Back in stock
Aether
RESTOCKED! Another remarkable performance from a group that has no peer and belongs to no genre or movement. Minimal in an essential and structural sense, they succeed where more formal attempts founder, in re-forming subjective time in a way that is genuinely gripping and as far from theoretical as great interpreters can get. Applying extraordinary technique in a remarkably discrete way, they here transfigure a single chord over a long duration, imperceptibly arriving far from their st…
Kraanerg
"I originated in 1954 a music constructed from the principle of indeterminism; two years later I named it "stochastic music." The laws of the calculus of probabilities entered composition through musical necessity… But other paths also let to the same stochastic crossroad -- first of all, natural events such as the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen…
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…
Piano Works 1
Composer and neurologist Diego Minciacchi is as likely to publish a paper on motor skills as he is to compose music that mixes scientific and poetic ideas; yet this fact should not intimidate listeners new to his work, who might worry that the compositions on this 2005 release from Col Legno are too cerebral or complicated to appreciate. What they should know upfront, however, is that Minciacchi is a product of the generation of composers who absorbed the lessons of the 1960s and '70s avant-gard…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
A conductor enjoys the privilege of being able to reconsider his attitude to musical works over and over again. The composer Boulez adheres to the same maxim: of his own compositions he regards only very few as being finished; most of them are, to him, "work in progress." The first two pieces on this collage CD were actually withdrawn by Boulez after their premiere as he wished to think them over again. Later on, Polyphonie X (1951) in view of its extremely strict serial procedure appeared to hi…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
Music and the freedom of art: Wolfgang Rihm's aim is not to produce empty sound structures but to hit the bull's eye with direct and unexpected force.
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 …
Confusion / Gentleman
Collecting two of Fela Kuti's finest mid-1970s albums onto one disc, CONFUSION/GENTLEMAN presents the revered Nigerian Afro-pop renegade in the midst of an early career stride. Released in '73, GENTLEMAN consists of the latter three out of this set's four tracks, and is particularly notable since it marks the fiery performer's studio debut on the saxophone. Never one to shy away from challenges, Kuti offers up an impassioned sax solo at the beginning of the extended title song (even though he ha…
Solitudes
Hirschfeld deliberately distinguished solitude, or loneliness, from a state that leads to depression or despair. For him, the contemplation of one’s self leads to the “dialogue with one self and with nature”, as is the case, e.g., in his Chant of the Night, which is based on poems by Walt Whitman. Hirschfeld chose Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with its portrayal of human solitude in the plains as a starting point in order to develop the music from a simple melodic cell, “which, like human consciousn…
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…
s/t
Recorded live at Verity's 1972, this CD represents possibly the finest duo performance of Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. Reissue of the rare LP on Incus
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…
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…
Plans
Ulrich Böttcher: percussion, electronics. Uwe Buhrdorf: clarinet, electronics. Ulrich Phillipp: bass, electronics. Since 1994 Maxwells Dmon has been playing improvised music with electro-acoustic instruments. The trio works beneath the surface of cleanly structured contexts to explore the molecular structure of music. With the music on 'Stillte post', Maxwells Dmon expands their fragmentary approach extending it to the field of postproduction. The recorded music has been fragmented and re-compos…
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…
American Landscapes 1
American Landscapes 1 and 2 are live dates from 2006. While there have been a few personnel changes since the original line-up—trombonist Hannes Bauer replacing Jeb Bishop and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love replacing Hamid Drake—the core Tentet has remained intact. Both discs are comprised of a single track, clocking in at respectively about 44 and 52 minutes. Both discs are difficult to digest as single entities: attacking them as longer composed/improvised pieces linked by changes allows you better…
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…
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 …
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…
![Ekphrasis [Continuo II] / Coro](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/013/luciano-berio-ekphrasis-continuo-ii-cor.jpg.500.jpg)
Ekphrasis [Continuo II] / Coro
The renowned American architects Sullivan, Wright and Mies van der Rohe are the center of attention in the composition Ekphrasis [Continuo II], even though originally Berio had no such thing in mind: "While I was working on Continuo, it was not my intention to compose a metaphor for architecture, or write a homage to the famous Chicago architects... Neither did I refer directly to the amusing but nevertheless solid constructions by Renzo Piano... However, as the work progressed I became aware th…