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Käärmeenkääntöpiiri
Perhaps this collaboration was destined to happen, and we’re overjoyed that it is happening here! Tampere, Finland’s Uton (Jani Hirvonen) and Taranto, Italy’s Valerio Cosi (who is ½ of Pulga after all) are two of the most creative and most prolific musicians working in experimental music at the moment, and on Käärmeenkääntopiiri, Uton and Valerio have mastered a sound that combines elements of psychedelia, free jazz, krautrock, environmental sounds, drones and more for an ecstatic listening expe…
Vita di San Francesco
When, in the summer of 1992, Lutz-Werner Hesse visited St. Francis’s hometown in Umbria, he was deeply moved by Giotto’s frescos in the Basilica. Using prints of the frescos, Hesse later developed a dramatic sequence, which was meant to serve as the basis for a composition revolving around the life of the saint. Gongs had always held a special fascination for Hesse. So, for this piece, he pitted 13 gongs against one organ: “The organ, I thought, is a particularly suitable partner for the gongs s…
Trac(k)_t
his is the final work in the series of works-encompassing ataraxia, bradycard, trans~, and back_forward – using the cymbalon as source material. The process of working with this hammered stringed instrument for this series has been a “discussion” between the instrument and myself, an exploration of traditional playing, digital processing, and mixtures of both. I feel that trac[k]_t should convey the scope of using an instrument without losing both its intrinsic nature of engagement as …
Pollen
Recorded on 20/21 December 2006 and 2 January 2007 at Studio Z, Berlin
Early works vol. 1 (1979/82)
Very last copy. First release of the early sound installations from the German sound artist Rolf Julius, ranging from 1979 to 1982 : Music on Two High Poles (1979), Morning Song (Berlin Concert Series, 1981, in collaboration with Joan La Barbara), Music for the Earth (Berlin Concert Series, 1981), Music for the Eyes , (1981), Music for a Pane of Glass (1980), Music for a Yellow Room (Berlin Concert Series, 1982), Chamber Concert for Three Loudspeakers, (Berlin Concert Series, 1982), Concert for …
Jättiläisrotta
The burgeoning Finnish free-folk movement has been garnering much praise & attention over the past year. First CD release by Avarus who play a left-field blend of noise, folk & free jazz. From the same circle of psychos who bring us Kemialliset Ystavat, Maniac's Dream, Pylon & the Anaksimandros. Backward, dirt-eating freak folk that makes the Animal Collective sound like Judy Collins.
Fama
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…
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…
Pléiades
Featured works: "Pléiades" and Psappha." Performed by Kroumata Percussion Ensemble; Gert Mortensen, percussion. "Xenakis has been very interested in percussion music -- ever since his orchestral piece 'Terretektorh (1966) in which the instrumental forces are spread throughout the hall, by way of 'Psappha' (1975) for a lone percussion virtuoso all the way to 'Pléiades' (1979) for six percussionists -- perhaps the largest composition in the entire percussion repertoire, and the most daring …
Music For Keyboard Instruments
This is the first recording of Xenakis‘ music for keyboard instruments realised by computer – unplayable by human hands! Realized by computer. 'Herma' for piano (1961); 'Mists' for piano (1981); 'Khoaï' for harpsichord (1976); 'Evryali' for piano (1973); 'Naama' for harpsichord (1984). Daniel Grossmann, MIDI programming. "This is the first recording of Xenakis' music for keyboard instruments realized by computer -- unplayable by human hands! The desire to hear a composition exactly as Xenak…
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…
Gran Torso / Salut für Caudwell
In 1988 the first issue of these recordings of Gran Torso and Salut für Caudwell was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics' Award); and neither compositions nor recordings have lost any of their value up to today. In Gran Torso, Lachenmann tried to explore the “mechanic and energetic conditions of sound production”. This resulted in singular, unusual sounds which simultaneously exploded the barriers of audibility, playing technique and sound as such. The guit…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
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,…
Journey Through A Body
Recorded in Roma in March 1981. It was recorded in five days, a day per body section. No tracks were re-recorded or added to after their day. Each was immediately after recording. No tracks were pre-planned, all tracks are invented directly onto the tape.
Live!
It's hard to go wrong with Fela Kuti's work from the 1970s, and LIVE!, which features the Afrobeat innovator backed by his powerhouse band Africa '70 and ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker, is no exception. Like all of Fela's recordings from the era, LIVE! consists of just a few tracks, each of which approximates or exceeds the ten minute mark. Yet the arrangements are so dynamic on these tracks, the criss-crossing polyrhythms so absorbing, and Fela's incantatory vocals so entrancing that the long ru…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
In the early 1970s Feldman increasingly turned his attention to works for orchestra, in most cases combined with a solo instrument, like Piano and Orchestra (1975). One aspect that was important to him in all of these works was a research into sound, an "unceasing effort to create, by way of exclusion and integration, by operating with colored projection surfaces and various spatial levels, a kind of self-supporting structure elastic enough to take up the exactly fixed initial impulse and contin…
Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell\' op. 41 di Arnold Schoenb
"All my works always start out from a human incentive: an event, an experience, a text in our lives leads to my instinct and my conscience and wants me to bear witness, as a musician and as a man." This is how Nono, in 1960, described his motivation as a composer, the incentive inducing him to speak up through his music. His opus 1, the Canonic variations on the series of op. 41 by Arnold Schönberg, is based on the twelve-tone series used in Schönberg's composition; it actually takes effect in t…
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.
Gene packs
Hirotomo Hasegawa : ichiriki, voice, loops. Shizuo Uchida : bass, ichigen, loops. Debut album by a new improvisation group consisting of Hirotomo Hasegawa and Shizuo Uchida. Both have a leather-bound folder full of underground back-story. Hasegawa was the lead singer of seminal early eighties Japanese punk hardcore group Aburadako (Greasy Octopus), while Uchida was a long-term member of Haino's Nijiumu medieval dream-drone unit. The group's instrumentation is highly unorthodox, placing Uchida's …
Girls Beware!
JanuarY 2004. Two years after the highly acclaimed album “Rose-garden", the portables come up with their second full length. “Girls Beware!" starts where their previous album ended. De Portables developed a cult reputation during the years, mainly because of their many intense and always different performances. Against all recent trends, standards and expectations they do their thing; they play because they like playing. The quartet twists themselves during 11 songs a way between pop, post-rock …