120 Pieces of Sound
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots. 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 the musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming me…
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…
(F)lute Songs
Four pieces for flute and voice composed between 1985-2018 by Mary Jane Leach, a pivotal part of NYC’s pioneering avant-garde community since the 1970s and an active member of the legendary DownTown Ensemble, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman’s legacy since his death in 1990. Mary Jane's vinyl debut 'Pipe Dreams' arrived last year via the Blume imprint a…
Kosmogonia
Cold Spring Records present a reissue of Krzysztof Penderecki's Kosmogonia, originally released in 1974. Unnerving, intense, bloodcurdling, sinister, dramatic -- the music of Kosmogonia features Penderecki's famous, unorthodox instrumental techniques, and some of the darkest music ever composed. Hailed by The Guardian as "Poland's greatest living composer," Krzysztof Penderecki is the maestro behind the unforgettable, disturbing music on 1980's The Shining (including "De Natura Sonoris II," feat…
Before Nightfall One
Sofa is proud to present this new collaboration with the labels own Ingar Zach together with the critically acclaimed contemporary ensemble Speak Percussion from Melbourne, Australia. Eugene Ughetti and Matthias Schack-Arnott in Speak Percussion invited Ingar Zach for the first concert in their series named Before Nightfall One. The idea behind this concert series is to experience and document the result of one single day of collaboration, culminating in a concert in a carefully chosen space in …
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…
Rimarimba Collection
** Edition of 250 screen-printed canvas carriers, with a signed and sealed Certificate of Absurdity from Robert Cox ** Freedom To Spend’s first catalog wide deep dive into an artist’s career focuses on four albums from Rimarimba, beginning with 1983’s Below The Horizon, followed by 1984’s On Dry Land, 1985’s In The Woods, and finally, the once-imagined, now-realized assembly of 1988’s Light Metabolism Number Prague. Somewhere out there around the turn of the 1980s, to the left of the post-punk c…
We, Like Salangan Swallows...: A Choral Gallery of Morton Feldma
The intense individuality of Morton Feldman's (1926?1987) art and its 'painterly' aspect have tended to push his rich output of works into a zone all of their own, surrounded by a moat of stillness. This recording attempts the reverse process -- to bring his choral works (the previously unrecorded Chorus and Instruments, Voices and Instruments 1, Voices and Instruments 2, and The Swallows of Salangan) into a 'gallery' of other choir compositions of his times. Through the interaction with works o…
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…
Electronic Music from York
On the Creel Pone short-list for easily as long as #200's William S. Fischer title, this 1973 compilation of music, all composed at York University's Electronic Music Studio during the late 60s & early 70s has been a real white whale for ages & ages, until composer Martin Wesley-Smith's personal copy landed (literally) in the lap of the core C.P. cognoscenti earlier this year. Consisting of three sides (1, 3, 5, appearing here as disc one) of music by resident composers, staff, and hangers-on at…
Darkroom
Tiny space... dimmed lights... little steps... circling... like abstract curving lines... round and round... repeat... Composition by Slobodan Kajkut. Personnel: Dejan Trkulja - clarinet; Christian Pollheimer - vibraphone; Slobodan Kajkut - sampler, programming.
Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) A Life Unfinished
Hardback cover edition, 1070 pages (!) Cornelius Cardew was a musician of genius for whom Life and Art were as one. He was a radical, both artistically and politically, becoming a tireless activist and uncompromising Marxist-Leninist. Passion and imagination governed all he did: his boldness and humanity continue to intrigue and inspire.
John Tilbury, whose close friendship with Cardew dates from their first concert together, in January 1960, has worked for many years on this biography, and brin…
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…
Turfan Fragments
Originally released in 2001 by the Dog W/A Bone label, this release features these 2 long pieces: For Samuel Beckett and The Turfan Fragments. Performed by: The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, with Petr Kotik, conductor. For Samuel Beckett and The Turfan Fragments are Morton Feldman's only chamber orchestra compositions. Both were commissions: The Turfan Fragments by the Swiss-Italian Radio Orchestra in 1980, For Samuel Beckett by the Schönberg Ensemble, Amsterdam, in 1987. Both titles are des…
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…
Two2 (2CD)
Landmark recording of John Cage's late work for two pianos, played by Mark Knoop and Philip Thomas. Uniquely for Cage's number pieces, Two2 doesn't use time brackets, so duration is open and left to the musicians' 'inner clock'. Previous recordings have lasted between 35 and 74 minutes, but this new version stretches across two CDs and lasts 128 minutes, revealing new depths and sonorities in the music. "A major achievement.”Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Es Schwindelt Mir, Es Brennt Mein Eingeweide
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.
Harmonium
Just Asked whether he would describe his music as “Sound for the sake of sound,” James Tenney (1934–2006) replied, “It’s sound for the sake of perceptual insight—some kind of perceptual revelation.” This release aptly demonstrates Tenney’s deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corpor…