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Phoenix
Superb introduction to a largely unknown avant-garde composer/instrument builder; one of the most important ReR releases in a while. The music of little known East European composer Ernö Kiraly has finally been preserved -- a collection of original works that will impress and amaze all students of contemporary classical/electroacoustic composition, along with those who have only recently discovered the sound worlds of Pierre Henry and Harry Partch. Kiraly's experimental music stems from two sour…
Le journaliste
Anne-James Chaton (voice, electronics) with Andy Moor (electric guitar, radio, electronics). Le journaliste consists of 8 pieces and is a part of a series of 100 portraits iniated by Anne-James Chaton... Most of these portraits have become large posters. Le journaliste is a journey into the texts and columns of a newspaper and radio broadcasts of a single journalist selected by Anne James. The world news, the politics, headlines, the stock exchange figures and the weather are all explored and tr…
The ins and outs
This is a studio recording, and thus somewhat different in approach and tone to the group's continuous live sets; an example can be heard on a compilation from the 2003 Freedom of the City festival. Here the emphasis is more on developing specific ideas with a consistent logic than on modulating between passages of tension and climax. On the longest track, the 13-minute Absolute Xero, the logic is sure and compelling; Skzypce is more playful, with Wilkinson vocalising through his reed and Noble,…
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…
Das tapfere Schneiderlein
Drop the usual children's opera platitudes, add a liberal measure of cheek – result: a smart musical comedy, young and saucy, just like the brave little people that go about their business here. Do the children today know at all what this fairytale is about? Well, if they don't, Wolfgang Mitterer will bring it home to them, with just a few characteristic instruments: double bass, samples, synthetic sounds. Elisabeth Rombach as the little tailor takes to the road boldly and merrily, parading the …
I Love My Organ
The bulk of the material on Tom Recchion's second album for Birdman was recorded just after the completion of Chaotica in the mid-'80s, and sounds like a natural continuation of that record (despite the absence of any Esquivel). Recchion is assisted on some tracks by noted musician, composer, author, journalist for The Wire, and music curator David Toop (himself a collaborator with Eno, Jon Hassell, John Zorn, Talvin Singh, Adrian Sherwood, and Scanner). Recchion labored on I Love My Organ for y…
Mise en Scène
"I wrote Mise en Scène between July 1992 and May 1994. Apart from the four additional clarinets involved besides the soloist (two of them as 'doppelgangers' of the soloist) having to move around in the hall during the five movements of the composition, the choice of title is also justified by a number of scenographic instructions that constituted an, albeit vague, starting point for the whole composition." For his concerto José Ramón Encinar also falls back on his own compositions for clarinet, …
Quilisma
The succinctness of his work will first become fully apparent when it becomes possible to view the second half of the twentieth century from something more like a bird’s-eye view.
Swimming In A Galaxy Of Goodwill And Sorrow
with Steve Swell: trombone Jemeel Moondoc: alto saxophoneWilliam Parker: double bass Hamid Drake: drum set - This is an album to be cherished, because it reaches back and incorporates styles from swing to post-modern free jazz; and because the playing of Steve Swell and the members of his quartet are as near-perfect as you are likely to find; and because the melodies capture the imagination with a complex beauty that hooks into the inner being of soulfulness. It encompasses a unity of elements…
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.
Landings
RESTOCKED, reduced price - Having recorded a significant body of work under various guises including A Broken Consort and Clouwbeck, Richard Skelton returns with a brand new and long anticipated album under his own name. Following on from 'Marking Time' (originally released via Preservation in 2008 only to be reissued on limited vinyl by Type over the summer), 'Landings' is an album steeped in the wild rural landscape of Skelton's surroundings. Over the span of just a few releases he's ma…
Speak no more about the leaves
This cd contains 3 pieces inspired by Arnold Schönberg's 'The Book of the Hanging Gardens' and in particular the poems by Stefan George that Schönberg used as lyrics. Track one uses Steve Roden's voice reading/singing part of the text as the only sound material. Track two uses the vowel structure from the text as a score for striking five tones on a small chime. Track three uses samples from the Schönberg work as well as Roden's voice singing the same text as track one.
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…
Seal Of The Blue Lotus
Seal of the Blue Lotus is the 1965 debut from the extraordinary folk guitarist Robbie Basho, who released numerous albums for John Fahey's Takoma label during the '60s. His mystical approach to six- and 12-string guitar improvisation shares many similarities to John Fahey in that Basho, too, was inspired by Eastern modalities -- his six-string melodies recalling the Indian ragas of Ravi Shankar's "Dhun in Musra Mund." "Mountain Man's Farewell" is an outstanding piece that displays the early seed…
Getting a head
Second in the metal box limited edition re-releases, this one from1980 with Fred Frith (guitar) and Charles K. Noyes (percussion) and featuring unorthodox instruments built from tape recorders and helium balloons.
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…
Der Tod und das Mädchen II
The tale of the Sleeping Beauty set somewhere between science fiction and biting social criticism. In her texts Elfriede Jelinek explores the states of sleep, of apparent death, of semi-consciousness, or of being barely awake – and in doing so investigates Austrian everyday life in all its uniqueness, including all the petty power games and battles of the sexes. Jelinek's grim texts, recited by Anne Bennent, Hanna Schygulla and an artificially generated voice, are combined with Olga Neuwirth's t…
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 …
Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell\' op. 41 di Arnold Schoenb
"All my works always start out from a human incentive: an event, an experience, a text in our lives leads to my instinct and my conscience and wants me to bear witness, as a musician and as a man." This is how Nono, in 1960, described his motivation as a composer, the incentive inducing him to speak up through his music. His opus 1, the Canonic variations on the series of op. 41 by Arnold Schönberg, is based on the twelve-tone series used in Schönberg's composition; it actually takes effect in t…
Glissando n.1
Restocked “A trance-tape piece, constituting the entirety of the genre called Illuminatory Sound Environment, composed in the 70s in response to Catherine Christer Hennix’s “Electric Harpsichord. ” John Berdnt’s enthralling liner notes explain ISE as “an unfurling sound field of overwhelming but far from gratuitous sensuality, a highly “tuned” texture where all of the aspects are coordinated to make a deeply unusual “whole”, a new kind of perceptual gestalt... The piece has a disorienting flow t…