Four Full Flutes
Born in Indiana during October 1933, since his arrival in New York City in 1958, Phill Niblock has occupied a central position within the world of avant-garde and experimental practice. Relentlessly active, his work as a visual artist and composer, in addition to his support of others via Experimental Intermedia - the performance venue he has run from his Soho loft since in 1968 - and XI - the label he founded in 1990 - have continuously lit a path for his peers and the generations that have fol…
The Diary Of The Unforgotten - Selbstportrait VI
*2023 stock* A beautiful collection of recordings from 1972 to 1978, first released in 1990 (with different artwork). "Selbstportrait VI" contains compositions Roedelius did in addition to his work with Cluster, Harmonia and Brian Eno in the legendary Forst years. In the booklet Roedelius looks back on this personal and artistical important period of his life. He explains the magic of the idyllic place and its influence on his music.
Wie Das Wispern Des Windes ... / Like The Whispering Of The Wind...
*2023 stock* If we can agree on 1969 as the year of Cluster's inception, then Roedelius needed a good 17 years to discover the aural qualities and musical beauty of the grand piano for his own compositions. Rarely has the title of a Roedelius album so poetically and yet so accurately described its content. On "Like The Whispering Of The Wind" from 1986 Roedelius expands his Études towards amorphousness, then suddenly a disarmingly familiar melody appears, from a completely different source perha…
of rain
*2023 stock* "The four works for piano recorded on this CD were written between 2017 and 2021. All were composed using a random number method. More precisely, each of the sonic components of sounds made from random numbers was changed, based on my own sensibility, into another sound that I was happy with. This transformation was carried out little by little every day, like writing in a diary, resulting in the creation of each individual sound. I always write similar things in explanatory notes a…
Works for Piano
*2023 stock* "The four tracks on this album are piano pieces I composed between 2007 and 2018, performed by pianist Satoko Inoue. A live recording of a 2018 solo recital by Inoue-san has been newly mastered for this release. The three tracks other than "Containing Time" are pieces I composed for Inoue-san. Around 2007, when I wrote "Cosmetic Dance," I often went to her concerts, as I liked the way she played. One day soon after I'd finished the composition, I went to hear her perform. After the …
Andersen's Swan Song
*2023 stock* "I composed this piece in 2011 on a commission for the concert "Sonorous Solitude / Hidehiko Watase Solo Flute Recital," produced by image/air_ (Ippei Hosokoshi). The conditions were that the piece should be as long as possible and written for baritone (Homei Kamie) and flauto traverso (Hidehiko Watase), and that I could use any lyrics I liked. Simply put, the flauto traverso is an ancestor of the contemporary flute. First, Watase-san told me about the instrument's characteristics. …
Study In Fifths I (For Two Flutes, Keyboard And Electronic Sounds)
*2023 stock* Contemporary classical composer Masamichi Kinoshita was born in 1969 in Ono, Fukui Prefecture. He currently lives in Tokyo. Kinoshita regularly performs at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo. In February 2020 he held the first concert in the series "Ftarri's Harmonium," featuring the harmonium housed at Ftarri. The series has since continued at a rate of one concert every few months; the fifth was held on July 3, 2021. In each concert, Kinoshita (on harmonium) performs his own compositions…
Musical Procedure
*2023 stock* This CD documents a series of works that I call "Musical Procedure." In composers' usual works, the sounds to be performed are written in a score; but in these pieces the procedures (which could also be called programs, algorithms or specification sheets) for shaping music, such as performance methods and the general ideas of the works, are written as concisely as possible, and the type of sound to be produced is left largely to the performers. The score is merely an arrangement of …
![Paraphrase on Shichikushoshinshu [1664]](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/2024-10/Tai_ParaphraseOn_CD_01-jpg.jpg.500.jpg)
Paraphrase on Shichikushoshinshu [1664]
*2023 stock* Published in the Edo era (1664), "Shichikushoshinshu" is a beginner’s guide to three musical instruments—the "hitoyogiri" shakuhachi, the koto, and the shamisen—which includes lyrics and fingerings for songs believed to have been popular at the time. Tai decided to create a new musical instrument in order to perform the shamisen music in "Shichikushoshinshu" (Japan’s oldest shamisen “scores”). The result was the self-made electric stringed instrument he calls the coiled cello. In 20…
Nemiesta
Three years after the release of Black Angels Songs, Miroslav Tóth together with Dystopic Requiem Quartet comes up with a rare album inspired by non-places, i.e. buildings and objects that were either unfinished, abandoned, over-multiplied, or were marked by mining and yet had no meaning in the end. Also featured on Non-places is Nénia, a track dedicated to the victims in Ukraine, written three days after the outbreak of war during the album's creation. The recordings were made in the Czech Repu…
Etudes
*300 copies limited edition* In writing about Igor Yalivec’s music it’s important to get the big thing out in the open right away. Igor Yalivec is a Dnipro, Ukraine based artist who at the time of this writing is currently living there, recording music, taking field recordings and generally existing as his country is under a pall of unease punctuated with moments of terror. It is under these circumstances where Etudes seems as vital a document as anything coming out of war-torn Ukraine, but also…
Touch three
This is Phill Niblock's third release on the Touch label. Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten minimalist. His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V. Vierk, David First, and Glenn Branca. T…
Glass World
“I have become fascinated by the complexity of the single sound.” - Annea Lockwood
Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II
Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II continues Black Truffle’s documentation of the late work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who sadly passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. Like the first volume of the series, the two works recorded here were written for The Ever Present Orchestra, an ensemble founded in Zürich in 2016 to perform Lucier’s work exclusively. At the core of the music Lucier wrote for the ensemble is the electric guitar, an instrument he began to e…
Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court
Tip! *300 copies limited release* Henry Birdsey - best known as one half of the microtonal multi-instrumentalist duo known as Tongue Depressor - is a master of dualities. He writes music that is both fundamental and complex, tranquil and fierce, and conceptual yet familiar all at once. His music often reflects the expansive and isolated regions of his home state of Vermont with its vast natural splendor, both lush and harsh, haunting and entrancing. It is also often about nothing more than the p…
Late Night Show
All my music is night music, says the composer Petr Bakla. Three pieces featured on the new album Late Night Show span almost a decade and provide varied examples of his style, 'so specific and personal, so allergic to fashion or aesthetic trend', as Eric Wubbels puts it in the insightful liner note. The central instrument is the piano, operated by Bakla´s longtime collaborator Miroslav Beinhauer, accompanied by the musicians of Brno Contemporary Orchestra.
Sounds While Waiting
Sounds While Waiting documents the latest organ works by composer and musician Ellen Arkbro – following her phenomenal debut, 2017's For Organ And Brass, and the more recent Chords. Recorded at a centuries-old church in Unnaryd, Sweden in June 2020, these pieces reveal the enchanting qualities of sustained harmonic sound, how patterns of listening dissolve and emerge as textured space. On opening track "Changes," long radiant tones ebb and flow like divine breaths, while "Leaving Dreaming" build…
Cantegral Segment(s) 16.17.18.19. / Transform (Stream) / Transphalba / Volta (Kernel)
Like Hunt’s composition “Lattice,” released on Texas Music in the same year, the four pieces included on Cantegral Segment(s) (IR-0032, 1979) represent a culmination and transformation of Hunt’s investigations from across the decade. The “Cantegral Segments” are a body of scores (or strategies) derived from and developed alongside the evolving compositional procedure Hunt called Haramand Plane, first used in a large-scale performance of that name from 1972 that employed elaborate homemade audio …
Texas Music
Tip! One of the first Irida releases, Texas Music (IRIDA 0026, 1979), collects compositions by Jerry Hunt (hailing from Dallas), Philip Krumm (based in San Antonio), and Jerry Willingham (“in and out” of Austin). The record was produced in two editions: one for mass consumption in a corrugated plain brown sleeve featuring a single fish stamp on the cover by the artist David McManaway, and a small “fundraising edition” sold in the same packaging at a higher price with a numbered print by McManawa…
Hybrid Musics
Larry Austin (1930–2018), thirteen years Hunt’s senior, was a key interlocutor for the composer. The two met during Austin’s term as editorial director of the magazine Source: Music of the Avant Garde and both had studied music at the University of North Texas. Following stints at the University of California, Davis, and the University of South Florida, Austin returned to UNT as professor in 1976 and took over its electronic music studio, the Center for Electronic Music and Intermedia. When Hunt…