Naturspil, Automatmusik, Syngeskål
New tape from Michael Mørkholt, made during his winter residency at Polychrome. "Naturspil, Automatmusik, Syngeskål". The pieces are performed on an acoustic singing bowl and a self-invented digital system, an electroacoustic composition principle for triads and rhythm in pure atmosphere. The principle is that the tonal relationships are mirrored in the rhythmic. A computer program with an amplitude-controlled trigger records a sound clip each time the singing bowl is struck. The sound clip is d…
Watercolors and Psychograms
"In the works of Martón Illés from the early 2000s, physically perceptible energy, gestural force, and visual conceptions of the sonic are already present. After 2010 the composer drew further implications from these for his work: since then, his musical thinking has no longer been based on fixed pitches, but rather on sounds – either as acoustic manifestations of imagined lines or as gestures modeled on the physical. The way he actually implements this by means of instruments is impressively de…
Painted Lights
Painted Lights, a new album of compositions by Kui Dong is now available on Kairos Music. The record, which features performances by Juliet Petrus, Deirdre Brenner, Third Coast Percussion, Arditti Quartet, Koehne Quartett, Volti, Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Robert Geary, and Raphael Schlüsselberg, comprises four pieces of chamber and choral music written by Dong between 2009 and 2017. California Shoreline (2017) for soprano, string quartet and prepared piano opens the album, followed by …
Music For The Kama Sutra
*2022 stock* Robert Hughes, composer and author, is a graduate of the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) and composition student of Aaron Copland, Carlos, Chavez, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Lou Harrison. He has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensemble, voices, performance art events and a wide variety of media, including twenty film scores and a large body of electronic music. His compositions include commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival, Oakland Sympho…
Solar One/The Watts Towers
Other Minds is excited to bring you an EP of two archival works from Bay Area composer Charles Boone. Both pieces take their inspiration and titles from man-made landmarks across California. Solar One from a monumental power station near the desert city of Barstow, The Watts Towers from Simon Rodia’s outsider art masterpiece in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. In much of his work, the composer seeks to create sonic landscapes that are simultaneously static and dynamic. Certain elements, ha…
Sonatas And Interludes For Prepared Piano
**2022 stock** Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, a cycle of 20 short pieces for prepared piano (a piano modified by inserting nuts and bolts and other objects between the piano strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects) by American composer John Cage. Created in 1946–48 after the composer had been introduced to Indian visual and performing arts, the cycle was intended to represent the so-called permanent emotions—the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the comi…
The Plains At Gordium
The Plains at Gordium was composed from June to August 2004 and is dedicated to Charlotta Kotik. The incentive to compose the piece came from a percussion group in Brno, Czech Republic, who asked me for a piece of music. Not being a commission-disciplined composer, I wrote a piece for six percussionists, while the Czech group, DAMA-DAMA had only four members and could not perform it. The size of the piece also defies the scale of a standard percussion piece, 1,290 measures over a 108-page score.…
Makrokosmos
** 2022 remastered repress ** Pianist Margaret Leng-Tan - considered the leading exponent of “extended” piano techniques - is at her best with this music. George Crumb and Ms. Tan worked closely on the preparation of these works for the recording. Crumb’s Makrokosmos I & II were written to expand the world of color and sonic possibilities which a single piano and pianist could create. In addition to playing the keyboard, the pianist is required to strum and pluck the strings; apply glass tumbler…
Because a circle is not enough
music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…
Things That Didn’t Work the First Time
With each composition, Annesley Black embarks courageously on a new experiment with an open future; while at the beginning of the compositional process the material can still mean many things, it gradually ceases to do so. And at some point, all ambiguities are cleared up: the piece stands. The paths that have led to this point are ultimately paradoxical: they are “immensely labyrinthine and completely logical at the same time” (Black). In their own unique way, the pieces gathered on this CD pre…
Ultima Thule
One could take Wolfram Schurig's Ultima Thule for five ensembles, a work whose mere instrumentation in-vokes that utopian place which, according to the composer, should automatically be the goal of any authentic artistic activity, as a motto for Wolfram Schurig‘s entire compositional œuvre. In ancient Greece, the name Thule referred to the northern-most part of the world, whose accessibility and actual existence, however, remained uncertain. Since Virgil, th…
For Piano I / For Pianist / Burdocks
With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.Werdo's unique “Studio Reihe” series continues with Christian Wolff: The works by Wolff recorded on this CD by the legendary pianists David Tudor and Frederic Rzewski and their …
Erwartung - Monodram, Op. 17
With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.The "Studio Reihe”now continues with a work by Arnold Schönberg: The premiere of Schoenberg's first stage work "Erwartung (Monodram)" [Expectation (Monodrama)] Op. 17, composed i…
Concerto Pour Violoncelle / Photoptosis / Tratto II
2022 Stock * With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.
The "Studio Reihe” starts with a CD with works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann. His complex “pluralistic” style fuses past, present and future into a musical unit of the h…
Epitaph Für Aikichi Kuboyama / Sechs Studien
* 2022 Stock * With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time."Studio Reihe” now continues withnow continues with works by Herbert Eimert: In view of recent events, especially in Japan, Herbert Eimert's piece “Epitaph für Aik…
Momente - Version 1965
With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time."Studio Reihe” now continues with a work by Karlheinz Stockhausen: His “Momente” [Moments] for soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists have not been designed a…
Pulse Music
*CD gatefold wallet with tip in booklet* Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seria…
Live im Haus des Rundfunks
The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks…
Adjacent Sound
Adjacent Sound positions Gabriel Paiuk as a composer attuned to the phenomena of perception, proximity, and the thresholds where listening itself becomes the subject. Rather than presenting a collection of isolated pieces, the album unfolds as a unified exploration into how sound delineates and dissolves boundaries - between performers, between recorded and live presence, between the material and the ephemeral. Every aspect of the release is shaped by a careful questioning of what it means to li…
Discreet Angel
Discreet Angel brings to light the uniquely understated voice of Mark Ellestad, gathering three chamber works composed between the late 1980s and early 1990s. What unifies the album is its atmosphere of meditative quiet and fragile resilience, qualities honed through Ellestad’s focus on pared-down gesture and subtle shifts in form. Rather than presenting polished showpieces, these compositions favor modesty, restraint, and an honest vulnerability - traits that resonate strongly with listeners se…