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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…
Cathédrale
Concert music for solo harp: The harp, whose ancestor belongs to the most ancient musical instruments, is usually associated with impressionistic sound. But Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - the most visionary inventor of sounds among contemporary composers, according to Wilhelm Sinkovicz – has never been satisfied with the status quo. So, while teaching composition and investigating new forms of musical notation, he succeeded in his endeavor to explore new possibilities of musical expression again and…
Out
Janek Schaefer is an architect. This might explain his vision on his music. A good building closes up into your memory without you even noticing it. The same goes for Schaefer's soundsculptures. Clearly structured soundloops baffling their way into perception. You can use his music in art-galleries, train-stations, living-rooms: anywhere really. Each time/place conducts his work to a different perception. Even a high volume or low volume defines another way in the listening experience which unfo…
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…
Kokotsu/ Ecstasy
Long deleted, originally released by Columbia Records on March 1970, “ Kokotsu / Ecstasy” is here re-released for the first time. Sonic-wise, the disc unleashes a whirlpool of Latin styled mondo -sexploitation sounds that get spiced up with feminine breathing and respiration sounds, moaning and hissing, igniting a maelstrom of assorted eroticism and sexual depravity. In all, it resembles a caged vixen engaged in sexual intercourse, hatching out cries, moans, sighs, words and other sounds such as…
Quando Stanno Morendo
Works of art are often triggered by private events. Sarà dolce tacere (1960), for example, was written on the occasion of the 40th birthday of Bruno Maderna, Nono's (former) teacher and close friend; and also in 1960 Nono wrote Ha venido for his daughter's first birthday. Djamila Boupachà (1962), ¿Dónde estás, hermano? (1982) and Quando stanno morendo (1982), on the other hand, are clearly expressions attributable to the politically involved, the committed cosmopolitan Nono.
Natura renovatur
Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) has featured prominently in my music writing life for a decade and a half, ever since I wrote Discovering Scelsi on my first computer for Piano Journal (Oct. 1986), one of the first UK articles about this fascinating and elusive composer.There are particular reasons why the Scelsi CD in the latest, indispensable batch from Kairos prompted a trawl of my files. Scelsi applauded my analysis of his piano music and we had a cordial correspondence, after which I met him tw…
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…
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 …
Klaviermusik
The sovereign and immediate approach Lachenmann takes in his Fünf Variationen über ein Thema von F. Schubert (1956) lends Schubert's slight Deutsche Tanz D 643a special and almost heroic flavor. But only five years later, Lachenmann had already travelled a considerable distance since those days as his Echo Andante of 1961 shows. Like Wiegenmusik (1963), the piece has been shaped by Lachenmann's studies with Luigi Nono whose influence and inspiration are clearly audible. A perfect example of the …
Hanging gardens
Completely unique, stunningly musical, technically impressive & breathtakingly simple. The Necks have defined an endlessly productive area of performance that is at once both minimal and gripping, obvious yet profoundly subtle. Easy to say, hard to achieve. It can take time for a group with a completely original idea to find its public & The Necks have been pursuing this one for over a decade in their native Australia - but it doesn't age, it just matures.
Happy days
Back in stock. Released: 1997.Jim O'Rourke is a rarity: a genuine bridge between the avant-garde and the underground. From his production work (Smog, Wilco, Faust) to his own freewheeling excursions as a solo performer and member of outfits like Gastr del Sol and Sonic Youth, his work continues to bring the out there in here. Happy Days pits a lone guitar against a phalanx of hurdy-gurdies, a decided shift away from the composer's electronic-based work. A roiling hornet's next of activity that F…
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, …
THIS PLACE IS DREAMING
An attempt to convert Brussels' sonic reality into music. Mutated environmental sound materials gathered in Brussels, remixes of interviews with inhabitants and extracts of installations are flanked with atmospheric compositions made with sounds from other cities and countries.
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, …
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.
Resonant Spaces
****THE WIRE 2008 TOP 50 RECORDS OF THE YEAR WINNER****"A couple of years ago the promoters Arika invited John Butcher to tour a number of out-of-the-way spaces in Scotland. The venues, selected for their extreme acoustic properties, included a mausoleum, a wartime fuel-storage tank and a cave. This album grows out of Butcher’s evident interest in escaping the acoustic confines of conventional venues (work with resonant spaces is documented on the earlier Geometry of Sentiment and Cavern with Ni…
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 …
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 …