Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany
“Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany, though both consisting mostly of quite short musical items, have as a whole different origins and different shapes. Keyboard Miscellany is an ongoing collection, a place to deposit occasional pieces which seem to have no place else to go. The earliest is “Variation on Morton Feldman’s Piano Piece 1952” (1988). The piece came about when I was asked to contribute an analysis of a Feldman piece to a collection of essays on Feldman’s music. To do this I tri…
Piano Sonatas & String Quartets 1
The first volume in a projected series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets — there are six of each — on Mode performed by the superb JACK Quartet and Stephen Clarke (piano). In the 1970s, Horatiu Radulescu (1942 - 2008) began exploring and composing begun composing what he called “plasmatic music,” in which sound was conceived as an “endless ocean of vibrations,” as opposed to the traditional way in which music treats sound as a fabric of discrete scale steps. His mu…
Soweto Stomp
Malcolm Goldstein, violin & direction. The Ratchet Orchestra. Composer/performer Malcolm Goldstein (b.1936) has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s. He received an M.A. in music composition from Columbia University in 1960, having studied with Otto Luening. In the 1960s in New York City, he was a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble. His 'Soundings' improvisations have received international acclaim for having reinvent…
Gather & Release
2016 release (RARE) ** Edition of 200 in printed cardstock sleeve with needle and thread stitched through cover packaged in a poly sleeve with sticker attached. "Gather & Release is the result of years worth of composer Sarah Hennies' exploration of the vibraphone in synthesis with her experiences of identity, obsession, anxiety, tension, grief, and loss. Over the course of an hour, Hennies entangles highly focused percussion playing with field recordings, sine waves, signifiers from her persona…
Lunch music
Lunch Music by composer Yannis Kyriakides is a set of pieces for voices, percussion and live electronics, inspired by the 1959 book Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. On this recording the virtuosity of percussionists Slagwerk Den Haag (recently heard on the recording of Michael Gordon's Timber) and contemporary vocal specialists of Silbersee are embedded in a rich sonic environment of electronics, modulated voices, grinding pulses and hallucinatory noises.The concept of the music revolves aro…
Die Form - Hurt
This Die Form side-project was recorded in a few days in 1984 and remains the only trace of their material recorded under the name Hurt, initially released on the Bain Total label during the same period as Some Experiences With Shock. This release brings together all the tracks from the cassette, as well as other titles from Die Form from this period. It is a kind of snapshot, close to the tear and chaos, where the machines and the out-of-control guitars are used as a support for the cry to fina…
MRI
Room40 continues the publication of a series of editions from American guitarist and composer Norman Westberg with a remastered and expanded edition of the previously self-released MRI. Best known for his work with the seminal outfit Swans, Westberg's output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City's music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema of Transgression…
Fissures / klisi
Lituus is from Chicago, IL; less is known of Black William. Somehow, on this split of hypnotically minimal synth pieces, that seems appropriate. Black William’s side takes a simple repeated figure and expands it (by hand) into an expansive buzzing drone. Lituus likewise programs a sequence that remains in constant change throughout the piece’s duration. Both sides combine programmed sequences with planned change, but also include a certain level of machine/human interaction. Certain parameters a…
Birds and Water, 4
The third entry in Ben Owen‘s Birds and Water series of recordings. As with Birds and Water, 1 (NTR018), these two sidelong electronic drones reflect Owen’s typically rigorous compositional choices. They display remarkably disparate, rich textures and are extremely immersive, especially when played loud and/or on headphones. Owen once again displays an ability to invite multiple levels of reaction to deceptively complex timbres, ranging from meditative to oppressive.
“The third release of record…
The case Against
Big master of tape manipulation, Howard Stelzer builds a few pieces around a feeling of sound deterioration and some falling aprt landscapes.
Howard Stelzer (b. 1974, New York) is a composer of electro-acoustic music. Beginning in 1991 while still a high school student in Boca Raton, Florida, Stelzer has always based his music around cassette tapes. Almost all of his sounds are generated by, processed by, recorded onto and played back out of cassettes and consumer-grade tape players. He ran the…
Mellow My Mind, a Sloow Tapes discography
Chronicling the first 10 years of Sloow Tapes, Mellow My Mind gives an overview of all the tapes, broadsides, lp’s and booklets published so far. From Keijo’s desolate avant/acid folk moves to Fursaxa’s spiked organ drones with a short detour by way of Ira Cohen’s Akashic Records. Fully annotated with detailed information about the tapes, promo texts, reviews and a few texts written especially for this publication by Bart De Paepe, Matthew Parry and Louise Landes Levi.
Um Piano Nas Barricadas
Since his first release (2006's Crepúsculo), pianist and composer Tiago Sousa has been consistently developing his very own aesthetic; through his relatively large body of work, one can identify an artist on the search for his own expression and identity. Um Piano nas Barricadas ("A Piano in the Barricades") follows three largely successful endeavors, all centered on the piano: Insónia (2009), Walden Pond's Monk (2011), and Samsara (2013). In the time between those works and Um Piano nas Barrica…
Looking Around
Christian Wolff, prepared piano, whistles, stones. Michael Pisaro, electric guitar, harmonica, stones. Recorded in 2014. Chistian Wolff (1934), American composer of avant-garde music. Michael Pisaro (1961), guitarist andcomposer, member of Wandelweiser. The album was mastered by Joe Panzner and designed by Yuko Zama
Earnest Rubbish
After a solo on Kye, the Australian writer Matthew Revert comes back with the American sound artist Vanessa Rossetto. Together they mostly work with field recordings, editing and mixing them in a narrative form, adding some texts and voices. Whereby two of the cutest cabbages in the cot create a soup unlike any other.
Astral Colonels: Good Times In The End Times
Anthony Pateras: doepfer A-100, harpsichord, pipe organ, prepared piano. Valerio Tricoli: Revox B77, voice. A billion perspectives on the same instrumental explosion. Approaching their electro-acoustic arsenal as a shimmering diamond refracting omni-directional compositional potential, Astral Colonels (Anthony Pateras & Valerio Tricoli) have worked over 7 years to transform pianos, organs, harpsichords, tape machines and synthesizers into an expansive sonic otherworld.Known for his work as produ…
Switch on a Dime
Robin Fox, electronics. Erik Griswold, prepared piano. Anthony Pateras, prepared piano. Music for two prepared pianos and electronics without precedent. Employing stochastic improvisations, live analogue processing, feedback experiments, atmospheric tape composition, ultra-physical episodic structures, all developed laboratory style over a month and recorded at its peak performance, this is a rare gem of live electro-acoustic instrumental music that defies the typical expectations of the given r…
More Circles
Restocked. In the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was a lot happening on the German "post Krautrock underground" that few people knew about, lots of independent artists doing their own thing, either via small labels or doing it themselves. Circles were one of these bands. Based on the Frankfurt suburbs, they consisted of the multi-instrumental duo of Dierk Leitert (synthesizer, sequencer, drums, bass, guitar, voice, saxophone, flute) and Mike Bohrmann (guitars, bass, synthesizer) plus a f…
Abendland. Zweites Stundenbuch
The new work by Gianfranco Pernaiachi is based on a re- working/re-thinking of a previous piano score: Abendland. This new work, passing thru a series of "actions" and further writings, became a completely different piece. Most important it's became an "open form" piece, expected to be interpretated by different people in different ways and, more important, with different artistic means. This edition contains 5 possible "interpretations": two musical ones, a piano verision by Pernaiachi himself …
Tie the stone of the wheel
Fascinating combination of two uncompromising saxophonists. Seymour Wright grew up listening to Evan Parker's radical reshaping of the saxophone and both develops and deconstructs it in his own playing. Together, the two interrupt and augment each other incessantly, creating tight spirals of difference and similarity that crackle with ideas and energy. Evan Parker : soprano and tenor saxophones. Seymour Wright : alto saxophone.Recorded by Sebastian Lexer on 5 October 2014 at the Kernel Brewery, …
Kore
'Kore' is a natural advancement of Reinhold Friedl's earlier composition 'Xenakis [a]live!' (released 2007 on Asphodel) - a homage to the French-Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. The piece is conceived for nine amplified instruments demonstrating Zeitkratzer well established tradition of instrumental amplification (e.g. the early collaborations with Zbigniew Karkowski or Merzbow and more recently with William Bennett of Whitehouse) where playing amplified does not only mean making things louder, it…