This album Mere Mortals is composer-producer Floating Points’s (Sam Shepherd) first full-length ballet score. Shepherd, who is known for mesmeric live sets that often combine acoustic and electronic instruments, wrote the work in response to a commission from Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet.
Inspired by the myth of Pandora and laced with metatextual poetry, Mere Mortals was premiered at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House in January 2024, directed by Rojo, with chor…
Recomposed by Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald is an extraordinary album that combines classical music and electronic sound art in a fascinating way. The two electronic music pioneers draw on recordings of Ravel’s Boléro and Rhapsodie espagnole, as well as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, conducted by Herbert von Karajan and performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, and use them to create an original, cohesive musical work.
In doing so, Craig and von Oswald do not simply juxtapose classical and…
The album Friendship Survival Guide by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and his close friend and composer Adam Wiltzie features a number of collaborative orchestral psychedelic drone compositions.
Wiltzie, co-founder of the now-legendary drone duo Stars of the Lid, and Jóhannsson, the award-winning composer and orchestrator, shared a decade-long friendship and creative partnership, writing, performing and recording together prior to the latter’s tragic passing in 2018. Friendship Su…
Originally released in 2006, Mount A is Hildur Guðnadóttir’s debut solo album. Recorded alone with her cello and released under the pseudonym “Lost in Hildurness”, it marked the beginning of a deeply personal body of work created as a space to “hear my own thoughts”. Twenty years later, its music continues to resonate, inspiring new orchestral reinterpretations on This Will Be Us. This edition also marks the album’s first-ever release on vinyl.
* Discounted Bundle * Two three-LP boxes, released together on 2 October for Steve Reich's ninetieth birthday, covering the years 1974 to 1982 in full.
Drumming; Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ; Six Pianos is the Deutsche Grammophon set of 1974, recorded at the Polydor Studios in Hamburg that January by Steve Reich and Musicians, with Cornelius Cardew on glockenspiel in the final part. It was the first time a box set had been given to a minimalist composer. This edition has been r…
Reich's three string quartets on one record for the first time: Different Trains (1988), Triple Quartet (1998) and WTC 9/11 (2010), each setting the live quartet against tape. New readings by New York's Mivos Quartet, made with the composer's involvement.
The 1974 DG recording of Drumming by Steve Reich and Musicians, with Six Pianos and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. Remastered from the original four-track tapes for the first time, cut all-analogue at Emil Berliner Studios. Numbered 3LP box, 180g, original artwork.
Earlier this year, Deutsche Grammophon announced and delivered one of the most exciting initiatives in recent memory: a brand-new audiophile vinyl reissue series dedicated to crucial avant-garde and experimental works from its own extensive catalog. Beginning with Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II (1970), Mauricio Kagel's Acustica (1972), and Tōru Takemitsu's Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden (1980), these deluxe limited editions completely blew us away, returning…
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. Includes hi-res audio download. Among the most playful and pointed entries in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series, Mauricio Kagel's Exotica returns to vinyl - a work that turns the Western fascination with the music of elsewhere into a piece of high comedy and, beneath the laughter, a quietly devast…
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. One of the most quietly radical entries in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series - the run of albums issued between 1968 and 1971 that did more than almost any other label project to document the experimental music of its moment - returns to vinyl. Recorded in London in 1971, the Scratch Orchestra's r…
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. A reissue of one of the most singular documents in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series - a single LP that sets two radically opposed ways of working with magnetic tape against one another, both realized within months of each other at the same address: the Studio di Fonologia della RAI in Milan.
On o…
Four fantastic experimental pieces composed in 1968 for instruments and tape/electronics, including Foss' outstanding theatrical piece for percussionist-conductor, electric guitar and three other instruments capable of sustaining a sound and Hiller's superb computer-generated composition, released on DGG's legendary "Avantgarde" series.
Special discounted Bundle. Audiophile edition. Pure analogue mastering & cutting from the original master tapes. Representing three of the most essential and sought-after works within the canon of 20th Century avant-garde composition, this bundle brings together Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II, Mauricio Kagel's Acustica, and Tōru Takemitsu's Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden in a single offering. Originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon between 1970 and 1980, ou…
Composed between 1968 and 1970 and originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1972, there are arguably few works within the canon of 20th Century experimental music as beloved and sought after as the Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel’s Acustica. Created for “experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers”, comprising electroacoustic material assembled on 4-track tape in 1969 at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and acoustic material for 2 to 5 musicians, scored over roughly 200 filing-ca…
Originally issued in 1970 within the third suite of LPs comprising Deutsche Grammophon's Avant-Garde series, the French composer and electroacoustic pioneer Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II stands among the most important and groundbreaking albums issued within the canon of 20th Century avant-garde and experimental music. Containing two radically distinct works, Presque Rien No.1 (1967-1970) and Société II (1967), it doubles as a near perfect illumination of the incredible range of c…
Containing what are easily among the important and celebrated works by Tōru Takemitsu, arguably Japan's most important and celebrated 20th Century avant-garde composer, 'Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden' was originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1980. Had the Avant-Garde series not concluded nine years prior, it certainly would have been contained within its ranks. Illuminating a crucial juncture within the composer's career which not only found him fully embracing ac…
Two quartets composed respectively in 1910 and 1926 superbly performed by Lasalle Quartett and released in DGG's "Alban Berg Edition / Gallery Series" in 1986. With insert.
The magnificent group of Egisto Macchi, Ennio Morricone, Franco Evangelisti, John Heineman, Mario Bertoncini and Walter Branchi on DGG's famed "Avantgarde" contemporary/electronic music series including a rare electronic piece, released in 1969. Essential.