Und Du... et al
** Und du… was composed in 1963, commissioned by the Austrian Broadcasting Co. It was supposed to be played “radiophonically,” i.e. on tape and with loudspeakers only, to reach and involve a group of listeners corresponding to the medium’s effective radius. My own involvement with the nuclear situation – the dangerousness of which against the background of Hiroshima was clear, but not nearly to the extent it is today among the broad public – prompted me to take the equally fundamental anxiety I …
Kaleidoscope
** In process of stocking ** Kairos presents Kaleidoscope by Eunho Chang. Born 1983 in Daegu, Republic of Korea, Eunho Chang began his musical studies with piano lessons at the age of seven. He studied composition at the Keimyung University, Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and obtained his PhD in musical composition at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music under the supervision of professor Marcin Błażewicz. He has been selected for various workshops and masterclasses, such as Impuls Acade…
Density 2036
In 2013, Claire Chase instigated a project designed to cultivate an entirely new body of work for flute. A MacArthur Fellow, Harvard professor, and indomitable musical force who co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, Chase began commissioning work, with the idea of doing so until the centennial of Edgard Varése's seminal flute solo "Density 21.5," in 2036. This deluxe 4-CD set is the first fruit of these commissions, realized in the first three years of the project, featuring 17 wor…
Pietra e Oggetto
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…
Saturations
Saturations is a composition by Danish multidisciplinary artist Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard, and features a clarinet choir consisting of 19(!) clarinet players. Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard (b. 1979) considers his work to be a basic research in realities working within the domains of imaginary & physical sound as well as other non-sonic media, and since 2012 Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard has experimented with creating music that lets the instruments transcend their inherent sonic norms and reappear in another for…
Suite No.9 / Quattro Illustrazioni / Un Adieu
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…
L'Air, L'Instant - Deux Pianos
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…
Infinite Ascent
This is French composer/pianist Melaine Dalibert’s fifth solo album since 2015, all featuring his own compositions. This time, the album consists of melodically structured song pieces, an area that Dalibert has been exploring in the last couple of years as a new compositional approach outside his signature algorithmic method of composition. This series of eight short pieces appeal in a new way from his previous music, and shows his maturity as a composer. Dalibert wrote all eight pieces in 2019 …
Popol Vuh
"The Popol Vuh- the Book of Counsel“ of the K'iché-Maya belongs to the most important creation myths of the early advanced civilizations in the world. A Maya from the K'iché people, who had learned Spanish during the conquista, wrote down the the texts in K'iché with Latin letters between 1545 and 1555. Before that, the texts were only passed on orally. Father Francisco Ximenéz copied this book and translated it into Spanish. Then he returned the original to the K'iché people. In this way the b…
Augmented Studies
* 2021 Stock * "When I imagine, as I sometimes do, that evolution were possible, Complexity is not its goal, but perhaps the safety net for a possible Immediacy. This opens up the possibility to exercise sufficient safeguards in an ever finer woven net of abstractions ? if not to escape directly ? to at least be able to risk a glimpse through the netting: a glimpse unfiltered through abstraction, signs, predetermined patterns, a glimpse of unaltered reality." - Peter Ablinger
Questions
* 2021 Stock * Most music proceeds with great self-assurance, more like an answer than like a question, but these pieces raise questions. We hope you will not only listen to the music as the pairs go by, but we will also want to decide whether they are same or different. Try it. Maybe your musical perceptions are better than you think. And if not, well, no one is going to grade you, and you can always try again! - Tom Johnson
This situation raises new questions, which Johnson undoubtedly intends…
Nine unfinished Symphonies
The Nine Unfinished Symphonies were conceived as one entity. They are written in my musical native tongue; the musical grammar and idioms with which I have become so familiar that I can converse in them spontaneously, without thinking, so that I can devote my full attention to what I actually want to do. It appears that we need narratives, such as the ‘sacred’ number nine with symphonies, or the concept of the Unfinished, which stands in sharp contrast to the fragmentary or the ‘uncapitalized’ u…
Subtle Matters
How many sounds can a piano produce without using the keyboard? Some answers can be found in this recording, where the whole instrument is investigated using different techniques to reveal a world of unexpected richness, textures, and resonances.But it’s not just that: it’s also a journey in what the concept of “piano” became in the imagination of three composers (and a pianist). Each, in fact, gave shape to an original sonorous universe, and the task of reconnecting the subtle threads between c…
Pathological Curves
To sonically modify sound, not as a composerly or listenerly injunction but as a condition of its possibility: such is the task of Elizabeth Hoffman. Hers is not merely a music of the "verb" - that composers "do" something or "perform" something on the sonic. Hers is an "adverbial" music.
Above all, adverbial music modifies - sound, yes, but more fundamentally the space in which sound appears and the temporality that it solicits as it vanishes, always. Adverbial music, reticently and generously,…
Painted Cakes Are Real, Too
When you are listening to his pieces and are completely at ease, they offer the listener the beauty of pure sound: I believe this also applies to his likeminded friends. Even when and if they are of a continuous narrative type, they just create the right situation to listen to sounds. As the title reveals: Painted cakes are real, too. The beautiful sounds are repeated in order to remain purely sound. This repetition does not build up a narrative, it becomes more complicated and excited not in or…
Ballad
The word "ballad" implies a tale or narrative, and while there is no literal story being told there, I found myself thinking of the two performers as co-travellers in a terrain - or as dance partners - and the music as sometimes like a song they sing together, sometimes a landscape they cross, sometimes a mood, sometimes a monologue, and sometimes a fine line they trace. In the end, it is a ballad about the cello and the piano, and the way I hear them together. - Linda Catlin Smith
Der Uhu des Ihi
"Leukert brings back intuition into the computer-mechanical techniques of contemporary classical music. His compositions derive from the hearing experience - he has become a David Lynch for the ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, who is operating with the ironically associative scepticism of Godard. A blessing that Maria De Alvear’s small label ‘World Edition’ now produced eight of Leukert’s audio pieces on CD; among them the enchanting trilogy Wildwechsel" . - Alban Nikolai Herbst
Improvisation
That’s the name of the game... Marco Blaauw plays on a quartertone double bell trumpet, a shell, brought from Madagascar,a slide trumpet, piccolo trumpet, quartertone flugel horneven megaphone and flexible tube. Gijsbrecht Royé plays on a self-made bass-zither. To play on the four groups of bass grandpiano strings, he uses different kinds of sticks; two bows (normally used for double bass), metal strings, nails, brushes, knives, rat-tailed files and metal scouring pads.
Proprio Motu
* 2021 Stock * The disc summarises a major part of Eduardo Polonio’s work over the last decade and in some way is a complement to his 1969 - 1998 anthology.
There is a deep line, indecipherable for me, that runs through the work of Eduardo Polonio. It is a spectral base that we can track to his early works. ... In his latest work, Sudoku-mix, he buries it even deeper. We should not opt for the easy programmatic interpretation of the phenomena he points to in his work. The harmonic plays and even…
Sitting Between Chairs
* 2021 Stock * Metamusic. A suitable term for all these works, if by this we understand that musical aspects are somehow transcended, transgressed.
Sitting between chairs. A transgression which leads, through interactions of materials and intentions, controlled use of randomness or indeterminacy, conceptual game of measurement or definition, to the contemplation of music itself as yet another fragment of the whole, because the sound objects may have a dramatic or musical nature.
How could this w…