About
Swiss composer and cellist Stefan Thut composed ‘about’ in 2017 for the sextet of Ryoko Akama (electronics), Stephen Chase (guitar), Eleanor Cully (piano), Patrick Farmer (metal percussion), lo wie (tingsha), and Thut (cello). The six musicians have diverse backgrounds in music, poetry, and literature, as well as comprising a multilingual group. Thut integrated both musical elements and non-musical elements in his piece. His score instructs three performers to make percussive, ringing, and elect…
Blurred Music
**Co-produced by David Sylvian and Yuko Zama, artwork by David Sylvian** The Berlin-based Bulgarian violinist Biliana Voutchkova and German clarinetist Michael Thieke have worked together intensely within both compositional and improvisational duo and group projects in Berlin since 2011. #In their current project “Blurred Music”, the duo works with musical structures that create a blur; improvised parts alternate with fields of pre-structured material in which digital recordings of the duo are d…
Hotel America
By any standards and from several directions, Hotel America is demanding work. It’s a five-movement piece stretching to 76-minutes. Composer Szilárd Mezei conducts an ensemble of 15 musicians and three actor/singers and employs musical methodologies ranging from densely composed to free jazz and free improvisation. The verbal content is also challenging: the actor/singers perform lengthy poems in Hungarian, a language little-used outside Hungary and a few surrounding territories.Hotel America is…
Two Orchestra Pieces
This recording is the first ever devoted to the orchestral music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) and thus documents a little-known aspect of his wide-ranging work. John, David (1998) introduces in its second part a prominent role for solo percussionist, playing a wide range of pitched and non-pitched instruments, including marimba, glockenspiel, a variety of drums, wood and metal instruments and other sources, the exact choice left to the performer. Rhapsody (2009), in contrast, uses instruments of…
Beats
The work of LA based music-maker John Krausbauer has so much to do with minimalism as with trance music as with soundart experimentation and "performance based" sound forms. And where, as he himself states, the "Trance-Psychedelia is the aim and goal". Firmly rooted in the 60s/70s Minimalist movement of LaMonte Young and The Theater of Eternal Music, as well as the trajectory out of that...(with the likes of Conrad, Flynt, Wada, Palestine, Chatham; Oliveros, Radigue etc etc), "beats" also touch …
Works with Guitar
Like his near contemporary Franco Donatoni, Aldo Clementi (b.1925) is an Italian composer who has had a very fruitful association with that most Italian of instruments, the guitar. Both Clementi and Donatoni shared similar paths in their compositional development: the early influences of major early 20th-century composers through the adoption and later rejection of serialism and the Darmstadt courses they both attended, culminating in their very individual mature styles. Clementi's recent pieces…
H1KhH2WM (Du Seuil), a Five-letter Sufi Word
The third chapter in the Sufi Word's series. Jean-Luc Fafchamps
on the release: "The Sufi Letters is a vast project of 28 compositions
(for the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet) undertaken in 2000 and still
ongoing. I am drawing inspiration from the symbolic charts found in
Sufi mysticism. Each Letter is a sonic meditation on the frontiers of
conscience and the paradoxes of time. Today's word, 'Du seuil' ('From
the threshold'), is the third word to be released by Sub Rosa. It is a
journe…
North of North
Instruments which sound like instruments!!! Unbelievable real-time compositions for the unlikely instrumentation of piano, trumpet and violin courtesy of North Of North: Anthony Pateras, Scott Tinkler and Erkki Veltheim.Drawing from improvisation, Carnatic music, 20th and 21st century compositional strategies, mathematical theories and open forms of jazz, their music is fused together by virtuosic instrumentalism, critical listening and a shared philosophy of musical and physical discipline. The…
Dream, American Music for Electric Guitar
“Dream” is a musical journey through the sound of the electric guitar in American concert music, based on sonic research and on the simplicity and beauty of the electric guitar timbre and colors.Sorrentino’s transcription of Dream by John Cage opens the program. This version demonstrates the pure beauty of the electric guitar’s clean sound with only the addition of light reverb. This is the first CD release for the lost electric guitar composition by Morton Feldman, The Possibility of a New Work…
Gong Gongs
**Warehouse find, still sealed original copies 1987 edition** Gong action suported by catalan fussion percussionist Santi Arisa. Main attraction here is the percussions and electronics piece Secuencia I.
Where Are We Going, Today
Christian Wolff, piano, objects, charango, flute. Antoine Beuger, voice, whistles, EWR recordings (1995) of Christian Wolff’s “Stones”.Antoine Beuger started composing music in 1990 and has released on his own label, Edition Wandelweiser Records, as well as Erstwhile Records. Beuger’s work is best exemplified by two releases, his first, Calme Étendue (Spinoza) and A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger. Calme Étendue (Spinoza) is an album that attempts to take the 17th century philosopher Spin…
Complete Early Percussion Works
Stockhausen’s early percussion music is among the most visionary of the percussion repertoire. This unique collection features some works which are almost impossible to find elsewhere. Zyklus was not only a novel composition in terms of its treatment of time and structure, it was also the first percussion solo ever performed. Kontakte, a masterpiece for piano and percussion with 4-channel tape, challenges to performers to play together and to make the maximum number of “contacts” with the tape. …
The Orchestral Works 2
"The first recording of his 32-minute grand cantata 'La Nascita del Verb.' Steeped in chromaticism, with hints of Scriabin and a sea of percussion, 'Nascita' boasts a vast double fugue (one of the most imposing in the history of music) and a forty-seven voice canon in twelve keys. This work, 'truly written in blood,' left Scelsi 'in a deplorable state, afterwards he stopped composing for several years. One of Giacinto Scelsi's infamous pieces are the 'Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola).' Ear piece…
A Cage of saxophones 1
Between 1983 and 1991 John cage wrote three pieces specifically for saxophones, Four5, Five4 and Hymnkus, which are combined here for the first time on CD. In addition, Cage authorized Ulrich Krieger's arrangement for saxophone of Ryoanji. Krieger also made a saxophone arrangement of Five, one of the few compositions from this period performable on any instruments. This unique disc concentrates on Cage's late works for saxophone. A CAGE OF SAXOPHONES VOL.2 (mode 160), features a combination of…
Ascension to Purgatory
This is Pape's third monographic CD with Mode Records. Whereas his last Mode CD ("Electro-acoustic Chamber Works", released in 1998) presented his ground breaking works of 1993-1996, this new CD presents a selection of his more recent pieces composed from 1998 to 2004. While Pape continues his fascination with composing with chaotic sound in Le Fleuve du Désir IV and Weaveworld Prologue, it is his new approach to composing with packets of granular time that predominates on this CD. In La Na…
Complete Music For Violin & Piano
Here, collected for the first time, are all of Morton Feldman's compositions for violin and piano. It is also a kind of walk through his compositional development, from the Webernesque early Piece for Violin and Piano (1950); through the experiments with graphic notation in Projection 4 (1951); followed by an excursion into the jungle-like density of David Tudor's energy in Extensions 1 (1951); to the cryptic notational riddles of Vertical Thoughts 2 (1963); from the dry carpet-dusting Spring …
Njinga: The Queen King – The Return of a Warrior
Written and Directed by IONE Original music and Sound by Pauline Oliveros Traditional Congolese Music by Titos Sompa Set and Costume Design by Valerie Maynard, Dance and Movement by Carol Chappell, Nego Gato, Biza Sompa and Titos Sompa, Traditional Brazilian Music and Dance by Nego Gato.
Njinga the Queen King is a collaborative effort between writer/director Ione and composer Pauline Oliveros, which they refer to as “a play with music and pageantry.” It is based on historica…
Music in 2 Dimensions – Works for Flute
In honor of the 40th anniversary of great composer/ conductor Bruno Maderna’s (1920-73) death, Mode is pleased to release the first complete CD of Maderna’s music for flute. The flute played an important part in Maderna’s oeuvre due to his friendship with the exceptional flutist Severino Gazzelloni, who had premiered almost all of the flute compositions. Musica su due dimensioni is among the earliest examples to make live music interact with electro-acoustic sounds recorded on tape. There …
Xenakis Edition 15, Orchestral Works
**CD Edition** Metastaseis A (first recording), Orchestra Sinfonica RAI; Terretektorh for 88 musicians dispersed among the public; Nomos Gamma for 98 musicians dispersed among the public — Residentie Orkest The Hague, Arturo Tamayo, conductor.
Naima
Swiss musician Roland Dahinden is not your typical trombonist. Equally at home in New Music, Jazz and Improvisation, he is a favorite interpreter of Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier, as well as being acclaimed for performances in the trombone/piano duo with Hildegard Kleeb. On disc, Dahinden is well known for his Hat Art recording devoted to Cage and Wolff. This disc is the first release of his own compositions and interpretations of John Coltrane's classic Nai…