★Amirani Records
Lasting Ephemerals
*2023 stock* Sparkling acoustic duo featuring a contemporary wild chamber attitude, improvising instant compositions, sound texture explorations and sudden lyrical flights. Their improvisation, that has been defined "A Gentle Vertigo", freely crosses boundaries and welcomes rich contradictions between melody and blessed chaos. Experimental flavors, multi-perspective intuitions and reciprocal listening are the extremely well balanced blend of this duo that strives for an improvisation where "thin…
Busy Butterflies
*2023 stock* "To watch two butterflies in flight is to see a complex intertwining of zigs and zags, dips and weaves, as each—seemingly erratically--rides the turbulence its wings create to carry it along. Together they trace an unchoreographed but nevertheless coherent set of variations on the line as they move with, against and through each other’s paths.
The intricate pattern of two butterflies’ interwoven flight paths stands as a fitting analogue for the nuanced complexity of Busy Butterflie…
Prossime Trascendenze
*2023 stock* Pivotal work in Mimmo’s discography this “Prossime Trascendenze” explores the intriguing relationships between composed and improvised forms, “tight corners” and collective interplay. A seamless orchestration toward a higher level of articulation that leads the listener through a textural pulsing structure where enlightened details deliver a splendid intelligibility.
Transient
"Second album for Clairvoyance, a trio that sublimates improvisation through a blessed chemistry, delivering a perfectly balanced music where elements coming from different derivations and attitudes find grace and essentiality, freshness and solidity. Narrative spots and timbral consciousness inform this classy band and make this record unmissable!!
Clairvoyance's fundamental orientation--an orientation that, collectively and individually, represents a compositional stance toward improvisation. …
Wells
"Amirani Records, the label founded and run by Milanese soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo, ends its eighteen-year run with three final releases. The last of the three, a recording of the Sestetto Internazionale, was reviewed here earlier; preceding it a duet for Mimmo and Finnish soprano and sopranino saxophonist Harri Sjöström, and a solo recording by Milanese cellist Walter Prati.
Mimmo and Sjöström are frequent collaborators, whether in the Sestetto Internazionale or as duet partners, and on W…
Due Mutabili
[…] There is something slightly daunting about the notion of an improvising sextet. Do the casual math of instrumental permutations from six soloists to one sextet, adding in duos, trios, quartets and quintets, and you have something like 55 possible combinations. Literally anything might surface, but among the least likely is the superb music achieved here by Sestetto Internazionale, music that dances between the ideal poles of inevitability and unpredictability, inviting a sense of wonder. Lis…
Cadenza Del Crepuscolo
"The meaning of "cadenza del crepuscolo" ("dusk cadenza") can be interpreted in a variety of ways. The most profound is the one corresponding with the implicitly slow flux of thoughts and reflections that emerge as we sense the day fading away, possibly in a moment of somewhat regretful oscillation between an unknown tomorrow, what we have already experienced and now miss, and the unexpressed potential of what we long for, but have not yet achieved (and perhaps never will).
The sympathetic music…
HerbstReise
"I look at this HerbstReise of ours as a sequence short but complete gaze of sound, often evocative in a narrative way, aimed at fulfilling an articulate as well as legible pattern. Though a single breath crosses them, fascinating opportunities are not alien to the syntax, the outline, and the expression of these improvisations. A clear ellipsis the dialogue proceeds delicately and consistently into, even when it thickens.
The inner timing, the layer of colour that shines through have a reflecti…
How To Get Rid Of The Darkness
*2023 stock* "Gianni Mimmo who runs Amirani Records from Italy and has performed in the KFJC Pit, here is joined by Pierfrancesco Mucari in a series of unaccompanied saxophone duets. These inventive and engaging duets bring to mind some of the duet work of Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake, if only somewhat less raucous. I also hear a soupcon of Anthony Braxton.
These duets seem to be neither fully written out but nor entirely improvised. They play sopranos and an alto, the musical range of which…
Standards (Brussels) 2006
2023 restock "Packaged in an elegant cartboard box (a decca style) which includes a 26 page booklet with three little essays (Positions for listening, Real space and dislocation, A possible anthropogony) by Italian poet and writer Erika Dagnino. Featuring Anthony Braxton on alto sax, Alessandro Giachero on piano, Antonio Borghini on double bass and Cristiano Calcagnile on drums. Recorded live November 23-26 2006 at P P Cafe in Brussels, Belgium. Although I didn't initially recognize the names of…
For Bunita Marcus (1985)
Proudly co-produced with Teriyaki records, this volume is simply Unique!
Difference Engines
*2023 stock* "This, the first CD dedicated entirely to work by composer Dario Palermo, features three substantial electroacoustic works written between 2009 and 2012. Palermo (b. 1970) has been involved with the use of new technologies in music since the early 1990s. His background includes studies with Giorgio Colombo Taccani and Giovanni Verrando and others, including Gerard Grisey, as well as in orchestral and chamber performance. His work, as typified in the three pieces presented here, is b…
Fine Tuning: The Gradisca Concert
The ubiquity of Coxhill’s sax lines are here answered, cherished, enhanced by the excellent guitar touch of Enzo Rocco. It’s a sort of subtle anarchic dance, intriguing and true.
Rocco e Rollo
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* "Gottschalk’s works and if you are looking for new-to-you works, this album would be a welcome one to the audio library. The title work of the album starts an eerie flicker of sound from hollow trills that swell to the orchestra’s entrance with a similar character and trills echoed. As the first movement continues, Parisi’s aptitude for both conventional and contemporary techniques are apparent with technical passages sounding effortless as he spans the range…
For Saxophones
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* "As a chamber music ensemble the saxophone quartet has a surprisingly long pedigree. The first work for it was written in 1857, less than twenty years after Adolphe Sax invented it, a Saxophone Quartette Club was founded in New York in 1879, and by 1896 a California Saxophone Quartet was on tour. While the modern saxophone quartet is now most likely to be associated with the jazz tradition, the standard ensemble of soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones…
CagExperience
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* "No matter how weird, how outrageous, how experimental or how avant garde musicians and composers try to be, it’s a pretty good chance dear Great-Grandfather John Cage did it first. And it’s a pretty good guess that even the most willing listeners and seasoned DJ’s may get pushed to the edge listening to some of his compositions. This makes me smile. I’ve been pushed and came back and forced myself to go farther and farther. Growth is hard. Endurance and stam…
Brutto, Ignudo
Proudly co-produced with Teriyaki records, this volume is simply Unique!