Sternklang
*2022 Stock.* Sternklang features a roaming studio recording, documenting the five spacially-separated electro-acoustic chamber groups of Sternklang, a harmonically-modulating piece structurally similar to the all-vocal Stimmung. Some soloists are also highlighted in the mix as they migrate from one group to another. This 2 CD recording features members of the English new music groups Intermodulation and Gentle Fire, as well as Annette Meriweather (vox), Harald Bojé (synth), Michael Vetter (vox,…
Für Kommende Zeiten
*2022 Stock.* Für kommende Zeiten is a relatively contemporary recording of some intuitive music pieces from Stockhausen's second collection of text scores, recorded by the Ensemble for Intuitive Music Weimar (Michael von Hintzenstern (piano/harmonium), Matthias von Hintzenstern (cello), Hans Tutschku (synthesizer), Daniel Hoffmann (trumpet)) on May 28, 2005. During a period of personal upheaval and crisis, Stockhausen wrote a set of texts, Aus Den Sieben Tagen, which are essentially verbal inst…
Stimmung – Pariser Version 1968 In Zwei Aufnahmen Von 1969 Und 1982
*2022 Stock. Includes 124-page booklet in German and English.* “Stimmung” was a commission from the City of Cologne, for an ensemble at the Rheinische Musikschule; Collegium Vocale Köln. It was written early 1968, in February and March, in a house on Long Island Sound in Madison, Connecticut, where Stockhausen and his wife Mary Bauermeister and their children lived a couple of months. This commission for a vocal work took on a completely new direction when Stockhausen – out of consideration for …
Gruppen / Carré
*2022 Stock. Includes 32-page booklet in German and English.* On volume no. 5 in the ongoing Stockhausen Edition we meet large-scale orchestral works for the first time in the series. The first piece on this CD originates in a commission that Stockhausen received from the WDR, but nobody – perhaps not even Stockhausen – could foresee the kind of music that would eventually come out of this commission. The end result was no less than revolutionary, in its totally new concept of music moving in sp…
Kontra-Punkte / Zeitmaße / Stop / Adieu
*2022 Stock.* The best, most efficient way to hear Stockhausen's works is through his official record label and publishing house. The Stockhausen Edition CDs are meticulously assembled with often voluminous booklets in English and German, filled with sketches and other documentary artifacts. Almost all of the recordings originally released on Deutsche Grammophon, Wergo, Nonesuch and other labels were reacquired by Stockhausen, and then remastered and repackaged under the Stockhausen Edition cata…
Formel / Schlagtrio / Spiel / Punkte
Four revolutionary orchestral works from 1951-52 showcase Stockhausen's bold transition to large ensemble writing. Featuring Formel, innovative Schlagtrio, theatrical Spiel, and the composer-conducted Punkte, this collection captures his pioneering experiments with orchestral pointillism and percussive techniques.
Chöre Für Doris - Choral - Drei Lieder - Sonatine - Kreuzspiel
Karlheinz Stockhausen's pivotal 1950-51 works reveal his transition from traditional forms to revolutionary serialism. Featuring Chöre für Doris, Drei Lieder, Sonatine, and groundbreaking Kreuzspiel, this collection captures the composer's systematic deconstruction of harmonic language while pioneering new approaches to musical time and space.
Música Azul
*Limited edition of 150 copies.* Música Azul is a gulfstream of melodies originally written for Spencer Clark’s Avatar Blue exposition at Het Bos in Antwerp, march 2019. I got the original melody lines from a photoshop mock-up in which Spencer showed his ideas for the expo. I then performed the piece - partly improvised - on the opening night as to activate the several artworks that were displayed in the installation. Afterwards I edited and reworked the composition for optimal home listening.
Riding Fences
*Limited edition of 300 copies.* Matthew Sage’s (Cached Media, Fuubutsushi) and Lieven Martens (Edições CN, Dolphins Into The Future) make a Western album together. Sage: “I have always found the idea of whatever "Western" means in America to be very elusive. It feels like a fantasy that we keep trying to relive by retelling exaggerated stories. An echo of an echo of an echo...” Martens: “In Belgium, "Western" entered the minds through movies, television series, theme parks, magazines. (…) the o…
Hibiki Hana-Ma / Mycenae Alpha / Polytope De Cluny
*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…
Diamanda Galás
Long out of print, Diamanda Galás' incendiary 1984-released second album is available once more, remastered by Brooklyn's Heba Kadry
Monochromes
*In process of stocking* “Tolimieri makes a universe of micro-nuance audible, with each piece consisting of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of points of contact. Each point is just a little different from its predecessor. One by one, the points carry the music outwards, until the sound canvas is radiantly filled with the sensation of a particular touch.
The succession of Monochromes on these discs has a beautiful logic. I hear it as an attempt to “begin again”, to rediscover the pi…
drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep
Rotterdam-based composer/pianist Reinier van Houdt created six pieces from March 22 to August 22, 2020 for a monthly 'quarantine' series of the online festival AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, commissioned by Jon Abbey. Each of the six pieces on 'drift nowhere past' was recorded on the 22nd of each month (#18, #75, #128, #155, #194, #211). "I've made these pieces from what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard, or imagined, each during one specific day in the quarantine of …
La Tempesta Colorata
Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on 'La Tempesta Colorata', a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases.
Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our mo…
Ocean
*Restored and remastered from the original tapes* "My task is to allow the listener to penetrate deeper into the music. The music is wholly improvisational. It has no concept in the rational sense of the word. It’s concept is purely intuitive. It presumes The Law of Analogies: “As above so below. Man is the same as the Universe. The Universe is the same as Man.” ("Emerald Tablet” by Hermes Trismegistus"). This intuition is a kind of rephrased logic which uses many more symbols which contain not …
Trio IX / Exercises
The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new Wergo album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX …
Halleluja / Alle Vittime Senza Nome
*2022 stock* 'Halleluja, Peter Eötvös’s “stuttering oratorio”, with a text by the novelist Péter Esterházy, was first performed in 2016. It’s built around the historical figure of Notker Balbulus, Notker the Stammerer, a ninth-century Benedictine monk who was a chronicler and composer. But, Eötvös insists, “It is not so much a portrait of Notker as of the times in which we live … At first the choir represents a society that says ‘hallelujah’ to everything: they have to be satisfied with everythi…
Works For Double Bass
*2022 stock* 'Hans Werner Henze was, during his lifetime, probably the most-performed composer of western modern music, and his advanced yet sensuously traditional music remains an important presence on stages around the world today. Henze was deeply attached to Italy, where he spent a large part of his life. The roots of this album go back to a personal meeting between Henze and the Italian double bass virtuoso Daniele Roccato when Roccato was attempting to obtain Henze’s blessing for a theater…
Patterns In A Chromatic Field
'Morton Feldman has proved one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. Yet he remains one of its most enigmatic, and his late works retain an aura of mystery steeped with the grandeur, anxiety and quietly changing colour he adored in abstract expressionist painting and, latterly, Anatolian rug design. Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) is perhaps the most rhythmically active of these famously long, static pieces, which showed his increasing preoccupation with matters of form, scale a…
Suite 8 & 11 per pianoforte
Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces…