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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…
Bryant park Moratorium Rally
An October afternoon in 1969. Midtown Manhattan. A rally in Bryant Park against the Vietnam War. Down 42nd Street towards Times Square, Tony Conrad is adjusting microphones in his 5th floor loft, one directed at the TV set -- where it will pick up live local news coverage -- the other pointing out the window, where the echo of speeches and crowd noise mingles with the oceanic rush of crosstown traffic. As the event is about to begin, he rolls tape. Thirty-four years later, we hear what he heard.…
Way Out
The Books have a terrific sense of humor-- and it makes The Way Out, an album built on eccentric vocal samples, a good-natured discovery instead of a cheap piece of mockery. Imagine if a blog had posted these clips of goofball hypnotherapist and meditation consultants, or found a tape of a boy and a girl swapping violent threats with each other: You'd chuckle and move on. But when the Books use these samples, they give them integrity. You find yourself engrossed with people …
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 The first two pieces on this collage CD were actually withdrawn by Boulez after their premiere as he wished to think them over again.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…
Certainty of Swarms
'The fusion of metal, noise rock, free jazz, industrial, and harsh electronics that makes up The certainty of swarms is the rare kind of heterogeneous concoction that is carefully matured, but never lost in pedestrian calculation. A blistering onslaught of metallic-fused noise-murk, swarms is considered by the band to be one of their most complete statements to date, an aptly blindsiding and developed work drawing from all quarters of their craft.'
Piano Duet
Before the epigones take over the stage we are given a chance to hear out Bach himself: the unfinished four-voice Contrapunctus XIV from the Art of the Fugue marks the starting point of Andreas Grau's and Götz Schumacher's remarkable exploration of the Bach cosmos. In the Berlin autograph of the Contrapunctus XIV the place where the score breaks off is marked by an inscription: "At the point where the name BACH is introduced in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died." Even though fr…
Suitable For Framing
Reissue of this obscure Canadian album from 1975, originally issued on the A.R.C. Record label, with extended mixes and bonus material from the same period. Performed by David Rosenboom and J. B. Floyd (pianos, one in each channel) & Trichy Sankaran on South Indian percussion (mrdangam and kanjira). On April 19th, 1975, at Northern Illinois University, three musicians met in a milestone event from which emerged a unique, improvising trio with two pianos and South Indian percussion. Fortunately, …
Chamber Music
It is with great shrewdness that Uroš Rojko has almost maxed out the unusual juxtapositions of an accordion with a viola and a piano, respectively. His fondness for the accordion may have its roots in his folk music past. On the present recording, however, these roots are not in evidence. Even the Tangos speak a language of their own, which Rojko creates by juggling characteristic fragments of tango, thereby reducing them to their essence. Even the first bars of his pieces exhibit the correspond…
Airforms
Airforms was first presented at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [Scottsdale, Arizona] in April of 2004. The work was inspired by a group of experimental houses designed by Wallace Neff in the 1940s using a process he called airform construction. The houses were built by spraying concrete over an inflated balloon structure. Inspired by the nautilus sea shell, the houses were an investigation into the aesthetic possibilities of structures formed by air, and the psychological effects of l…
Music for a Summer Evening / A Little Suite for Christmas / Five
Music for a Summer Evening (1974) is the third part of the "cosmic drama" Macrocosmos, which investigates the relations between the innermost human soul and the vastness of the cosmos; relations that also determine the temporal, dynamic and tonal dimensions of the composition. Its immense material extravagance is reflected by a range of some 70 percussion instruments; in addition, the two pianists are required to perform a variety of different techniques, such as pizzicatos, flageolets, etc. A s…
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…
Vous Et Nous
A brilliant collaboration between these two dark moody French singers -- every bit as great as their classics from the early 70s! Recorded in 1977, with enough material to make up 2 LPs, this set features 33 tracks that slip and slide into each other with cool sounds, spare instrumentation, and amazing vocals that are difficult to describe, but which cut you to the quick once you've heard them! Extremely haunting, with a feel that sounds like the wind blowing through an empty cottage on…
Violin and Orchestra / Coptic Light
Morton Feldman dedicated a whole series of compositions to the relationship between solo instruments and the orchestra: after Cello and Orchestra (1972), Piano and Orchestra (1975), Oboe and Orchestra (1976) and Flute and Orchestra (1977/78) his Violin and Orchestra (1979) marks the conclusion of these "relationship works." The variety of sound accumulated around the violin, or through the violin, in less than an hour's time ranges from delicate whispers to cantilenas in rich tones and sharp rep…
Musica Viva 06
"Musica Viva 06" is another excellent release from the German Col Legno label, which specializes in the avant-garde. This disc includes three live performances -- the original 1981 recording of "Ais," featuring the incredible baritone voice of Spyros Sakkas, a new recording of "Troorkh," a trombone concerto, from 2000, and (drumroll please...) the world premiere of "Anastenaria," also from 2000, with the inimitable Xenakis champion Charles Bornstein conducting. As it turns out, "Metastas…
Urueña
'Sillón is proud to present what has to be Italy's best kept secret on the improvised music scene. Based in Madrid, Spain, Alessandra Rombolá works in the field of contemporary music and improvisation. Her stunning debut-cd, Urueña, shows her great musicality and sense of form. Her sound is so rich that it fills the whole space of the beautiful Church in the tiny village in central Spain, Urueña. The music is captured in detail by sound-wizard, Pierre-Olivier Boulant. A must for all fans of crea…
String Quartets Vol 4
The most recent of his compositions which Rihm called “string quartets” date back a few years already, with a gap in the enumeration still waiting to be filled (the eleventh quartet is missing). Even a cursory comparison of the three works’ beginnings reveals Rihm’s “ability to find new and distinctly characteristic solutions for each piece, which, each in their own way, put a stamp on what is to follow.” (R. Frisius) The gentle pizzicati of Quartet No. 10 and the muted, shadowy chord of No. 12 …
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.
Aerial # 3
This release is the third and last in the three-part Aerial series. Tod Dockstader is one of the all-time great figures in the world of musique concréte composition, with his "organized sound" works from the 1960s being amongst the most radical ever conceived -- in league with Schaeffer, Henry, Stockhausen, and Varese. Aerial is a rare new work in the realm of shortwave radio, from one of America's most experimental composers. Volume 1 was released in March 2005 inside a slipcase. Volume …
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 …
American Piano Concertos
The great creator of musical novelties hardly ever departed from the melodic harmonious basis, though: his major achievements included not least the development of new techniques for piano playing, which he also integrated in his book New Musical Resources. His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928) appears to put the spotlight on the technical and musical-historical findings, whereas in pieces such as Irish Jig and Four Irish Tales he openly and merrily inquires into his Irish background, with…