The Beating of Wings
The 40th anniversary edition of Andrew Poppy’s The Beating of Wings, originally released on ZTT Records. Hailed as “a major landmark in pop-classical genre-blending and post-minimalism” (Robert Davidson, Topology) and “… ahead of his time … he’d fit right in with the Max Richters and Nils Frahms of today” (Steven Wilson; Porcupine Tree, The Album Years podcast). Composed and produced by Andrew Poppy and performed by his bespoke ensembles, The Beating of Wings contains four mesmeric tracks that m…
Turning
When James Lyon touches a violin, people listen; he can turn a phrase or a tune like few others. So, after a long career teaching at Penn State, it is high time he had a solo album to his credit: Turning is a deeply personal collection of works that celebrates his 35-year tenure at the institution.
The title Turning carries multiple meanings for Lyon, reflecting both transition and opportunity. “For well over three decades, I have been taking my turn being a professor of violin,” Lyon explains. …
Fumée
Smoke, sometimes, gets in your ears. Neuma Records announces the release of Fumée, featuring world premiere recordings of three major orchestral works by British-American composer Geoffrey Gordon. Each composition transforms visual art into music: Willem de Kooning’s explosive Abstract Expressionism, a haunting Belle Époque chanson, and the early-20th-century Synchromist movement’s “color orchestration” all find new life through Gordon’s vividly imagined scores. The album opens with Gotham News …
Continuous Interior
With Continuous Interior, Abby Fisher unveils a solo album that reimagines percussion and electronics. The album includes two immersive works that explore scale, space, and perception. The title track – the evocative Continuous Interior by New York composer Robert Honstein – draws inspiration from the modern experience of limitless, bounded spaces – shopping malls, airport terminals, vast warehouses – and translates that feeling into waves of resonant sound, where vibraphone tones sparkle above …
Kinesis, Vol. 3
If 3 is the perfect number, Galan Trio’s third installment in their series dedicated to the American piano trio hits the jackpot. Following the critical success of the first two volumes, which explored works from the easterly states, Kinesis: Volume 3 expands the project’s acoustic horizons by incorporating electronics for the first time, all while remaining true to the series’ guiding principle: dynamic motion. The double-album presents thirteen world-premiere recordings that treat the piano tr…
Yet
“Most times in trauma, there is no exit,” composer Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice writes in her album introduction. “Yet every once in a while, a door is ajar and we are left to wonder if we really could leave. All the music of Yet revolves around suffering in captivity juxtaposed with the possibility of liberation.” Yet is a powerfully imaginative and intimate collection of contemporary classical music that navigates the stark – sometimes Surreal and satirical – landscapes of trauma and hope.
D…
Waldmusik
Forests have inspired composers from Schubert to Messiaen, but Christopher Shultis takes it one step further with Waldmusik, a sonic chronicle of fourteen years of walking and listening. This cycle of compositions traces a personal and artistic evolution sparked by solitary walks in woodlands and mountains across the globe. The genesis of Waldmusik dates to a 2003 residency in Taos, New Mexico, where its core idea—”walking in woods / listening … / what I hear”—became a lifelong creative mantra. …
New Colombian Music for Saxophone Quartet
Since their founding in 2007, the Madrid based saxophone quartet Sigma Project has premiered more than 85 works and introduced hundreds more to audiences from Teatro alla Scala in Milan to Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Their commitment to commissioning new works is the saxophone quartet’s parallel to the Kronos Quartet. Juan Antonio Cuéllar’s Cuatro Artificios is a four-movement work that follows the classical structure of the quartet or symphony (Allegro-Adagio-Scherzo-Allegro Finale) and draws…
Scintillae
For fifty years, the piano has been the backbone of Raymond Deane’s creative output. This journey began at age sixteen with the first Orphic Piece, a work that set the stage for a career defined by breaking contemporary taboos. Rejecting both the strict rules of traditional keys and the lawlessness of atonality, Deane creates his own temporary musical structures, constantly building them up and dismantling them again. For him, composition is a process of conflict and negotiation, allowing for th…
Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss
Kraig Grady, an American based in Australia, is a microtonal composer. He explains it thus: “Alternative tunings are a major inspiration for my compositional explorations. The pivotal point for me was meeting with tuning theorist Ervin Wilson and witnessing Harry Partch’s U.S. Highball in 1975. I was convinced that working with different instruments and tunings was going to be a major artistic movement.
I began studying tuning with Wilson which continued for as long as we knew each other. … I’m …
Exotica
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. Includes hi-res audio download. Among the most playful and pointed entries in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series, Mauricio Kagel's Exotica returns to vinyl - a work that turns the Western fascination with the music of elsewhere into a piece of high comedy and, beneath the laughter, a quietly devast…
December
"I remember the first time I sat at a piano, my feet dangling over the edge. As I tested the keys, I felt a wonder and joy at the sound coming out of the instrument. I still feel that joy every time I sit at a piano. In the two drone works in this release: "December" and "Thomas," I was intrigued in the contrast of the rhythm of the hammers striking the strings with the rhythm of the swelling overtones. On "Thomas", the trumpet tones blend and contrast, sometimes revealing the piano, and sometim…
Songs of Erosion
*200 copies limited edition* “Songs of Erosion” is a project by Clara Levy & Victor Guaita Igual revisiting the 13th-century Spanish songbook “Cantigas de Santa María” through the lens of erosion.
Rejecting a historicist interpretation, Clara Levy and Victor Guaita Igual develop a set of instructions inspired by geological processes. These serve as a basis for approaching pitch and rhythmic material, shaping it into new compositions. Among the cantigas explored by the duo, this record focuses on…
Julius Eastman, Vol. 5: Gay Guerrilla
This is the fifth chapter, and one of the most assured. Wild Up's long reckoning with the music of Julius Eastman arrives at Gay Guerrilla, the work Eastman composed at the close of the 1970s and regarded as the point where his politics and his sound became indivisible.
Eastman remains one of the singular figures of American experimentalism, an African American and openly gay composer who moved through the orbit of the Buffalo new music scene and the downtown minimalist world before dying destit…
The Story Of Moondog
Dating back to 1957, The Story Of Moondog followed up the previous year's More Moondog LP, setting its course for adventurous new sounds and homemade percussion meditations.The music is never a slave to any one fixed agenda and much of the material here sounds as if its gathered from some undiscovered culture - it's all-but impossible to compare this with anything else from the era, but when the longer-form pieces arrive they augment the more primal, outsider aesthetics with visceral, jazzy arra…
šumum
*200 copies limited edition* Michaela Turcerová’s compositions unfold in slow motion. The saxophonist and composer’s glacial music zeroes in on the granularities of each note as it rings, soaking in every subtle shift in texture and pitch. Šumum exemplifies this patient approach to writing music, branching out from themes of loss and togetherness into an intricate tapestry of introspective sound. These four pieces invite deep collaboration between performers, who together shape the music through…
Transparent Duo
*100 copies limited edition* Transparent duo, for 2 string instruments. On transparent paper. One set of pages indicates bowing. The second indicates the direction and length of mostly inaudible glissando. Players overlay pages and play any number of combinations. Field recordings were taken one morning and evening, in the summer of 2025 around Narrowsburg. "Through my music, I create situations for people to play and be together, to sustain a community, to share sounds and ideas in a welcoming …
String Quartets
Rand Steiger’s Introspective Trilogy is a series of string quartets with electronics composed over a period of eight years for the JACK Quartet. Reflecting on emotional states through musical expression, the quartets explore intense feelings of anger, frustration, and despair in response to alarming political developments in the U.S. and globally, from 2016 when the project began, to catastrophic recent developments. Steiger relates the resurgence of xenophobia and well-known elements of authori…
Désert Méditerranéen
The pianistic writing of Giorgos Koumendakis represents a rare encounter of delicacy, intellectual concentration, and profound compositional coherence. It belongs to a free post-modernity, rooted in the continuity of certain Eastern European composers who developed an independent and original modernity. The cycle Mediterranean Desert, which forms the central axis of this album, is a work for piano consisting of 22 pieces inspired by Mediterranean flora and fauna. It offers a distinctive sound ma…
Loo(p)cy
This album is intended to be a retrospective view of Luigi Manfrin’s compositional journey. Rather than following a chronological order, it identifies loops that run through his musical production: recurrences, foldings and returns that never replicate the same pattern, but instead reactivate structural tensions in different contexts. At the core is the idea of sound as an immanent experience. The unity of the album lies not in the identity of its materials, but in the constant questioning of th…