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Foldings
At 7pm on a cold Tokyo evening in January 2002, Taku Sugimoto met Mark Wastell at the exit to Yoyogi underground station. Taku had with him his acoustic guitar and a cello that Mark was to use for that evenings concert. They walked the short distance to Offsite, more or less just around the corner. Once inside, Mark began to change the cello strings and Taku started to arrange the recording equipment. Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakumara arrived shortly after and busily set about install…
FADENKREUZE
For Elmar Lampson, composition and the phenomenology of music overlap as disciplines, and attentive listening is as critical to his works' reception as is analysis of their carefully timed structures or pitch content. Lampson's String Quartet No. 2 (1992-1998) operates on several aural planes, some near and easy to distinguish, and others more remote and indistinct. The material shifts between active, atonal flurries and soft, almost lyrical passages of modal simplicity, and the extremely soft d…
Arabbox
recorded in 1993 following the first Gulf War. 10 years later, following the second Gulf War, Soleilmoon is pleased to finally release this important Muslimgauze album. On April 15, 2003, we issued it in an expensive limited edition of 500 copies, packed in a hand-made metal box. This second edition, in an edition of 1000 copies, is released without the box but has a friendly price. It's commonly known that Bryn Jones, the late musician behind Muslimgauze, was driven by the passion of th…
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…
Musica Viva 03
Musica Viva 03: Pleading for divine forgiveness, exploring the bounds of possibility of clarinets, and tricks of light.
Songbook
If you'd like to hear what might remain, and might survive, of the popular common musical property, these two works by the Salzburg composer Clemens Gadenstätter will give you some essential clues. "Akkor(d/t)anz" is based on the character of Romantic piano music manifested by monumental chords. The explosion of the chord is followed by pulsations derived from differentiated perceptions of its details. The "dance" of chords in accordance with new formations of the original chord demands an energ…
Symphony No. 3
Charles Ives (1874-1954) earned his living by selling insurance policies to his contemporaries. Besides, he took a great interest in literature, philosophy and, first and foremost, music. And what came of it? The most original modernist music one could imagine. Ives's Third Symphony was inspired by his memory of camp meetings, the Christian "evangelistic gatherings" common in his youth. However bizarre these meetings may appear to us, they were a familiar feature of rural America especially duri…
Punani Rubberist
First edition of 300 copies. 'Punani Rubberist is a new composition for computer, bass clarinet and gas horn. The CD includes remixes by Kazumoto Endo, eRikm, and Joe Gilmore, and an additional unreleased solo computer composition (Excelsior Punani) from 2003. He plucked a hair from his body, chewed it up, spat it out, made the magic with his fist, said the words of the spell, and shouted 'Change!'. It turned into hundreds and thousands of little monkeys, who rushed wildly about grabbing weapons…
Sonatas & Inteludes
The sonata originated in the Baroque as a small, one-movement form, which nevertheless already contained the core of the sonata to be later developed and composed in elaborate detail by the Viennese Classics. In his Sonatas and Interludes John Cage stuck to the concise, one-movement form, thus establishing a link to Scarlatti and Bach's preludes as well as to Chopin's Préludes and Satie's piano pieces. Other than many of his later, freer works, these small but complex gems are fixed and noted do…
(Old school) Karlheinz Stockhausen
This is the fourth release in the series [old school]. The first three CDs, dedicated to the music of John Cage [zkr0009], James Tenney [zkr0010] and Alvin Lucier [zkr0011] have been highly acclaimed. London's Wire Magazine wrote: 'The rigour and discipline they collectively bring to this compositions make both discs utterly enthralling, from start to finish.' The new release is dedicated to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.' 'I do not want a spiritualistic session. I want music.' Karlheinz St…
Endokraniosis
This is probably one of the most clinical releases of Maurizio Bianchi's current discography. Together with Siegmar Fricke from Germany four very complex soundscapes have been produced that on the one hand show similarities and relations in sound to Maurizio’s early releases and on the other hand enter new territorities of clinical sound-excursions. The four long tracks contain metallurgic ambiences, painful postoperative distortions, quiet endoscopic sections and pulsating, radiant elect…
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black was an installation at LA Municipal Art Gallery as part of the COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship exhibition from 2004. The installation consisted of 2000 posters: 1000 Gold and 1000 Black. Two separate rooms were covered with these posters that were covered solid in their color with the name of the color printed rather large in dead center. At the bottom of each poster was listed the instrumentation for each particular soundtrack to the color. The GO…
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…
Piano Works
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.
Der Abgrund
"Der Abgrund is the last act of an unsolved theorem which must remains the same. It's the arcane enchanter of a denied truth since mimesis of itself, as not manifested manifestation that nevertheless perseveres on its concept of form beyond the form. It's omnivalent hypostasis of a prismatic Maurizio Bianchi who is annulling himself and reinvents between a climate and the other without solution of continuity, today in symbiotic communion with Frequency In Cycles Per Second. "Der Abgrund" is an o…
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…
Zombie
A record full of magical chants & even more magical grooves (anyone who would wish the part seven minutes into "Zombie" would end has no soul & probably does not have a soul). Fela Kuti's music transcends barriers of taste & culture, due to the inevitable desire of all human beings to throw their hands up & shake their rumps with no remorse.
s/t
Born in 1934. Boeswillwald took an eclectic engineer training (electronics, sound recording) of fine arts (decorative arts) and theatre, and at the Sorbonne antique theatre. In 1953, he discovered the Sorbonne maison des lettres studio founded by Roland Barthes and from that point commits himself into sound creation. He frequented regularly the radio Club d'essais where he met P. Schaeffer. 'Le piano joue, la caravane passe' (2000). 'Au fond, la mer est belle' (1999). 'Pathos ad Libitum' (…
String Quartets Vol. 2 (Nos. 5 & 6)
That the two single-movement string quartets No. 5 (“Ohne Titel”) and No. 6 (“Blaubuch”), composed in 1981/83 and 1984, belong to the most passionate of Rihm’s quartets is due to their restless vigor. This impulsive approach is of course always present in his music. But even the tempo indications “fast, restless” and “fast und free” suggest a certain stringency - which is fully realized in the pieces. A sense of inner disquiet pulls the listener like a maelstrom into a sea of commotion, of stru…
Zombie Fela Kuti And Afrika 70
Includes liner notes by Jacqueline Grandchamp-Thiam, Rikki Stein and Mabinuori Kayode Idowu. Digitally remastered by Pompon (Translab Paris, Paris, France). With the inclusion of Nigerian master musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti's incendiary 1977 single, "Zombie," "Mr. Follow Follow," a typical anti-authoritarian exhortation, and a couple of hitherto-unreleased live cuts from the 1978 Berlin Jazz festival, ZOMBIE finds the iconoclastic singer and bandleader at his electrifying best. The title track, …