Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 6
The sixth and final volume in Wergo's acclaimed series of recordings, Earle Brown - A Life in Music completes the label's reissue of the eighteen LPs of Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series, recorded between 1960 and 1973. The first disc in the set contains works by John Cage and Christian Wolff from the early 1960s. Disc two presents violinist Paul Zukofsky accompanied by pianist Gilbert Kalish in works by Crumb, Yun, Wuorinen and Cage. The final disc contains works by South Americ…
Lejaren Hiller: A Total Matrix of Possibilities
Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) was a musically eclectic composer, often combining several different types of techniques in the same piece. In the mid-sixties, he asserted that his "objective in composing music by means of computer programming is not the immediate realization of an aesthetic unity, but the providing and evaluating of techniques whereby this goal can eventually be realized." In this sense Hiller was a forward-looking composer, in that each piece was an experiment that lead towa…
Transparent Winter
Painting Petals On Planet Ghost is the project formed in 2004 by the brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio, better known as My Cat Is An Alien, along with Ramona Ponzini, after years of synergistic interaction. The idea behind the project is to combine the most lyrical and melodic MCIAA sounds with the peculiar research carried on by Ramona and focused on the use of ancient Japanese poetry as a privileged source of texts to be set to music. PPOPG is therefore a project that reflects an escape to …
Homunculus
Debut disc from the new collaborative project between Nathan Bowles (Black Twig Pickers/Spiral Joy Band) and Lisa Cameron (Venison Whirled). A real odd one this, lots of rattling and scraping of percussive objects creating 3 tracks of abstract improvised surreal sonic explorations. The sound is matched by what I can only describe as the weirdest sleeves I have every had the joy of releasing (and we've had some weird ones), but this one is far out, the guy at my local print shop looked baffled wh…
E (and sometimes why)
If, Bwana is always Al Margolis. Trio Scordatura is Elisabeth Smalt, viola d'amore; Alfrun Schmid, voice; Bob Gilmore, keyboard/laptop. The new 2 cd magnum opus by If, Bwana (Al Margolis) has been almost 3 years in the making. It is the first time he has composed works (usually with prerecorded sounds) specifically for another ensemble. Gilmore's Girls, Ringing (Ano)the(r) Bell, and Diapason, maybe were specifically written for Trio Scordatura. Cicada 4AA was the first piece of If, Bwana's…
In the Library of Dreams
'I was going to write about how this is an absolutely beautiful and disturbing record, but I think quoting from the liner notes of James Pritchett really does sum it up. 'Frances White invites us to take a walk through her Resonant Landscape. Where are we going? We are walking through the woods, marshes, and streams of New Jersey. She points out the birds and frogs that make their home there, the water that flows through it and the wind that shakes the trees. But then we turn and there is…
Stroke by stroke
2011 release ** All the recordings were made at home in Athens between June 2010 and April 2011. No electronic effects, overdubbing or processing used. Ambient noise from several parallel events taking place in Greece at the time of recording has deliberately not been removed. "On Stroke by Stroke, the windows in Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga’s house are thrown open; you can hear the streets of Athens enlaced in her apothegmatic pieces for a radically prepared and refashioned zither. Knowing this…
EARR plays a Snare is a Bell
a Snare is a Bell is a solo piece for snare drum, voice and the room in which it is played.Inspired by some close encounters I had with African shamanic/trance musicians and my personal experiences with meditation and music, it also relates to a known-to-many-of-us acoustical wonder of sitting on the toilet and picking up the tone of that little room (often by accident while coughing or talking out loud to oneself) and enjoying to sing that tone and let the toilet become filled with an eno…
Anyway Your Children Will Deny It
After excellent reviews and endless touring all over the world, supporting bands like Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu and Sic Alps, the Italian weirdos Father Murphy are back with a brand new album titled “Anyway your children will deny it”. It is the latest, boldest installation of an ongoing series of albums investigating the band’s favorite themes: life, death, love, religion and even more death. For this album, the Italian trio comprised of Reverend Freddie (vocals, guitar), Chiara Lee (vocals, keyboards,…
On Procedural Grounds
In his compositions, composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann seeks to integrate rigor and internal logic with raw immediacy while fully engaging his fellow performers as not simply dutiful interpreters, but creatively invested collaborators. Aesthetically, the results evoke much from European modernism, but realized via idiosyncratic modular forms and process-oriented strategies equally indebted to the New York School and the jazz avant-garde. On Procedural Grounds (2010) is a half-hour work conceived…
Outside The Great Drought
NY-based multi-instrumentalist Colby Nathan delivers a debut that contains a jumpy and highly neurotic form of outsiderpop combining bebopdrenched rants and surrealistic torchsongs with lush arrangements that constantly test the limits of self-control and good reason. “Outside, The Great Drought” offers baroque exuberance and teenage angst through sixties inspired craftsmanship that keeps spiraling out of this worldly realm. Think Jonathan Richman, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
For Pau Torres
Catalan musician Ferran Fages, known for his guitar work as much as his work with turntables and electronics, delivers here a striking album of evocative, nocturnal electric guitar explorations. Bracketed by two intricate pieces of feedback, the centerpiece of this work maps out a carefully constructed arc of a story, bringing this album closer to that often misunderstood soundtrack-for-a-movie-yet-to-be-filmed genre. Ferran Fages: electric guitar and walkie-talkie. Composed, recorded and mixed …
Magazine
while, during and after showing the video installation "Gargles from Ipanema" during the exhibition "Contour 2011" at Nekkerspoel Station in Mechelen, Belgium, a ton of hate-mail, lettres of complain and negative fleshbook-, twitter- and blog comments arrose from the smelly armpit of Belgium, people have spit on the TV screens and even cut the electricity out. therefore NMBS decided to remove the installation 3 days before the groupexhibtion closed down.the installation showed an older woman dan…
Money Band
Collection gathers pre-Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice material from James Jackson Toth's Golden Calves project. Originally released in 1996; limited to 1000 copies. "It was really all about The Godz, Jandek, The Shadow Ring, Strapping Fieldhands, Swell Maps and Tower Recordings. Beyond these, I had only heard the 'classic' and most available free jazz, krautrock and noise albums. I was a long way from, say, the second Comus album or Charles Gayle. But this music changed my life. It was a re…
Symphony No. 3: Siddhartha Gautama O El Poder De La Nada
When psycho-spatial composer Nelson Gastaldi passed away in 2009 at the age of 77, he left behind a unique musical legacy that is only now beginning to be unveiled. A self-described “musical nihilist with noble and mystic origins” (as well as an accomplished visual artist), Gastaldi supported himself and his family with a job at an electric company in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while creating an astonishing body of work that went virtually unheard during his lifetime. Synthesizing his wide-ranging…
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 3
Wergo presents the third volume of the Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series. Recorded between 1960 and 1973, the original LPs from which these CDs were taken have long been collector's items. These rare and historically important recordings of international avantgarde music have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The series presents the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that fl ourished in Europe, the United States, Latin …
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 1
Featuring The Manhattan Percussion Ensemble, John Cage (conductor), Paul Price (conductor), Christoph Caskel (percussion), David Tudor (piano), Aloys Kontarsky (piano), Bernhard Kontarsky (celesta), MEV (Ala Bryant, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum & Ivan Vandor), AMM (Cornelius Cardew, Lou Gare, Christopher Hobbs, Eddie Prevost & Keith Rowe). "Wergo's Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series focuses on the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that flou…
El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai
Nettle is a band project led by DJ Rupture. For this album, Nettle imagined a remake of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining set in a luxury hotel in Dubai, U.A.E. El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai is their soundtrack for that nonexistent film.Cello, violin, guembri, guitar, and voice combine with digital processing to create a complex soundworld whose acoustic and electronic elements are in intimate dialog. Produced by arranged by Rupture, El Resplandor offers vivid, haunting pieces that draw on the…
'Waves breaking on rocks
Peter Garland (b. 1952) studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney at Cal Arts and had long student-mentor friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles and Dane Rudhyar. Like Harrison, Garland has forged his own musical vocabulary as a kind of new indigenous music, celebrating pan-cultural experience and vision, and unafraid to suggest that music can still give us a glimpse of that which is sacred. Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us) (2003) is a suite of elegies that was…
Dolmen Music
Meredith Monk and her vocal troupe cut a line between experimental theatre and music, marking a passage through the Ancient Greek tragedy, the opera, world-music, the archaic ritual and the mystical chant. It started with "Gotham Lullaby", presenting a contralto over a desolate and stark piano sonata. Then "Travelling" set a feverish gypsy dance, a wild ritual stirring the primeval forces at play. The sonata returned in "The Tale", as the backbone to an offbeat pantomime/ theatrical performance.…