James Tenney
By Zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl's personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: Zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of groundbreaking compositions by James Tenney.James Tenney (1934 - 2006) was a composer, music theorist and pioneer especially in the field of microtonal music, being an influential part of the so-called New York avantgarde scene (Cage, Feldman). Besides his compositonal work, Tenney was teacher at various universities with students like Charle…
Betula
Dutch composer/clarinetist Germaine Sijstermans is one of the emerging artists of the new generation of the contemporary classical music scene, regularly and closely working with artists associated with Edition Wandelweiser. This is her debut album as a composer, a double CD containing seven of her recent pieces, all composed between 2017-2019 and performed by the ensemble of six musicians who had worked closely together from the very start of the project: Antoine Beuger (concert flute), Germain…
Two Skies
"Two Skies" is the first recording of an ongoing collaboration betweenviolinist Maya Bennardo, bass clarinetist Erik Blennow Calälv, and kacapi musician Kristofer Svensson, who have been playing together in Stockholm since 2020. Bringing together different performance and composition practices—contemporary classical, free improvisation, and Sundanese music—the music on this album represents a hybrid form of chamber music. In its origination, it is a form of music between improvisation and compos…
Residy
'The music on this album is a variation on a variation, the Goldberg Variation no. 21 by JS Bach. In a moment of realistic modesty, it struck me that I will probably never live up to my old dream of being able to play all the Goldberg variations in a way that’s at least close to the composer’s intentions and that pleases my own ears. However, I reckoned, perhaps I could use the score of one of the pieces as a foundation to build something else. Exploring and at the same time (re)creating the res…
Selected Improvisations From Golha, Pt. I
Tip! *In process of stocking* A collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965... Morteza Mahjubi (1900-1965) was a Iranian pianist & composer who developed a unique tuning system for the piano which enabled the instrument to be played in all the different modes and dastgahs of traditional Persian art music. Known as Piano-ye Sonnati, this technique allowed Mahjubi to express the unique ornamental and…
Block Gifts
*300 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* Block Gifts is a collection of three works for organs composed by James Rushford between 2015 and 2018. Using harmonium, portative organ and electric organ, each piece is linked by Rushford’s idiosyncratic combination of strict intervallic systems in different tunings (Werckmeister, quarter-tone, equal temperament), and haptically-informed rhythmic and expressive freedom. Creaks, stutters and sweeping fingers on keys become instrumental sounds…
Música Azul
*Limited edition of 150 copies.* Música Azul is a gulfstream of melodies originally written for Spencer Clark’s Avatar Blue exposition at Het Bos in Antwerp, march 2019. I got the original melody lines from a photoshop mock-up in which Spencer showed his ideas for the expo. I then performed the piece - partly improvised - on the opening night as to activate the several artworks that were displayed in the installation. Afterwards I edited and reworked the composition for optimal home listening.
Diamanda Galás
Long out of print, Diamanda Galás' incendiary 1984-released second album is available once more, remastered by Brooklyn's Heba Kadry
Monochromes
*In process of stocking* “Tolimieri makes a universe of micro-nuance audible, with each piece consisting of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of points of contact. Each point is just a little different from its predecessor. One by one, the points carry the music outwards, until the sound canvas is radiantly filled with the sensation of a particular touch.
The succession of Monochromes on these discs has a beautiful logic. I hear it as an attempt to “begin again”, to rediscover the pi…
drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep
Rotterdam-based composer/pianist Reinier van Houdt created six pieces from March 22 to August 22, 2020 for a monthly 'quarantine' series of the online festival AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, commissioned by Jon Abbey. Each of the six pieces on 'drift nowhere past' was recorded on the 22nd of each month (#18, #75, #128, #155, #194, #211). "I've made these pieces from what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard, or imagined, each during one specific day in the quarantine of …
Ocean
*Restored and remastered from the original tapes* "My task is to allow the listener to penetrate deeper into the music. The music is wholly improvisational. It has no concept in the rational sense of the word. It’s concept is purely intuitive. It presumes The Law of Analogies: “As above so below. Man is the same as the Universe. The Universe is the same as Man.” ("Emerald Tablet” by Hermes Trismegistus"). This intuition is a kind of rephrased logic which uses many more symbols which contain not …
Trio IX / Exercises
The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new Wergo album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX …
Halleluja / Alle Vittime Senza Nome
*2022 stock* 'Halleluja, Peter Eötvös’s “stuttering oratorio”, with a text by the novelist Péter Esterházy, was first performed in 2016. It’s built around the historical figure of Notker Balbulus, Notker the Stammerer, a ninth-century Benedictine monk who was a chronicler and composer. But, Eötvös insists, “It is not so much a portrait of Notker as of the times in which we live … At first the choir represents a society that says ‘hallelujah’ to everything: they have to be satisfied with everythi…
Works For Double Bass
*2022 stock* 'Hans Werner Henze was, during his lifetime, probably the most-performed composer of western modern music, and his advanced yet sensuously traditional music remains an important presence on stages around the world today. Henze was deeply attached to Italy, where he spent a large part of his life. The roots of this album go back to a personal meeting between Henze and the Italian double bass virtuoso Daniele Roccato when Roccato was attempting to obtain Henze’s blessing for a theater…
Patterns In A Chromatic Field
'Morton Feldman has proved one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. Yet he remains one of its most enigmatic, and his late works retain an aura of mystery steeped with the grandeur, anxiety and quietly changing colour he adored in abstract expressionist painting and, latterly, Anatolian rug design. Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) is perhaps the most rhythmically active of these famously long, static pieces, which showed his increasing preoccupation with matters of form, scale a…
Suite 8 & 11 per pianoforte
Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces…
Music For The Double Life Of Amphibians (Landmark Recordings)
'The literal meaning of “amphibian” is “double life” and applies to animals living part of their lives in water and part of their lives on land. In the program note to his electroacoustic classic Music for the Double Life of Amphibians, Morton Subotnick states that “amphibian” is to be taken as a metaphor for the work’s structure and programmatic content, which follow a metamorphosis of being through the stages of amphibian to beast to angel. But it also applies to the musical material, the doub…
Heliogabalus Imperator / Works For Orchestra
*2022 stock* The relationship between Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen was one of great mutual respect. The German composer admired the British conductor and composer for electrifying performances of Henze’s own and other composers’ works. Knussen was an untiring and enthusiastic champion of his friend Henze’s music. The recordings collected here display Knussen’s deep understanding of Henze’s music. Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in sensitive and meticulous performances of comp…
...Of Late
Astral Spirits presents ...of Late by Jessica Pavone String Ensemble.
Jessica Pavone - composer / viola; voice on track 3Aimée Niemann - violin; voice on track 3Abby Swidler - violin on tracks 1,3,4; viola on tracks 2&5; voice on track 3
Nam June's Spirit Was Speaking To Me
A spellbinding tribute from one multi-faceted artist to another. New York-based artist Aki Onda (b. 1967) conjured a transduction to the Korean multi-media pioneer Nam June Paik (1932-2006).