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…
dialogues with environments
2013 releae **
"Three works for solo piano in a kind of homage to Cage's "4'33"", insofar as the room in which the recordings took place is accorded coequal prominence, at least as the stated intention of Lee. So one hears various rustles, coughs and whatnot while the beginning of the last track, "Piano Solo No. 5" (2011) sounds as though recorded in close proximity to a number of aging fluorescent bulbs. More to the point, the piano sound is noticeably different in the three spaces. The music i…
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 …
11 Microexercises
2013 release **
"11 Micro-Exercises were invented by Christian Wolff in response to a commission from the Miniaturist Ensemble. For Wandelweiser Editions, other miniaturists perform these eleven pieces (plus two bonus pieces): Beat Keller and Reza Khot. Keller and Khot are two electric guitarists who pierce the ivory (sometimes tear it) and respect the principle of a musical art free from preconceptions. Nine seconds, twenty-two, one minute and thirteen, or eleven minutes and forty-seven… The le…
drei, 1-21
2013 release **
From the early 2000s, Stefan Thut began a series of scores named according to the number of performers, somewhat like Cage's later works. Ranging from one performer to seven, including the more indeterminate "some" and "many," each score is very open, completely undefined, with a few written indications (limited mainly to volume restrictions), plus a kind of guiding thread to follow (composed of letters, lines, etc.) during the performance, without any indication of duration, for…
Urs Peter Schneider . Klavier
2014 release **
"Peter Streiff’s music moves in historical webs, encompassing the connected worlds of allusion and individuality in a language that is at once direct and cryptic. This new disc of his piano music, performed by fellow composer Urs Peter Schneider, is a microcosm of Streiff’s creative trajectory. For ease of comprehension, I will use English versions of composition titles in this review. “Of Magic” (1970), the earliest material represented here, has a fair amount in common with the…
Kompositionen 1973-1986
2014 release **
"The structure of this 2-disc set is durationally symmetrical, four pieces lasting (more or less) 8, 60, 60 and 8 minutes. I've no idea how representative this sample is of Schneider's work (I think it's my first experience of it) but there seems to be at least something of a common thread int he way he uses quasi-repetition of forms (not in a minimalist sense) that, over time, result in something larger than the individual elements. "Zeitgehöft" (the title of a collection of poe…
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…