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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, …
From The Kitchen Archives No.3: Amplified: New Music Meets Rock
From the Kitchen Archives Vol. 3. Amplified: New Music Meets Rock, 1981-1986 is the third release in a series of CDs compiled from The Kitchen's archive that documents historic concert recordings at The Kitchen from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. While the first two releases, New Music, New York 1979 and Steve Reich and Musicians, Live 1977 focused on major figures of new and experimental music from The Kitchen's first decade, Amplified moves into the early 1980s, representing a vocabulary th…
Sun Awakens
Ben Chasny has busied himself releasing a solid run of outsider folk records for some time now; ‘The Sun Awakens’ is his eighth full-length outing and thankfully it shows no signs of Chasny letting his quality control wane. As he explored on his last Drag City release ‘School of the Flower’, Chasny has again employed a handful of collaborators to fill-out his unique sound with percussion and odd instruments – yet this doesn’t distil the fact that the record is totally his own. "The Sun Awakens" …
Adlib
He lives in Rostock, Germany and studies informatics. Petters combines perfectly the software computer culture with intensity. His music reflects so much emotion through electronic wires -- you start wondering why more electronica people don\\\'t succeed in the same way. Everything is done with a detailed precision which makes it difficult to relegate this to the background. Even if its \\\'ambient\\\', it still turns your brain around and hits you. Adlib is another moniker from the young Kristi…
Garage
Smalltown Supersound's "Superjazz" offshoot delivers this much-discussed darkcore jazz fusion album led by sometime sonic youth collaborator Mats Gustafsson, here rummaging through improvs and cover versions like a garage band picking up trumpets, double bass and drums for their heavily skewed but massively charming workouts. Sticking a hairy a tongue out at the polished slickness of the Bad Plus, The Thing offer up cover versions of tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and Peter Bro…
Darmstadt 2004
The "devil's organist" in action: if you really want to know what the "Queen of Instruments" is all about, make sure to experience Wolfang Mitterer play it live.Mitterer's organ event at Darmstadt in 2004 included not only works for organ solo but also synthetic sounds. In the piece mixture V (1995) he adheres to the principle indicated in the title, the mixture, in various respects – on the one hand in terms of organ technique and sound, on the other hand by his way of combining organ and elect…
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…
Universe Symphony / Second Symphony
The most ambitious and grandest of his projects would of course never see completion. For over forty years, Ives continued to supplement the material for his Universe Symphony, adding both notes and details. At some point, the scenario he envisaged got somewhat out of hand, Henry Cowell reported. “Several orchestras and large parties of singers, male and female, were to be placed in valleys, on mountain slopes and on summits,” and “6 to 10 different orchestras on several mountain tops, each movi…
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…
Karawane Der Mystiks
Alfred Otterstaetter began playing music in the late '70s, releasing homemade tapes and records under different band names. Blumen des Exotischen Eises LP was released in '86 in the quantity of 100 copies on his Dead Eye Records. It was recorded between '83 and '85 and consisted of spontaneous music, some of it played by Alfred alone on different instruments with overdubs, and some with friends. Some tracks have early '70s open-air spaced out feel, others -- more heavy hypnotic Teutonic sound. O…
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…
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 …
3 Liederzyklen
In the three song cycles of this recording, Wolfgang Rihm stays faithful to the text and its meaning while paying close attention to melodic line. In choosing to do so, Rihm has a deep lineage in the great tradition of Romantic art song that stretches back to the distinguished names of Schönberg, Berg, Brahms and Schumann. Approaching the text both from the perspective of the singer and from that of the accompanying pianist, Rihm is able to reach tremendous heights of expression. While the eleve…
In Stereo
'Written and performed by Christian fennesz, Jim O'Rourke & Peter Rehberg. Recorded and mixed at Studio GOK Sound, Tokyo, October 2009. Mastered at Piethopraxis, Köln, December 2009. 'Thats right, they're back! After a hiatus of almost 9 years the legendary trio of Christian fennesz, Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg have returned with a new studio album. Technically the first studio album as previous releases were edits of live performances. They spent a week in Studio GOK Sound, Tokyo to lay down…
Jugendlieder - Songs From The Youth
Berg's early lieder owe their existence largely to the young composer's great interest in literature; nevertheless it was his friend Hermann Watznauer, who actually inspired him to embark on composing his first lieder around 1900/01. And Berg enjoyed himself so much that he continued along the same lines until 1903, completing another 30 lieder; even Arnold Schönberg was essentially fascinated by them: "Berg's earliest compositions, however clumsy they may have been, already reveal two qualities…
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.
View
View was first presented as part of a solo exhibition at the jennjoy gallery in san francisco. the show also included paintings, drawings, and a silent video work. for the installation, i asked jenn to record for me the sounds of the View from one of the gallery windows. "sounds were recorded from ledge just above radiator on various days and times in april" sometimes the window was open, somethimes closed. i used fragments of these recordings as both a compositional cue as well as the entire so…
Chamber Music Vol. 1
It is the eternal questions that Nikolaus Brass mainly concerns himself with in his compositional work: the question of existence, of being, and first and foremost of all possible intermediate stages at the edge of what is conceivable, of what can just be grasped. In VOID (1999) he investigates the feeling left by loss, "structural empty spaces that bear the construction of sound while challenging it at the same time." For a due (2003), Brass has borrowed short captions from Yashushi Inoue's nov…
Electronic music
Iannis Xenakis is without a doubt one of the major figures in the development of music in the 20th century. In 1957, he joined Pierre Schaeffer and others at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, and it was there that Xenakis composed his early works for electronic tape. Xenakis' distinct sound is already apparent in 'Diamorphoses' (1957) which incorporates sounds of distant earthquakes, car crashes, jet engines, and other 'noise-like' sounds, and 'Concret PH' (1958), based on the s…
Turning Dreams & Shifting Harbours
The Kidnapping Europe project was initialized by the artists Christina Clar (Paris, France) and Peter Jap Lim (Berlin, Germany) in 2001. Based on the "Europa Myth" (Zeus kidnapped the phoenician princess Europa and brought her to a continent which now has her name), the project aims to approach the topic of migration and the dreams, hopes and visions of migrants, in particular, from a contemporary perspective. In addition to their own work, which resulted in an installation that made its debut a…