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…
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…
Free Spirits
'When I first had the chance to listen at Markus Stockhausen performing live at Conservatorio Nicolini in Piacenza, some years ago, I immediately had the intuition of this musical meeting. I was sure that the poetry of Lino Capra Vaccina will melt with Markus’ one in a completely intuitive, spontaneous way, creating something really unusual, really new. When, some months later, I had the chance to produce then meet the great Santoor player Alireza Mortazavi for the album Hamdelaneh (with Markus,…
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.
Hibiki Hana-Ma / Mycenae Alpha / Polytope De Cluny
*Restocked, reduced price* "Hibiki Hana-Ma" was created in 1969 for the Steel Pavilion of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation at the Expo 1970 in Osaka as musical part of a multimedia show. Even though the work does not bear the designation in its title, it can be already regarded as a Polytope: it was created for a specific architectural location, lasers and mirrors have been installed: a light choreography by the Japanese artist Keiji Usami accompanied the spectacle. This concept of synchroniz…
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 …
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…
The Wild Beasts - Landmark Recordings
*2022 stock* Morton Subotnick achieved fame in the field of electronic music with Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull, his best-known tape works of the late 1960s. Since then, he has been active combining electronics with other media, notably employing gestural sketches on tape to alter sounds produced by voices and instrumentalists. The two works on this 2015 Wergo release are representative of Subotnick's methods, using a trumpet with a chamber ensemble in After the Butterfly, to reali…
...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
Nothing Is Real ...
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…
Phase Patterns / Pendulum Music / Piano Phase / Four Organs
"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 "…
s/t
Yiran Zhao makes use not only of musical elements but also of objects, bodies, movements and light-sources as compositional material. Many of her pieces inhabit the various boundary states between instrumental music, performance, sound-installation, and video-art. Leonie Reineke describes the composer in the CD-booklet as a “prudent researcher“, who encounters the sonic cosmos of her environment with great earnestness, and comes microscopically close to things.
In the composition “Piep“ she focu…
James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet
*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…
Die Verwandlung des Zornes
*In process of stocking* The Zooming is implemented musically; it captures places on the globe that lie in a constantly narrowing field of view around the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg, the site of the piece's premiere. In the north and south, the latitudes represent the boundaries at 90° each, in the east and west, the longitudes at 180° each. The places where the four wind instruments play in the Kollegienkirche each lie on an imaginary line projected in the four different cardinal directions, n…