Music from United States

Anthony Braxton and Fred Frith each have about as close a relationship to the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville as just about any non-Canadians. The first release on Victo, the label run by the producers of the annual Canadian festival, was a guitar duo with Frith and Rene Lussier; the second was a duet between Braxton and Derek Bailey. Until this year, each had released three discs on the label. But 2005 was the Year of Braxton and the label has released three new Brax…

2022 Repress, in process of stocking. The Expanding Universe is the 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The original album is reissued here as a massively expanded 3LP or 2CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased and many making their first appearance on vinyl in this brand new 2018 edition. Since this album’s first reissue in 2012, it has gone on to be widely establis…

*2022 stock* Performed by Julia Breuer (flutes), Matthias Engler (vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, tubular bells), Elmar Schrammel (piano, celesta). Recorded 2007. One of Feldman's classic long-term late works, written in 1984. Wergo is proud to present Morton Feldman's four-hour-long trio For Philip Guston, performed by the ensemble Breuer-Engler-Schrammel. Feldman disagreed with those who regarded his works since the 1970s as being too long. 'In music, it's very difficult to distinguish betw…

CD with 20-page booklet. Recorded March 2001, Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt. "Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece." Alvin Lucier said this about his own practice of stripping composition back to its acoustic logic - removing the performer's ego, the expressive gesture, the narrative arc, until only the phenomenon remains. What is left, in each of the five works gathered here, is resonance: sympathetic vibra…

"What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing" (Steve Reich, 1968). Minimal music, which numbers Steve Reich among its founders and as one of its most significant representatives, existed for hardly more than ten years. The Ensemble Avantgarde presents a wonderful survey of Reich's minimal music-compositions. The conceptional concentration in the musical work on the structurally simple means of its creation is seen especially in Reich's "…

*2022 stock* George Brecht, Alison Knowles, Philip Corner. "Fluxus! The New York-born artists whose radio plays are collected on this CD, Philip Corner, Alison Knowles, and George Brecht, have appeared together in performances, and they are also connected by their relationship to John Cage's aesthetic, by work with chance operations, and by Zen. Explaining Fluxus is like wanting to hold a river in your hand." Includes the pieces "Satie's Rose Cross as a Revelation" by Philip Corner, "Bean Sequen…

*2022 stock* This work began life as a radio play in 1982, a commission from and for Klaus Schöning and Cologne’s WDR. Working on the principles of collage, Cage brought together 15 unlikely characters – Narrator, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Vocoder, Erik Satie, Jonathan Albert, Mao Tse Tung (as a child), Henry David Thoreau, Rrose Selavy, Thorstein Veblen, Buckminster Fuller, Brigham Young, and Robert Rauschenberg – who speak together, their dialogue comprised of literal quotations, freely ada…

When words trail off at the beginning of Claire Rousay’s “Everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music…

*2022 stock* Wergo presents Moton Feldman's compositions For Franz Kline · For Frank O'Hara · De Kooning · Piano Piece To Philip Guston. Performed by Ensemble Avantgarde.

*2022 stock* John Cage's first manifesto, written in 1937, was called The Future of Music: Credo, and the future it described was an "all-sound music" open to every kind of noise. This volume of Wergo's Edition John Cage follows that idea across three decades, from the prepared piano of the 1940s to the vocal and spoken works of the 1970s. Sonata XIII, from the Sonatas and Interludes, and Music for Marcel Duchamp are pieces for prepared piano, played by Peter Roggenkamp: screws, bolts and rubber…

*2022 stock* It may come as a surprise but one of the leading creators of keyboard music in the twentieth century is a composer by the name of John Cage. Cage’s reputation is so deeply associated with the avantgarde, with chance music, graphic notation, performance art, technology and Zen Buddhism that is early, conventionally-notated music for percussion ensemble and keyboards is sometimes neglected. Or was until recently. In the last few years – with the advent of performances and recordings l…

'Etudes Australes was composed specifically for Grete Sultan, so this album is among the definitive recordings. As an indeterminate piece for solo piano (okay, well, a "duet for two hands"), this sounds very similar to Music of Changes, Winter Music, etc. Here, though, Cage generates indeterminacy by turning once again to using star charts as tools of composition, as he did previously in the wonderful Atlas Eclipticalis. In a way, I find the piano to be more suited to star charts than almost any…

*2022 stock* This recording deals with works composed between 1944 and 1958, including several of Cage's lovely and masterful prepared piano pieces, which will come as a major surprise to those familiar only with his chance compositions. Joshua Pierce is the principal pianist (assisted by Dorothy Jonas on the Three Dances, written for two pianos) and attacks the pieces with a nice balance of delicacy and aggression, although compared to the earlier Angel recording of the abovementioned Three Dan…

*2022 stock* Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, a cycle of 20 short pieces for prepared piano (a piano modified by inserting nuts and bolts and other objects between the piano strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects) by American composer John Cage. Created in 1946–48 after the composer had been introduced to Indian visual and performing arts, the cycle was intended to represent the so-called permanent emotions—the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the comic,…

*2022 stock* It's over 70 years since John Cage wrote his pivotal Music of Changes, and it's beginning to show its age. It feels very much of its time, with its uncompromising adherence to the 64 hexagrams of I-Ching, the Chinese book of changes, determining the direction of the piece and its use of sudden, percussive attacks on the strings or the body of the instrument. But for all that there is no denying the extreme stamina and concentration required of the performer, and here Herbert Henck e…

Three early compositions (1968-1970) by Steve Reich, one of the most prolific exponents of minimal music, in stunning interpretations by the critically acclaimed Ensemble Avantgarde. Available on vinyl (180gr, gatefold sleeve incl. download code) for the first time ever!

Silver Apples of the Moon' is without a doubt the best known work from influential composer and electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick. It was originally commissioned by Nonesuch records back in 1967, when electronic music was more of a series of ideas than a recognised art form, and since then it has achieved well deserved classic status, influencing so much that would come after it is impossible to conceive. Subotnick's instrument of choice was the Buchla modular synthesizer, a gigantic pat…

'I believe Jacob's Room is one of the most extraordinary examples of extended vocal techniques that I have ever heard. Touch is the child of the original Buchla electronic music triumvirate that included Silver Apples and Wild Bull. Its exploration of the sound and texture possibilities of electronic music is a variation on the two previous compositions. Jacob's Room is a vehicle for Subotnick's wife, Joan LaBarbara to demonstrate why she is universally considered the master of extended vocal te…

Electronic works by Morton Subotnick: Touch and A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur, remastered from the analogue tapes with new stereo mixes, and Gestures with vocalist Joan La Barbara. Includes the complete 28-minute version of A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur.

Chamber works by Christian Wolff from 1950 to 1987, mostly first recordings, including the Serenade written at sixteen, the Harriet Tubman setting for voice and trio, and For Morty, played by The Barton Workshop under James Fulkerson.