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.
The First Born is (quite aptly) the first collaboration between Fabio Orsi (more than a recurring name in the In A Silent Place catalogue) and Mamuthones - better known to friends and family as Alessio Gastaldello and founding member and drummer of Jennifer Gentle, the Italian psych band signed to Sub Pop Records. After six years with the Jennifers, Alessio split amicably in late 2006 and reinvented himself as Mamuthones, a one-man project delving into primitive percussive jamming and equally pr…
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…
The succinctness of his work will first become fully apparent when it becomes possible to view the second half of the twentieth century from something more like a bird’s-eye view.
Analog and computer-generated electroacoustic music and mixed pieces for voice, instruments and live-electronics, realized at EMS - the Stockholm Electronic Music Studio. (now the Stockholm Institute of Electroacoustic Music) 1970-1979. Miklós Maros was a composition teacher at the Stockholm secondary school of music in Stockholm, (1971-1973), teacher at the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm (EMS) (1971-1978), and lecturer in electronic music at the College of Music in Stockholm (1976-1980…
The oboe more than suited Maderna's partiality for clear structures and sensual-concrete sounds. It was not without good reason that at a time when the supply of music dedicated to the oboe was anything but plenty, Maderna wrote, not one, not two, but three concertos (besides several other works for oboe) for this "nasal" sounding member of the woodwind family. The first oboe concerto (1963) seems almost classical in its character, in the interplay of oboe and orchestra, or involving other instr…
Giacinto Scelsi’s relationship with the piano is interesting and contradictory. For no other instrument has the Italian composer and poet composed so many pieces; to no other instrument does he seem so closely attached, both personally and biographically; and no other instrument disappeared so abruptly and finally from his scores as the piano, the European showcase instrument. With the piano, we can follow the break lines and develop-ments in the musical thinking and works of Giacinto Scelsi, wh…
With his Pedagogical Sketchbook often regarded as a virtual manual in composition, Paul Klee has exerted a far-reaching influence on modern music. Few composers were so profoundly affected as Sándor Veress, whose encounter with Klee's work after fleeing Hungary in 1949 gave rise to seven fantasies that range from the Bachian gravity of 'Old Sound' and the intensely elegiac 'Green in Green' to the rhythmic playfulness of 'Stone Collection'. Grau and Schumacher give a committed performance, differ…
Site-specific FAMA, “audio theatre piece for large ensemble, eight voices, actress, and sound structure,” requires the best performers for execution. Luckily, Furrer draws upon the talented Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and Klangforum Wien. Also credited are the architect, acoustician, technical and lighting engineer, costumer and stage direction. Texts are by Ovid and Arthur Schnitzler. The focus on space and solo instruments (contrabass flute and two bass clarinets) suggest Nono’s late aestheti…
Jan Philip Schulze has been playing Henze’s piano works “in his sleep,” as he says. Indeed he has worked with the composer intensively on every piece, yet during the recording sessions he was noticeably surprised, while listening back to recordings, to find himself confronted by the work afresh, discovering new sides to it which he had previously experienced differently.
In his series Vertical Time Study, Hosokawa seeks to „integrate Noh’s vertical structure of time into my own music. It is about how temporal elements, like wedges, disrupt the vertical, horizontal timeline at irregular intervals. These disruptions produce elements of tension … creating visible fissures in the structure of time and visible cracks in space. My aim is to examine the complexity and the depth of these sounds hidden in the moment.” In his piece Sen V, Hosokawa tries to combine the “ea…
It was recorded at the legendary Total Music Meeting of Free Music Production in November 2000. Dawn is a composition played off the cuff of nearly 42 minutes. All the highs and lows of a longer composition are on this recording: searching and finding, restrained groping and violent erupting.... The decisive factor, however, is that this music is played by people who have nothing or very little to do with this attitude, by Gert-Jan Prins (see his solo record Prins Live, GROB210), by the saxophon…
In Mad Sweeney's shadow: mass, piano trio, lieder cycle, wind quintet – for each of these "classic" formats Corcoran has created his own original, archaic sound.
Hardly any other composer has ever been as far removed from conservatism as Helmut Lachenmann. In all his oeuvre his listeners are never permitted to lean back comfortably even for a moment in expectation of the well-known and familiar. Again and again Lachenmann succeeded, and still succeeds, in shaking the "aesthetic apparatus," the system of conventional formulas and phrases established throughout decades and centuries, to its very foundations. Intérieur I (1966), a piece for percussion solo,…
Guenter's assiduous compositions favor extremely subtle variances in electro-acoustic crackle, subsonic rumble, and subliminal frequencies exploring the limits of the audible spectrum through invisible digital edits. The title of his landmark debut album, released in 1994 and reissued through Table of the Elements in 1996, translates as "a little dirty snow," an apt description for Guenter's naturally impressionistic minimalism. UN PEU DE NEIGE SALIE opens with "Untitled I/92," a degenerating ma…
CD release of the blau vinyl written and produced by Monoton in 1980. Re-mastered in 2006. It also contains 3 unreleased tracks from that period. Since the late 70's, early 1980's, Monotonprodukt and the "Institut für wissenschaftliche Sensation" (Institute for Scientific Sensations) have been working on the transposition of metamathematical structures, natural constants and resonance patterns in models of "bionic" psycho-active automat music. Publications, installations and long-ter…
Vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Robert Wyatt's career extends from the beginnings of the psychedelic era to the present day. This album started its life as simply a collection of the two BBC Top Gear sessions that Robert recorded in 1972 and 1974. But as we worked on it, Robert became more and more involved in it, until it ended up in its final form. In addition to the Top Gear recordings, there is a previously unheard and little known 1973 soundtrack for a short experimental film, …
In 1988, genius producer Hal Willner (best known, perhaps ironically, for his Disney tribute album STAY AWAKE) traveled to Lawrence, Kansas and taped NAKED LUNCH author and Beat Generation legend William Burroughs performing excerpts from his ... Full Descriptionwork. He then enlisted the likes of Donald Fagen and Sonic Youth to create accompanying musical collages. To this end he also unearthed Aaron Copland-esque music recorded in the late '40s and '50s for various radio shows by Toscanini'…
A collaboration between Burroughs, producer Hal Willner, and politico-rappers Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. It features Burroughs reading excerpts from seven of his books set to music by the Heroes, mostly a slow, lazy funk that sounds like it was lifted from a '70s blaxploitation soundtrack. Highlights include the 16-minute, decidedly Burroughsian holiday treat "A Junky's Christmas" and "Words of Advice for Young People," which first appeared on the Smack My Crack collection, minus the music…
A different beast from the spiritual and improvised stylings of the recent (vinyl-only) Sateenkaarisuudelma, this record is much more composed and more succinct – with ten gorgeous slices of hissing, crackling vinyl samples, small instruments, decrepit synthesizers, broken toys and vocals making up an album which flows perfectly. The effortless melodies (probably the most uplifting of the entire Fonal catalogue) and haunting vocals take you into an ethereal world of spirits and thick mist lullin…
An interesting development in recent times has been the transAtlantic and trans-generational connections being made in the improvisation community. The Emanem recording by Steve Beresford with Okkyung Lee and Peter Evans, and George Lewis' collaboration with GIO are just two recent examples that come to mind. At the forefront of this trend is the duo of Nate Wooley (trumpet & amplifier) and Paul Lytton (percussion & live electronics) bringing two of the most questioning minds in improvised music…