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The Sapphire Nature
2002 release ** "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…
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 …
Glaciers in Extinction
One can hardly imagine a more striking description of the anticipated disappearance of these ice giants: Glaciers in Extinction is a warning by sounds. Fabbriciani’s deep, grieving sounds tell not only of the catastrophe to come but of the unfathomable origin of existence itself. The sound of nature revealed, and not for glaciologists only: This concerns all of us. The famous Italian flautist and, with his hyperbass flute, much sought-after interpreter of New Music has himself composed powerful …
Music For Mandolin And Guitar
The minor forms represented on the present recording range from the principles of the ars nova in the Sonata piccola to the weird waltzes in the Movimenti per chitarra. With the exception of the Préludes, the pieces are to be performed as cycles. The Sonata Piccola, composed in 1986 and revised in 1996, is really based on medieval compositional principles. The names of the movements of the Movimenti per chitarra and of the Partita then suggest Baroque forms of the suite. At the same time, a logi…
Allegro Sostenuto / Pression / Dal Niente / Intérieur I
Both Sostenuto and Dal niente were composed for the clarinetist Eduard Brunner. “As in the earlier Ausklang for piano and orchestra, the musical material is determined by the interplay of the experiences of resonance on the one hand and motion on the other. Both aspects of sound encounter one another in the conception of structure as a multiply ambivalent ‘arpeggio’, i.e. as a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction – experienced in temporal succession – which is conveyed both…
Cipher
It has been Chicago, not New York, that has been the confluence of music of Europe, jazz of the Americas, and improvised music. Whereas NYC claims all things to be "New York" (sort of like Al Gore inventing the internet), music makers in Chicago identify and defer to varying regional influences.Such is the case on Cipher, where seemingly disparate forces come together to create heady and engaging music. But then leader Josh Abrams has made a career of such things. He began with the Philadelphia …
Nachtgesänge / Konzert für Violoncello und Orchester / Intrada /
Young Müller (b. 1964, Switzerland) writes in a consistently romantic style — unexpected col legno fare! Perhaps Sterling should have released this. The warm Hesse settings, Nachtgesänge, could be mistaken for Szymanowski or Zemlinsky; indeed, Ernman sounds as though she’d be ideal in a Strauss opera. Darkly emotional, the single-movement cello concerto taps Shostakovich and Lutoslawski’s pathos; the idée fixe’s colorful unfolding reminds the listener of Dutilleux. Müller maintains his anachroni…
The boys
Sound-track to the prize-winning movie. The Necks break with convention here and put several shorter pieces on one CD. All gems and all pared back to the reiterative imperfection that is the Necks' unique and glorious signature. This a band that seems to be coming into its golden age. Prodigious music and highly recommended.
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…
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…
Solar Flares Burn For You
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, …
Quatervois
Finally the overdue and long awaited re-release of IOVAE’s Quatervois which came originally as a limited CD-R release on Drone Disco. IOVAE, native of Cincinnati is a true alchemist, working out lo-fi tape collages and simple four track assemblages. He uses unusual sound sources and layers these into rather dense and industrial etudes of found sound. Iovae (Ron Orovitz) has been playing with sound in the culturally insular confines of Cincinnati Ohio since circa 1988. Initially, tape & turntable…
Playtime
Including Notturno volgare, for clarinet; Playtime No.1; Alex in Mongolia, for two guitars; Rite in progress, for piano; Notturno, for double bass; Playtime No.4; Dietro l'orologio, for soprano & tenor saxophones; Sei danze, for violin.
An Experimental Recital
Some 150 years apart, both composers developed minute nuclei into an ever expanding cosmos of sound, each against the background of his own era. Prick up your ears – Schubert's Fantasy in F minor and Sonata in B flat major D 617 crossed with Ligeti's Three pieces for two pianos: rich in contrasts, upsetting, and in a simply stunning interpretation by Andreas Grau & Götz Schumacher. In the beginning there was simply the idea of playing Schubert and Ligeti together in one program: "During the perf…
Une Soirée Vian
The Soirée Vian, a kind of meta-cabaret created in 1991 based on a commission by the WDR, develops along the narrative red thread of Boris Vian's novel The red grass and turns into a dizzying journey through the absurdly crazy worlds of Vian's universe. The fullness and polystylism of this venture undertaken by Denys Bouliane might indeed almost make the listener dizzy, not least due to the fantastic performance by the electro-acoustic ensemble "Série B." Their "musical roller coaster ride from …
Kapnos
Meerkat is a kind of Italian underground big band. Here we find Adriano Zanni (Punck), Matteo Uggeri (Hue), Luca Sigurtà, Luca Bergero (Fhievel), Davide Valecchi (Aal), Andrea Ferraris (Ics), Fabio Selvafiorita, Paolo Ippoliti (Logoplasm), Laura Lovreglio (Logoplasm) and Andrea Marutti (Amon, Never Known). If you have been paying attention in the last few years, you may recognize these names as Italy's finest in the fields of ambient, electronics, microsound, post guitar - well, anything but tru…
How To Get Started
"John Cage conceived How To Get Started almost as an afterthought -- a performance substituting for another that was previously planned in 1989 for delivery at 'Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Music' presented by Bay Area Radio Drama at Sprocket Systems, Skywalker Ranch, in Nicasio, California. In his introduction, Cage talks about the difficulty of initiating the creative process, while exploring the usefulness of im…
14 Récitations
A songbird that stops singing must die. Georges Aperghis demands a similar degree of self-sacrifice of the performer of his 14 Récitation.
Congotronics
This group was founded over 25 yrs ago by Mingiedi, a virtuoso of the likembé ('thumb piano'). The band's line-up includes 3 electric likembés, equipped w/ hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, & plugged into amplifiers. There's also a rhythm section which uses traditional as well as makeshift percussion, 3 singers, 3 dancers & a peculiar sound system including megaphones dating from the colonial period. Their repertoire draws largely on Bazombo trance music, to w…
Piano Duet
Before the epigones take over the stage we are given a chance to hear out Bach himself: the unfinished four-voice Contrapunctus XIV from the Art of the Fugue marks the starting point of Andreas Grau's and Götz Schumacher's remarkable exploration of the Bach cosmos. In the Berlin autograph of the Contrapunctus XIV the place where the score breaks off is marked by an inscription: "At the point where the name BACH is introduced in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died." Even though fr…