Composition / All styles

Composed between 1968 and 1970 and originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1972, there are arguably few works within the canon of 20th Century experimental music as beloved and sought after as the Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel’s Acustica. Created for “experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers”, comprising electroacoustic material assembled on 4-track tape in 1969 at  Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and acoustic material for 2 to 5 musicians, scored over roughly 200 filing-ca…

LP version: Coral alone, Watt’s own collective composition for four clarinets, a little over thirty minutes. The three commissioned pieces stay on the sold-out cassette box.

2005 release ** The works on this CD represent three different series of compositions, which I have been working on simultaneously in the last few years. Structurally, their individual parts resemble each other: all instruments play (rather) long sounds, each one followed by a pause.55 similar events plus two drummers drumming (1999) consists of two layers of events. On the one hand, seven instruments are organized ‘isophonically’ and with regular durations. Their sounds, each comprising the sam…

Xenakis Edition volume 13: works for soloist and ensemble by Iannis Xenakis, played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble under Steven Schick, with the first recording of Zythos for trombone and six marimbas.

A new vision of John Cage, via his complete works for string quartet. Spanning forty years of the artist’s activities, these three masterworks illuminate the different stylistic periods in the output of this 20th century icon.

Thanatosis Records is proud to announce the release of Fuse Modulations, the latest work by Norwegian composer and guitarist Fredrik Rasten, performed by the innovative quartet Asterales.

Samuel Reinhard returns to elsewhere music with “For 10 Musicians,” a four-part ensemble piece recorded in 2025 at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.

Mega Tip!  Edition of 200 copies, comes with a large illustrated insert. Giuseppe Chiari arrived at music from the wrong direction. He read mathematics and engineering at university and studied piano and composition privately, and it was John Cage who turned him toward experimental music. With Pietro Grossi he founded Vita Musicale Contemporanea, one of the first Italian associations for new music, and with Sylvano Bussotti he assembled the travelling exhibition Musica e segno. In 1962 Frederic …

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…

Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer, clarinetist, and central figure in the Wandelweiser collective, presents three recent chamber works—all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, with one piece featuring the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa. These compositions mark a significant evolution in Frey's aesthetic. As Ian Mikyska of the Prague collective explains, "Jürg is neither writing the music he used to write nor writing the music that anyone expects of him"—moving beyon…

Composer, alone by Jürg Frey (performed by Reinier van Houdt) is a luminous retrospective stretching across three discs and 35 years. Twelve solo piano pieces—fragile yet substantial—trace Frey's evolution, distilling time and silence into crystalline musical objects. Van Houdt’s touch brings warmth and clarity, illuminating the invisible architecture within Frey’s sensitive landscapes.

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…

'Composed in 1970, Mantra, for two pianos and ring modulation, was one of the decisive turning points in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s career. The 70-minute piece not only signalled a break with the text-based intuitive works, relying heavily on improvisation, that had come to dominate his output towards the end of the previous decade and a return to fully notated scores, but also introduced the idea of melodic formulae, the “mantra” of the title, which Stockhausen would eventually develop into the or…

Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two features three rarely encountered works by John Cage, interpreted by Apartment House. The album brings together the sparse, spatial interplay of “Two”, the poised transformations of “Thoreau Drawings”, and the hypnotic, layered repetitions of “Hymnkus” in performances marked by clarity, restraint, and ensemble sensitivity.

A sparse and subtle jungle comprises the pieces that make up "Pietra e Oggetto". It is subtle, as such it remains in the memory. Thanks to the device of silence, which is like the air in between things, it allows time for what we have heard to imprint on our acoustic sketchpad. Like closing your eyes to preserve a memory and then moving on to the next. We feel a certain privilege in listening to these undecidable environments; these composite and hybrid objects filled with synthetic biodiversity…

Three orchestral works by Giacinto Scelsi recorded in Vienna in 2005: Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola), Uaxuctum, and the first recording of La Nascita del Verbo, with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and choirs.

Mind is moving (IX) is a composition for guitar by Michael Pisaro-Liu, affiliated with the avant-garde composers group The Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. Pisaro's work can be characterized as experimental minimalism, often utilizing silence, a minimum of musical material, and extended composition durations. This version is executed by Slovenian guitarist Primož Sukič.

"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 "…

Hidden treasure is always thrilling, particularly when it means recovering the forgotten works of a great artist. This historic CD offers a selection of previously unrecorded rarities by composer Conlon Nancarrow, including Piece for Tape, a dazzling rhythmic exercise in musique concrète. Listeners are also treated to the composer’s own recording of his study for prepared player piano, as well as a rare interview with the composer himself.

Kenneth Gaburo (1926–1993) composed works for instruments, voices, electronics, multi-media, theater, and a variety of other resources. Foremost among his many interests was a concern with the voice and with language—how we shape language and how we are shaped by it—and with making works that existed somewhere between the boundaries of music and language. Of the works on this CD, three are intensely concerned with what Gaburo termed “Compositional Linguistics” (Antiphony III, Antiphony IV, and M…

David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer/performer known as a pioneer in American experimental music. This series of eight works, created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrates a remarkable extension of Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock… series of 1969–71 using the harmonic and sub-harmonic series. The In the Beginning series exemplifies the idea of model-building as a compositional process. A simple process is def…

Iannis Xenakis's late electroacoustic music became electronic: all sounds are synthetic "explicit computer music" as Peter Hoffmann called it. The music presented here shows Xenakis's way back from spatialized immersive music and multimedia spectacle to simple loudspeaker music. The sound does not move anymore, there are no synchronized visuals: nothing remains but structured noise. Xenakis used two inventions he had already presented in the context of the Polytopes: sounds created by stochastic…

Roberto Fabbriciani plays the complete flute works of Henri Pousseur, including Flexions I, Éclipticare and Zeus joueur de flûtes with live electronics by Alvise Vidolin, plus the 1957 tape piece Scambi.

*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 400 copies.* We haven’t found them yet, the words to talk to each other about the worrying signs of climate change. Feeling worried when walking on autumn leaves in the beginning of August should be completely normal. But how do we communicate about it? We don’t want to be just the next hysterical doomer. With this music I try to focus on the climate pain itself, gently inviting the listener to investigate their latent feelings of unease and growing co…

The fourth disc in the Canadian Composers Series features the music of Chiyoko Szlavnics. The CD contains three works, two of which use sinewaves in conjuncton with acoustic instruments. The title track ‘During a Lifetime’ is written for sinewaves and saxophone quartet, an instrument on which Szlavnics herself used to perform. The final piece, ‘Reservoir’, is composed for sinewaves and an unusual instrumental octet, including two accordions, two flutes and two percussionists. The middle piece ‘F…

* Edition of 500 * In Catherine Lamb's Prisma Interius series the unpredictability of the outside articulates the field of perception through precise bandpass filters, while acoustic instruments and musicians guide the unfolding of its harmonic space. A series of nine pieces exploring the potential of the Secondary Rainbow synthesizer, an instrument developed in 2016-2017 with Bryan Eubanks, that uses the live environment outside the performance space as a noise generator for basic subtractive s…

anabasis (1) is a composition in 72 parts for five musicians, based on four kinds of materials: Sand, Wind, Tone and Wave; these materials are arranged and intertwined with a fifth ‘Interludes’ strand that interacts with the four materials. All of these are then ‘unbound’ over the course of the piece by changing continuity in a variety of ways outlined in the score. This interpretation of the score is a live performance that features prepared reed organ, electromagnetic pick-ups, sand, pedals, D…

In May, composer, musician, and producer Kara-Lis Coverdale released her first new album in eight years, From Where You Came. It was followed by her second album of 2025, A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever, in September. Today, Coverdale details her third full-length release of the year, Changes In Air, out 21 November via Smalltown Supersound, and unveils its lead single ‘Curve Traces of Held Space’. Changes In Air is a work for electric organ, modular synthesis, and piano in five secti…

How does music inhabit the space between two worlds? Jürg Frey confronts this question directly in Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre, a composition for ten musicians that exists in deliberate suspension, refusing the security of solid ground. Commissioned by ensemble]h[iatus, the piece emerged from extended collaboration between composer and performers, particularly in navigating two specific challenges: the distinctive voice of Thomas Lehn's analogue synthesiser and the relationship between…

On Simoom we hear three of Lois V. Vierk's works for "big instruments," that is, multiples of the same instrument, treated more like single entities than like groups of voices: Go Guitars for five electric guitars tuned microtonally around "E," Cirrus for six trumpets, and Simoom for eight cellos. All three works employ what Vierk describes as "Exponential Structure," which utilizes exponential relationships to control time, pitch movement and rates of change. Within this system, Vierk creates v…

This album presents Annea Lockwood’s complete concert piano works, born from a deep collaborative journey. It culminates in a new version of Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano, where voice and memory resonate through the piano’s frame via transducer speaker.

'SOVT' is an album containing one 55-minute piece, written for piano by Sarah Hennies in 2017. SOVT stands for Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract which refers to vocal exercises that strengthens the voice by helping the vocal cords vibrate more efficiently. One may practice SOVT exercises by singing with a straw in the mouth which regulates air pressure and reduces strain on the vocal folds. Hennies encountered these exercises in a class on so-called “voice feminization” for transgender women which also …

Three works by Peter Garland, Another Sunrise, Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage and I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last, for pianos, harpsichord, voices and percussion, with Aki Takahashi and Essential Music.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce World in World, the latest solo offering from prolific Berlin-based guitarist-composer Julia Reidy. Where the recent trilogy of LP releases – brace, brace (Slip, 2019), In Real Life (Black Truffle, 2019), and Vanish (Editions Mego, 2020) – focussed on increasingly lush electronic settings for Reidy’s propulsive fingerpicking and auto-tuned vocals, arranged into wide-ranging side-long epics, World in World finds Reidy refocusing on the core elements of their a…

Acclaimed NYC composer, producer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion on "Of Shadow and Substance".

"First, the booklet notes. If you pine for Gertrude Stein speaking circles around herself, meaning what she doesn’t mean, and not meaning what she means, you’ll probably like Tom Johnson’s non-sort-of-explanation of his magnum keyboard opus, An Hour For Piano. The composer prefers that you don’t read his notes while listening to the music. In fact, don’t read them before you play the CD for the first time. Listen to the piece first. Then, if you’re feeling artsy, put on the CD again and read the…

Tip! Marja Ahti is a Swedish artist living in Turku, Finland. She works with found sounds, objects and electronics, creating auditory assemblages that reveal a profound sensitivity to sound’s tactile potential. This new record sees her palette expand to include more recognisable acoustic instrumentation, albeit working in collaboration with musicians who are already reconfiguring how those instruments can sound. Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth has its roots in a tape piece presented at Lamp…

The complete electronic works of Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw, eight pieces from 1956 to 1982 restored from the original tapes, including the Prix Italia oratorio Job and Chronos, rediscovered in an archive.

Tombstones is a collection of twenty songs composed by American composer Michael Pisaro-Liu between 2006 and 2010, journeying into experimental pop with pieces that are "experimental or indeterminate but still a song". This disc features eleven songs under the artistic direction of the Lille-based pianist Barbara Dang. Dang and six members of the Muzzix collective (Yoann Bellefont, Ivann Cruz, Raphaël Godeau, Peter Orins, Christian Pruvost, Maryline Pruvost) recorded the pieces in June 2020, wit…

The Hotel is honoured to present Passage Through: A Ritual, Philip Corner’s soundtrack to Stan Brakhage’s 1990 film of the same name.