Composition / All styles

DVD of two filmed portraits made by Luc Ferrari and Gérard Patris for French TV in the 1960s: Stockhausen rehearsing Momente, and Hommage à Edgard Varèse, released here for the first time with English subtitles.

Suspended somewhere between stillness and movement, Winterglare explores the fragile moments that exist beneath the surface: frozen landscapes, distant memories, quiet isolation, and the sudden brilliance of light reflected through the cold. The album unfolds as an immersive listening experience, inviting the audience into a world that feels both intimate and vast. Rather than offering easy answers, Winterglare creates space for reflection. Its songs move through shadow and radiance, embracing c…

*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…

*2024 stock* Computer Music serves as the official musical documentation of the November 1981 International Computer Music Conference, held at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. The album features five compositions with music that ranges from electronic sounds to female vocals, flute and horns, stringed instruments, and percussion. The composers include Larry Austin, whose early works were recorded with the help of Leonard Bernstein; Bruce Pennycook, who now teaches music at the Butl…

**500 copies** This album contains LA-based composer Michael Pisaro's recent composition Barricades, a 63-minute piece for piano and electronics. Consisting of thirteen studies (piano pieces, some with electronics) and two electronic interludes, the piece is performed by Israel-based pianist Shira Legmann, with Pisaro on electronics. Legmann's clean, supple yet solid piano sounds, employing a wide dynamic range, add a sense of organic life to the composition. Her whispery nuances and mysterious …

The first ever survey of the seminal British experimental music collective, Gentle Fire, "Explorations (1970 - 1973)" offers a remarkable and previously unavailable glimpse of their activities during the early 1970s.

Kontakte is a Stockhausen classic from 1959, for electronics, percussion and piano (played here by David Tudor). One of his "moment form" compositions, which "...lead up to no climax, nor do they have prepared, and thus expected, climaxes, nor the usual introductory, intensifying, transitional, and cadential stages which are related to the curve of development in a whole work; they are rather immediately intense and -- permanently present -- endeavor to maintain the level of continued 'peaks' up…

Nippon Cultural Broadcasting (= Bunka Hōsō) is known for airing Toshiro Mayuzumi’s composition for “Works for musique concrète X.Y.Z.” the very first Japanese work of musique concrète. Now, for the first time, the long-lost broadcast recordings produced by the director of that era are being released! These include a piece by Yori-aki Matsudaira's father, Yoritsune Matsudaira, created by repeatedly dubbing instrumental material, as well as an experimental work unique to Bunka Hōsō, produced throu…

First released in 1969 on the Advanced Recordings label, this album represents Richard Maxfield’s music manifesto. A wild collage of highly manipulated sonic events from an extreme variety of analog sources.

* 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…

Iannis Xenakis's early electroacoustic works define already the compositional space he is using later in his mature, almost one-hour long works like Persepolis or La Légende d'Er. After arriving in Paris as a Greek refuge in 1947, Xenakis quickly found a work as construction engineer with the architect Le Corbusier. He tried in vain for several years to become a member of the Groupe De Musique Concrète (GRM) and thus to gain access to the electroacoustic studios at the French radio. Pierre Schae…

*200 copies limited edition* The music on ‘Remanens’ is the result of a commission by Art Cinema OFF off and B.A.A.D.M to score the short silent film ‘Positano’ made by french actor and filmmaker Pierre Clémenti in 1969. The film itself is an ever-shifting series of glimpses, without much context, of a family vacation to the island Positano. The short cuts are similar to a dream or obscured, residual memories where chronology has fallen apart. The score was reworked into album format on ‘Remane…

The string quartet Current that provides the centerpiece of Adams’ new album dates from 2016, when Spektral Quartet commissioned the composer to write a short work that became the 12-minute study Quartet Movement. Though that piece stands alone, Adams sensed that it might also be used as the basis for something larger, so over the next few years he expanded its scope. The present five-movement work, completed in 2019, was co-commissioned by Spektral Quartet and Cal Performances, with additional …

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…

*Handmade textile sleeve* British composer Simon Goff interprets space, both within ourselves and the objects that surround us with Interior Realms - vol.1; a wondrous, contemplative work of electronic chamber music. The idea first came from the philosophical idea underpinning the book Interior Realms, published by Theatrum Mundi in 2021. In it, a collection of essays reflects upon architecture’s influence on the human spirit. It challenges us to think not only about music as space, but also abo…

“This album resulted (like many things) from experimentation, and actually from composing etudes formyself to practice justly-tuned chords. From that starting point I began to think about space, not justspace like the silence around sound events, but also the hollow, resonant spaces in my sinuses andmouth, and the space where the sounds were recorded, or the space where the sounds were listened to.I wanted to show the many colors of the sounds, even the hidden ones, like Pauline Oliveros who sai…

The Great Liberation Through Hearing (1995) is scored for amplified, just-tuned string quartet and digitallytransformed human voice. Generated from a phonetic analysis of the names of Buddhist deities describedin The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the piece explores connections between Eastern mantric science andWestern linguistic structuralism. It brings together the compositional linguistics of Kenneth Gaburo andthe intonational theories of Harry Partch through two simultaneous mappings of the anal…

Rex is a solo cello record written and recorded while I’ve been living in the former home of Rex Brasher, a self-taught painter who created over 1,200 watercolors of North American birds. Composed for acoustic and electric cello, the record reflects the solitude and intensity that shaped both Brasher’s vision and my own process. Rex is not a portrait, but an echo—of a person, a place, and a way of seeing the world. Thank you to Matthew, Munawar, Cynthia & the RBA for the place, support, and gene…

Swiss-based German vocalist/composer Marianne Schuppe and Berlin-based Italian cellist Deborah Walker present two duo works: Aus dem Zeltbuch, co-composed by Schuppe and Walker; and Occam River XXIX, a piece by French composer Éliane Radigue. Aus dem Zeltbuch (2022/23), based on a text-collage by Marianne Schuppe, reveals a surface of a word-sound texture on the edge of acoustic intelligibility. Aus dem Zeltbuch questions our perception of language in a musical context by creating bilingual area…

Shira Legmann is an Israeli concert pianist, with a wide repertoire from Baroque to contemporary and experimental music. This album contains three piano works by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi: Suite No.9 "Ttai" (1953), Quattro Illustrazioni (1953), and Un Adieu (1978/1988). This is Legmann's second CD on Elsewhere Music, following the 2019 album "Barricades" in which she was the pianist for Michael Pisaro's composition for piano/electronics.Legmann's clean, supple yet solid piano sounds, whic…

'Slow Roads' is an album of eight pieces written by Hague-based Serbian composer Ivan Vukosavljević between 2019 and 2022, for solo 1/4 comma meantone organ. All eight pieces were recorded in 2022 on five different historic organs, dating from the early 16th to mid-17th centuries, located in medieval churches scattered throughout the countryside of the northern Netherlands. Each piece was adapted for a specific organ, as they vary considerably in their disposition. All eight pieces are written i…

'Les signes passagers' is an album of seven pieces for solo fortepiano written by Jürg Frey in 2021, commissioned by the Amsterdam-based pianist Keiko Shichijo. It was premiered by Shichijo on February 5, 2022 at the Concertgebouw Brugge during the Slow Festival. In the same year, Shichijo performed the piece again at the November Music 2022 and later recorded it for this album in April 2023 at the Concertgebouw Brugge in the presence of the composer. “As a listener, I have experienced with musi…

Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming melodies.Frey wrote two compositions for two pianos in 2017-2019: Entre les deux l'instant (2017/20…

Swiss composer Jürg Frey and Dutch pianist/composer Reinier van Houdt are reunited on this triple CD, 'lieues d'ombres', after their successful collaboration on 'l'air, l'instant - deux pianos' (elsewhere 014), during which the two built a close rapport. 'lieues d'ombres' contains seven of Frey’s solo piano works, written from 1984 – 2018, including one previously unreleased work, ‘Three Piano Pieces’. All seven pieces were recorded by Micha de Kanter at The Muziekcentrum van de Omroep (MCO) in …

In recent years, pianist and producer Mirek Coutigny has worked on his own world of sound with electronic and acoustic instruments. He improvised on sketches that he wrote over the last 10 years and reworked them for piano, strings, percussion and electronics.The common thread running through “The Further We Ventured” is a fascination for the “suburbs”, more specific, the contrast between the often similar facades and the diversity of stories behind those facades.This is also reflected in the co…

Ensemble 0 presents L'Étrange Femme des Neiges, a fresh addition to their exploratory discography and the official soundtrack to a new film featuring Blanche Gardin and Philippe Katerine. This release demonstrates Ensemble 0's knack for understated textures and melodic invention, crafting a sonic atmosphere that seamlessly blends cinematic intimacy with expressive minimalism.

Chamber works by Irish composer Gerald Barry for solo piano, violin and piano, piano trio and piano quartet, played by the Fidelio Trio with Rose Redgrave and the composer. All but In the Asylum are first recordings.

Bruce Brubaker is one of the most exciting pianists in the contemporary American classical scene, according to Pitchfork. He is back with a follow-up to his 11th album Glass Piano an audacious reprise of compositions by his contemporary Philip Glass. Brubaker’s new album, Eno Piano, is a stunning reinterpretation of selected tracks from Brian Eno’s ambient masterpiece, Music for Airports, as well as three original tracks. Brubaker carefully dissects, rearranges and reconstructs the iconic compos…

Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. That concern led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those that he had used before. Music for 88 is the result of these researches. It contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.

Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's Baobab and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the…

1971 composition fusing classical structure with jazz improvisation by Third Stream composer, released in 1978 by Flying Fish.

*2025 stock* A landmark new recording brings together two of Frederic Rzewski’s most powerful and socially engaged works, interpreted with striking intensity by pianist Takuya Otaki. At the heart of the release is The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), a monumental set of 36 variations on the Chilean resistance song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!”, composed as an ode to solidarity and resilience in times of political struggle. Widely considered one of the pinnacles of late 20th…

Vanessa Wagner breathes new life into Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes, revealing the powerful lyricism and subtle turbulence of Glass’s minimalist language. Her interpretation brings emotional intensity and poetic nuance across all 20 etudes, reflecting over a decade spent exploring the repertoire and making for an immersive listening experience.

Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016's On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology. Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as laye…

Tractus emphasizes Arvo Pärt compositions that blend the timbres of choir and string orchestra. New versions predominate, with focused performances from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction that invite alert and concentrated listening. From the opening composition Littlemore Tractus, which takes as its starting point consoling reflections from a sermon by John Henry Newman, the idea of change, transfiguration and renewal resona…

"In September 2019 I was asked by cellist Leo Svensson Sander and harpist Stina Hellberg Agback if I would be interested participating in a project together with them, violinist Eva Lindal and a couple of visual artists, a poet and a scenographer, which would deal with questions concerning how to make art in times of crisis, something I gladly and curiously accepted. The project would take Messiaen's ’Quatuor pour la fin de temps’ and its genesis, creation and historical context as a point of de…

Hot on the heels of his wonderful piece on the Early to Late CD released earlier this year, a new hour-long work for an ensemble of six musicians by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg. The piece borrows material from a song by Schubert, but transforms it into Granberg's typically taut and focused soundworld: "The expressiveness of the song has been subdued or silenced, and has become something which takes place somewhere beneath the surface of the music.

Your work with the larger group Skogen is now relatively well-known, and indeed successful. Why the change of group formation for this release? And in particular why the absence of electronics, which was such a feature of your two Another Timbre discs with Skogen?Well, partly because of some quite trivial, practical and arbitrary reasons, actually. Firstly, I had some sort of desire to be part of an ensemble performing my music playing the clarinet instead of the piano, as I normally have done t…

Three beautiful works for Jurg Frey's clarinet by the Amsterdam-based Wandelweiser composer Dante Boon, with the composer accompanying Jurg on piano on two of the pieces. Amsterdam-based composer and pianist Dante Boon (1973) has been composing since he was 11 years old, playing new music since he was thirteen. He joined a well-known Dutch rock band when he was 24. After its break-up, he worked extensively over the years with composers such as Tom Johnson, Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger and Sam…

This CD offers the first recording of Frank Denyer's extraordinary hour-long piece for large ensemble The Fish That Became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed), composed between 1991 and 1996. The ensemble includes a huge number of home-made percussion instruments made from discarded materials, as well as obscure instruments such as eunuch flutes, ocarinas and crumhorns. The album comes with a booklet with notes by Frank Denyer and an essay by Michael Turnbull.Musicians include:Octandre Ensemble …