Piano Sonatas & String Quartets 1
Limited edition of 500 numbered copies. The LP was mastered from the 96khz/24-bit files. Lacquers were cut by vinyl veteran Scott Hull at Masterdisk in New York. The LP is pressed by RTI in California, one of the most highly regarded pressing plants in the USA. All of this to insure the best sounding, highest quality LP. After all, why make an LP if it doesn’t sound great and have something special to offer ?
It is packaged with a 4-page insert of liner notes by the late Bob Gilmore and a score …
Dissociative Counterpoint Disorder
Andrzej Chłopecki, the late critic and animator of the music scene, wrote extensively about Szymański's music as well as supporting the composer by means of his longtime role with the Warsaw Autumn festival. Chłopecki puts things thus: "the formal structure is beautiful while stylistic expression is calculated: for Szymański's music is a continual game." He then offers precedents in Johannes Ockeghem and Anton Webern, deducing that Szymański's "guiding principles would be speculation and con…
Umbrae
2016 release ** The four works on this CD, ranging in date from 2004 to 2014, form an integral part of Andrzej Kwiecinski’s creative development and at the same time demonstrate his particular affinity with music for strings. Umbrae (2004) for string quintet. Mural (2008-10) for string quintet. Luci nella noote V (2014) for four string quartet. Contregambilles (2014) for string quartet. After studying composition, musicology and Baroque singing (countertenor) in Warsaw, Kwiecinski moved in 2005 …
Pas de Deux
We are in 1985, a hectic year for the emerging independent record label Auxilio de Cientos. The company ‘offices’ are in full performance. There are several projects going on, and the first one at international level is no less than a compilation which meets up electronic music groups formed by a couple, a very common tendency these days. A nearly ‘conceptual’ Project in which electronic groups from such distant countries as USA or Germany take part; however, they have a common denomi…
Relative Calm
Jon Gibson (b. 1940) is one of the less frequently mentioned pioneering composers of minimal music and is probably best known as a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Gibson also holds the unique distinction of having performed with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young (as a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music), in addition to Glass, the four composers widely regarded as the founding fathers of minimal music. Gibson also has a track record of composing for modern and …
Drumming
Steve Reich’s Drumming , more than forty years after its composition, stands as a watershed document of modern music. In its ambitious scope, intellectual rigor, and artistic seriousness, this piece, along with Terry Riley’s In C and Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, went a long way toward establishing minimalism’s quickly expanding influence in the early 1970s.Most of Steve Reich’s early music is focused on phase patterns, in which a fixed rhythmic pattern is layered and moved in and out of…
Phases
Goodness me this is a little bit special - a dangerously low priced boxed set of all the major work of one of the 20th century's most important composers Steve Reich. Containing five full cds and a booklet (with loads of useful info to read while you're listening) this has everything a Reich beginner could possibly need: 'Music for 18 Musicians' (probably Reich's greatest achievement and spanning the entire first disc), 'Different Trains', 'Tehllim', 'Eight Lines', the Counterpoint series…
The ECM Recording
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…
Dirt Road
Receiving the Approaching Memory, composed in 2011 for Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop, is among Bryn Harrison’s most celebrated works - an extended meditation on memory, recognition, and the evolving experience of musical time. The piece unfolds in five substantial sections, each built around networks of repetitive figures that spiral and shimmer, gradually reducing the pitch material from full chromaticism to only two common notes by the end. Rather than simply repeating, Harrison’s patterns m…
Dirt Road
Dirt Road stands as a milestone in Linda Catlin Smith's catalogue - a single work expanding over an hour, composed in 2005 and commissioned for dance. Performed by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Simon Limbrick (percussion), the piece moves through fifteen loosely connected movements, each open to interpretation and marked by Smith’s trademark transparency. The violin floats above sparse percussion gestures - wood, metal, vibraphone, and bowls - sometimes in suspended dialogue, sometimes drifting acr…
Volume
Illogical Harmonies is the collaborative project of Berlin residents Johnny Chang (violin) and Mike Majkowski (double bass). Their album Volume presents fifty-four minutes of highly focused, acoustic improvisation - five tracks, each marked by an almost ritual commitment to duration, a fascination with harmonic overlap, and an ongoing search for balance between individual and ensemble sound. Eschewing quick changes or dramatic gesture, Chang and Majkowski operate in a zone of gradual development…
Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions
In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…
Crash
Crash was Robert Ashley's last opera. It premiered at the Whitney Biennial weeks after his death in 2014, and presented again in 2015 at Roulette, where this recording was made. Featuring the original cast: Gelsey Bell, Amirtha Kidambi, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, and Aliza Simons. Music Director: Tom Hamilton. "What I have appreciated most about previous reconceptions of Ashley's operas was the extent to which newcomers found fresh possibilities. Already in Crash, broadened horizons…
A Nonesuch Retrospective
Nonesuch Records released Henryk Górecki: A Nonesuch Retrospective, a seven-disc box set containing all Nonesuch recordings of Górecki works—Lerchenmusik; Symphony No. 3; String Quartets Nos. 1, 2, and 3; Miserere; Kleines Requiem für eine Polka; Harpsichord Concerto; and Good Night—as well as the first recording of the late composer's final work, Symphony No. 4, Tansman Episodes, on January 22, 2016. The recording of Symphony No. 4, available both in the box and individually, was made during th…
Vokal / Instrumental
2013 release **
"Sometimes, music reaches my desk which I genuinely feel is beyond my ken to write about--I simply don't have the necessary tools. This wonderful disc, in large part, is one such so I'll pretty much stick to just giving my impressions and make no real attempt to put the music into context. I do feel confident in saying that, though I haven't heard everything released from Wandelweiser, the music herein will pretty definitely not coincide with your impression of the label, and I …
songs and piano pieces
2014 release **
"Beethoven’s fifth symphony begins with that now-iconic but aphoristic “short-short-short-long” musical motive about which so much has beenwritten and said, a radical statement for string melody without harmonic accompaniment. On his 2008 composition “Song 2,” for bass flute, Wandelweiser composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos essentializes the very concept of a similarly constructed four-note phrase, presenting each gesture in isolation, long silences allowing for listener recont…
Nun
Lachenmann seems to continue nurturing the modernist aesthetic,perhaps that it had passed/eclipsed the German experience, something Habermas has said, and that we do live in an age of new opacity, or complaisance (Undurchsichtlichkeit). It is fascinating still to contemplate the state of music Now,(Nun) from this fragile state,a broken timbre "zerbrechlichen klang", one where the creator/composer needs to begin again and renew timbre for the future,find new contexts for works or simply th…
24 petits preludes pour la guitare
2013 release **
"True, there are 24 pieces contained on this disc, which range in duration from 2:00 to 3:45, but in part due to the large amount of silence in which the single notes are swathed and also because the composition are "of a piece", the recording reads almost as a continuous work. The preludes seem to consist of sets of two to five notes, generally, perhaps always, in a rising pattern and very often diminishing as they appear, purely struck, with incredible gentleness, so much so th…
Hildegard von Bingen : John Cage
2012 release **
"Combining the deep voice of Hildegard von Bingen and the inner song of John Cage (or vice versa)—what a wonderful idea, isn't it? And it's Irene Kurka herself who seems to have come up with it. She performs Hildegard nine times and gives her version of Sonnekus² (in nine parts, which Satie's Je te veux inspired Cage to use). She blends, finally, the eighteen pieces already sung. She merges attachment to faith and detachment from all things, Latin and the elevation it encourages …
keine fernen mehr
2010 release **
"Two discs, 17 tracks per disc, just whistling, never remotely pyrotechnic, always with substantial breath in the tone, emerging from the very audible hum of the room, subsiding back into it. Slow, hints of melody but, fundamentally, the kind of things you'd whistle to yourself when deeply thinking of matters, perhaps not even realizing you're whistling. It's so personal, in a way, yet you don't (at least I don't) have any uncomfortable feeling of eavesdropping. Beuger is a fluti…