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1939
This release reissues Robert Rutman's Pogus Lp (P201-1) and includes an additional track. Rutman (b. 1930) has been building and performing on his homemade metallic instruments for many years. This recording features his buzz chime, steel cello, and bow chime, along with tabla, Tibetan horn, and Rutman's vocal chants. Rutman caresses the metal, drawing out eerie drones and overtones that buzz and trumpet. The music in turn can be as fragile as glass or reach the depths of resonance, as if one ha…
Tape play
The Ten Tape Compositions: Fat Millie's Lament, The Wasting of Lucrecetzia, For Harry, Lemon Drops, Dante's Joynte, Rerun, Mouthpiece II, Hiss, Few (in collaboration with Henri Chopin), and Kyrie. "Over his career, Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) produced a lot of electronic music. However, works for tape alone are fairly rare in his output. Over about a thirty-year period, ten works for solo tape were produced. Of the ten tape pieces, five were created in the mid-1960s at the University of Illinois,…
Pieces From The Past: By Philip Corner For The Violin of Malcolm
Five works spanning 30 years from composer Philip Corner written for violinst Malcolm Goldstein, early notated works and later graphic works, four of the pieces from live recordings. "It has been a while in the works, but finally Pogus can proudly announce the release of this wonderful disc. Five works spanning 30 plus years by experimental composer Philip Corner, interpreted by his friend and fellow composer and utterly amazing violinist Malcolm Goldstein. These works consist of early pieces w…
Zones of Influence
David Rosenboom (b.1947) is considered a pioneer in American experimental music. This release of his Zones of Influence (1984-85) documents for the first time the complete version of a major composition for percussion and computer electronics that introduced new virtuoso performance techniques along with significant developments in real-time algorithmic composition and advanced interactive linking of percussion instruments with software. Few solo percussion works exist with the scope of this com…
Tape works
"killer disc of lo-fi tape music & electronic studies from reynols’ Anla Courtis; completely all over the map, from the electric-guitar based musique concrète of “asma de tía de alga” to the almost pietro-grossi-esque bleep-fest of “invisible clown sonata” (what a title!) to the epic closer “encías de viento.” highly recommended." (Mimaroglu)...now back to his real name Alan Courtis, this still comes out under the misspelled Anla Courtis moniker (a slight name change given to him by his former R…
Thousand Year Dreaming-Floating World
Thousand Year Dreaming (1990) was commissioned by Essential Music and was written with the musicians on this recording, their particular strengths and inclinations, very much in mind. It grew out of an improvisatory piece, Nautilus, which Art Baron, Scott Robinson and Annea Lockwood realised in 1989. They found that the sound of conch shell trumpets, didjeridu and frame drums really flowered in the resonant spaces they were using for the piece. Lockwood started imagining the sonorities possible …
Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Fascinating and highly attractive project which returns the music of Gurdjieff (c. 1866 – 1949) to its ethnic inspirational sources. To date Gurdjieff’s compositions have largely been studied, in the West, via the piano transcriptions of Thomas de Hartmann. Armenian composer Levon Eskenian now goes beyond the printed notes to look at the musical traditions that Gurdjieff encountered during his travels, and rearranges the compositions from this perspective. Eskenian…
The Music of Stones
Tip, tip tip! *2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Listening to the music of Stephan Micus – which is as itinerant and wide ranging as his life – is one of the most profound experiences possible today. Beyond categories and labels, this German artist was already way ahead of trends when he released his first album in 1976. Fifteen recordings later The Garden of Mirrors, his first CD since the phenomenal Athos, seems on the surface to be heading in a stylistic direction pointing towards the Orient. But…
Urban Bushmen
*2024 stock* Urban Bushmen is a live double album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded at the Amerika Haus in Munich over two days in May 1980 and released on ECM in March 1982. The quintet comprises trumpeter Lester Bowie, saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and rhythm section Malachi Favors Maghostut and Don Moye.
Piano Songs
Celebrating Meredith Monk as composer, these Piano Songs give us a world at once playful and earnest. Written or derived from work composed between 1971 and 2006, the pieces inhabit Monk’s unique universe, as played by two of new music’s most distinguished interpreters, pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. These pieces are ‘songs’ because they have strong roots in Monk’s pieces for voice, and because they are direct, specific, and imagistic. Meredith Monk on composing for two pianos: “I de…
Violin & Orchestra
Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Here she turns her attention to one of the pivotal compositions of Morton Feldman. Violin and Orchestra, composed in 1979, marked a new direction, with an almost painterly attention to detail in slowly unfolding music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In t…
Dolmen Music
Meredith Monk and her vocal troupe cut a line between experimental theatre and music, marking a passage through the Ancient Greek tragedy, the opera, world-music, the archaic ritual and the mystical chant. It started with "Gotham Lullaby", presenting a contralto over a desolate and stark piano sonata. Then "Travelling" set a feverish gypsy dance, a wild ritual stirring the primeval forces at play. The sonata returned in "The Tale", as the backbone to an offbeat pantomime/ theatrical performance.…
A Hilliard Songbook - New Music For Voices
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Although by now almost habitually referred to as Britain’s foremost early music vocal group, the Hilliard Ensemble (founded 1974) has long had an equal, and complementary, commitment to contemporary music. Its members have sought out new music that adapts itself to the group’s blend of voices and, where necessary, commissioned works from composers they admire. In their recitals, century-spanning leaps – from John Cage, say, to Josquin Deprez (or vice versa), from P…
The ECM Recording
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…
Arbos
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* "This CD features some great performances by Pärt specialists of a variety of shorter works. The clamorous Arbos for brass makes a startling opening for those who expect abstracted reverence; the lament, An den Wassern, has a startling ending that builds in intensity and volume only to break off mid-phrase. The static Pari Intervallo for organ leads into De Profundis, with its sense of slow but unstoppable movement (every note the same length, every measure the sa…
Litany
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* The starting point for Litany was a commission received from the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene, US. For this reason, Pärt selected an English text as the basis for his composition.
Arvo Pärt: “The English language lacks plasticity which is brought to music with long words. Working with a text in English, I had to make new discoveries and use melodic constructions that I normally don’t use in my music, to extract material from words and sentences. The text for Lita…
Miserere
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* For reasons perhaps too numerous to list here in full, Arvo Pärt’s Miserere remains my most cherished of the Estonian composer’s ever-growing book of masterworks. Suffice it to say that its magic lies in its stillness. For such an expansive piece—scored as it is for choir, soloists, organ, and ensemble—it is remarkably introspective. Its opening invocation of Psalm 51 fleshes out a corpus of spoken language made melody. A statement from the clarinet follows every w…
Chicken Shit Bingo
Peter Brötzmann collaborated with many artists in his career, regularly adding new compatriots into the fold, and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love became one of his staunchest allies after the percussionist joined the Chicago Tentet in 2004. They worked in various contexts, including this inexhaustible, hard-hitting duo. Most of the albums they’ve issued have captured live performances, but in 2015 they made this stunning studio recording. As Nilssen-Love says in the liner notes, “Peter had a…
Afro Blue
Saxophonist Mats Gustafsson is notorious for his prolific nature and constantly expanding circle of collaborators, but few of his partnerships have been as powerful and profound as Gush, the Swedish trio which formed way back in 1988 and celebrates its 36th anniversary in 2024. This performance was captured live at the famous Stockholm jazz venue Fasching on December 17, 1998, and the music excited all three musicians when they revisited it this year. The album is named for the Mongo Santamaria …
We And The Sea
Rich blend of Brazilian samba and Afro percussion, more like the jazz of Getz/Gilberto than the bossa nova of, say, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66. An exquisite album, that stretches the boundaries of Bossa Nova.