Among the Tarnished Stars / Quatuor pour la fin du temps
The UK ensemble Apartment House performs two works: Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du Temps in six movements, and Linda Catlin Smith's Among the Tarnished Stars, taking a fresh modern approach to the Messiaen, drawing out its experimental character, and the sense of drama and intricate gradations of sonority in Smith's rich and mysterious work.
Point/Wave
The first piece composer Catherine Lamb has written specifically for acoustic guitar was commissioned by Chilean guitarist Christián Alvear. Extending concepts from an installation piece titled Secondary Rainbow with Bryan Eubanks, Lamb employs electronics over an infinite cycle of four "environmental chords" which overlap and resonate with one another.
Breaths
Three works from Italian composer and pianist Federico Pozzer in his "breathing" series, compositions where the musicians follow the concept of inhaling, exhaling, and pausing, set against certain fixed actions or interactions as they devise their own musical actions."My first 'breathing pieces' were written at the end of 2016... I was looking for a solution that could overcome both the players' freedom in decision-making and the strictness of the score. What I wanted was to lead musicians towar…
Windfell
James Weeks’ major work for singing violinist, Windfell, has been released on the leading British experimental music label Another Timbre. Written for and performed by Canadian violinist Mira Benjamin, Windfell debuted in October / November 2017 at concerts in London and in Durham University’s Klang series. Lasting almost an hour, Windfell arose from ‘an image of the violin surrounded by space and open air: on top of a hill, high-up and remote, played only by the wind. On this ‘wind fell’ the br…
Shade / Gradient
**425 copies, 3-color letterpressed jacket with large 20-page booklet containing the full score and a lengthy interview with the composer** Catherine Lamb’s work is characterized by an insistence on what she calls the “interaction of tone”. Precisely tuned intervals, played slowly at subtle volumes, blend and generate a host of difference and combination tones, phasing, beating and aural illusions. Her ensemble and orchestral compositions have been performed in grand halls and d.i.y. spaces alik…
Music For Lock Grooves
**250 copies** SN Variations fifth release features two tracks in three parts each composed for lock grooves recorded onto acetate, percussion by Sam Wilson (Riot Ensemble / Actress) and violin performed by Aisha Orazbayeva. The tracks also feature the piano of Mark Knoop and the voice of Josephine Stephenson. A lock groove is one cycle of one groove on a record. This is 1.8 sec cut at 33rpm and 1.33 cut at 45rpm. Adrian Corker used the cutting lathe currently residing in the living room of The …
Barricades
**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 …
Cheminant
**500 copies** This is French composer / pianist Melaine Dalibert's third solo piano album, following his well-received 2018 album Musique pour le lever du jour and 2017 album Ressac. Cheminant contains a diverse array of Dalibert's unique compositions for solo piano, ranging from the up-tempo rhythmic Percolations performed masterfully by Dalibert's right hand, to the slow, prolonged meditative Music in an octave and Cheminant, to the kaleidoscopic Étude II with the repetitive hammered chords, …
Flores
**2021 stock** Flores, like any other work of Maria de Alvear, deals with the ideal of inner freedom. This is not a mere claim, it is manifested in the shape of the piece itself. Written in the author's typical mixture of composition and notated improvisation, the text leaves a certain scope to the seven instrumentalists as to the elaboration of the rhythm and at times also the intonation. The score has almost no directives for the parts of the two singers: what and how the singing is performed …
Raga Virga (Live At Montalbâne 17.6.2011)
**2019 stock* * Indian Dhrupad songs meet the chants of Hildegard of Bingen: this extraordinary encounter took place in 2011 at the Montalbâne Festival. It was a successful experiment in a concert that linked together two worlds that at first glance have nothing in common. But this is deceptive, since both musical worlds follow the rules of modal music and can thus lay, intertwine, and harmonize wonderfully with one another. And both worlds come from the context of contemplation in monasteries a…
Solo for voice 58 : 18 microtonal ragas
**2021 stock** The world premiere recording of Solo for Voice 58 by legendary American avant-garde composer John Cage. Italian-German dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni is the ideal interpreter, trained in classical Indian singing but also able to improvise on ragas in a new music context. Cuni developed from Cage’s score of eighteen raga scales a remarkable and unique interpretation that belongs to both the classical Indian and Western experimental traditions. Includes an extensive booklet with essays …
Ways For an Orchestra
Following three beautiful studio albums, Minton and Weston are back with an outstanding program of orchestral arrangements. The music flows with great pathos through renditions of their own most memorable compositions alongside pieces by Eric Dolphy, Luc Ex, Lindsay Cooper, Jacques Brel and others. Music by Phil Minton, Veryan Weston, Eric Dolphy, Arthur Sullivan, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Lindsay Cooper, Luc Ex, Jacques Brel
Chirality
The new Eyvind Kang album was recorded in Italy with a 25 piece mixed orchestra of traditional strings and winds, with the addition of Moog synthesizer, accordion, percussion, field recordings and voice. It features vocals by Alan Bishop, co-founder of Sun City Girls. Eyvind Kang conductor, chironomy, violaAlan Bishop voice, field recordingsMarco Dalpane accordion, moog synthesizerMG_INC Orchestra:Ferenc Vojnic Hajduk 1st violin; Eliana de Candia 1st violin; Giulia Camardella 1st violin; Eleonor…
Deux Songes (Les Jours Sont Faits Pour Expliquer Les Nuits)
** 300 copies** French musician Bruno Duplant is one of the most talked-about artists on the experimental music scene today. In recent years he's presented many outstanding composed pieces and released a succession of excellent recordings on labels around the world. The abundance and vitality of his work are remarkable. On this album, two compositions by Duplant are performed by Ordinary Affects, led by Boston-based musician/composer Morgan Evans-Weiler. Ordinary Affects is an experimental music…
Piano Music
Robert Palmer (1915-2010) produced more than ninety symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo works throughout his career, earning a reputation in the mid-twentieth century as one of the country's leading, most daring, and -- at the same time -- appealing modernists. Palmer's unique musical language combined a deeply emotional impulse with complex counterpoint and rhythmic structures, drawing comparisons to Hindemith, Bartók, Lou Harrison, even Brahms. Aaron Copland famously included Palmer on his 19…
Cloud Atlas/Vertical Study
Cloud Atlas is a collection of ten short pieces composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi between 1985 to 1999. Vertical Study gathers rare pieces composed by Claude Ledoux. Both are performed by Japanese pianist Kaoru Tashiro. "Kaoru
produces serene, yet rich sound texture; the fluctuation of beat and
the perspective of the motif are ingenious. I hope many more people will
taste this joy of finding a grain of gold with your own eyes and ears,
from her commercialism-unrelated, sincere and an experimental…
Panopticon Specularities
A native of Istanbul, Turgut Erçetin (1983) studied composition and completed his doctorate studies at Stanford University. In 2016, Erçetin was awarded with DAAD Artists-In-Berlin program for a year-long residency in Berlin, and since then he has been based in Berlin. Erçetin's works engage with issues of sound, not as colors but as sonic entities that interface with time and space. Most of his works, therefore, are involved with acoustics and psychoacoustics as well as computer aided compositi…
Beissel
A collaboration between Austrian composer Klaus Lang and the ensemble Golden Fur (James Rushford, Judith Hamann & Samuel Dunscombe). Together they developed a piece in the abbey at Sankt Lambrecht in Austria, using music by the eighteenth century religious composer Johann Beissel, who developed a compositional system which he claimed to have received from angels, and which has been described as a very early precursor of serialism. The result is an extraordinary piece of music: fragility blown th…
Viola Torros
4 compositions from violist/composers Catherine Lamb & Johnny Chang, the 1st focusing on the mysterious compositions of Vedic-era composer Viola Torros, exploring monady, melody and harmony; the second, one composition each from Chang performed with the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, and from Lamb using the secondary rainbow synthesizer she developed with Bryan Eubanks..The summer I arrived in Berlin, I began meeting with Johnny around music-related things and he started mentioning a composer he w…
Without
Clara de Asís composed the piece 'Without' for the duo of Erik Carlson (violin) and Greg Stuart (percussion) in 2018. In this 43-minute piece, de Asís gave a precise framework for the position and the duration of each sound section and each silence, as well as a rough outline for the texture and the volume of each sound, the use of tone or noise (or tone-noise), and the materials for the percussion, but a large part of the score was open for the two performers' freedom.In the realization of this…