line to the concentration: a harmonious whole." (Cruz de Castro) The Toc…
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, …
Siete Cantos De Espana
The three cultures at the center of the songs on this recording make a joint appearance in the finale of the Siete cantos de España. They are formed into a unified whole in Ensalada, as the soprano and the baritone begin singing together texts of Castilian, Sephardic and Arabic origin. The poems’ subjects are love, agony and death; and in order to bring them to life Halffter requires a large orchestra of about 100 musicians and two soloists with the baritone singing Spanish texts and the soprano…
Milano New Wave 1980-83
a representative and intense snapshot of the Milanese sinthy wave scene of the early eighties, 20 tracks that recount the salient steps of the brief but intense career of four Milanese bands — from the post-punk of Other Side, to the oblique funk of State Of Art, to the evident Kraftwerk infl uences of La Maison, to the electro of Jeunesse d’Ivoire — four bands that illustrate the mood of an underground scene tha…
Donaueschinger Musiktage 2004
Unusually, the 2004 annual COL LEGNO release from the Donaueschinger Musiktage is devoted to the work of one composer, Englishman Benedict Mason, and to just one extensive and curiously-titled work, commissioned in 2001 by the German Südwestrundfunk. Specially written for the hall in Donaueschingen where this live recording of the work’s first performance was made, Mason’s music explores space and acoustic, as well as the character of a variety of instruments, to fascinating effect.
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…
Tre
Archimedes Badkar (Archimedes Bathtub) was a Swedish group formed by percussionist/pianist/composer Per Tjernberg that existed between 1972 -1980, recording four LPs (including a 2 LP set) that has since achieved cult status in several camps. World Music was not yet a household term, but for once that description seems perfect for what Archimedes Badkar must definitely be regarded as one of the pioneering bands. Several of the members had travelled and studied music in North and South India, Mor…
Kafka-Fragments
A wonderful CD, recorded under Kurtag's supervision: the hour-long Kafka Fragments, completed in 1986, is his biggest work to date: it's a characteristic cycle of 40 tiny movements, scored for soprano voice and violin, that adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.The text is a mosaic of quotations from Kafka's writings, diaries and letters. The cycle is divided into four parts, articulated by the two longest movements; they draw a huge range of expression from soprano Juliane …
IIron
4 panel CD digipack: it would be too easy to simply call IIRON the COH metal album, as it goes way beyond that. True, this album of classic Pavlov stompers contains more than its fair share of guitars both acoustic and electric, yet it still maintains that sense of power and purpose through electronic music which stands out as the COH ‘raison d’être’. Coming 11 years after IRON, which also tackled the sound of rock with alarming results, the new album features not only recent guitar tracks recor…
Casse-tete
Composed in 1979 and edited on LP in 1984 by Amaryllis. Reissue on cd by Oral, 2008. Contrary to an electronic music delighting itself in soaring above reality in self abstraction, the concrete music of Bernard Bonnier has a down on earth hearing, and a dancing too, altough now and then out of beat. Bernard Bonnier has defined chameleon-music as: '...a mime* trying to beat its parth through the puzzle (casse-tête: literally 'head-breaker') of soliciting madness, sundowns, violence, science, love…
Orchestral Works
The second CD of col legno's Wien Modern Edition is dedicated to Luciano Berio, who throughout his life kept on searching for new sounds, and new instrumental and orchestral organizing principles in his work. His Sequences for solo instruments are among the most important landmarks in recent music; later on, Berio decided to "comment" on some of these notoriously complex solo works from an orchestral perspective. Chemins and Chemins IIb are adaptations of the Sequences for harp and viola. "The b…