★Deutsche Grammophon

The legendary DG Avantgarde vinyl series (1968-1971) is turning 55! In order to celebrate this occasion, the series is now released on 21 CDs for the first time. The Avantgarde series serves as a historical document for a time of radical change in musical thinking and the breaking of artistic boundaries. The question "What is music?" confronted many of the composers and musicians involved in the series, and the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s and 1970s was a palpable influence. Deutsche G…

"Roger and Brian Eno explore the nature of sound in their first ever duo album, Mixing Colours. The album’s eighteen soundscapes invite listeners to immerse themselves in the infinite space that lies below their surface. Coming out on Deutsche Grammophon. Mixing Colours grew over a number of years, with both artists drawing on their long experience as composers, performers and producers. The creative process began with Roger Eno playing individual pieces and recording them using a MIDI keyboard.…

Empathetic ambient siblings Roger & Brian Eno gently experiment with synaesthetic sound-colour pieces inspired by Schubert on 18 MIDI visions recorded over the last 15 years. It’s super sweet stuff, a necessary balm for current states of psychic anxiety.  “Roger and Brian Eno explore the nature of sound in their first ever duo album, Mixing Colours. The album’s eighteen soundscapes invite listeners to immerse themselves in the infinite space that lies below their surface. Coming out on Deutsche …

Manhattan in the Sixties. Every day, at the corner of 54th and Sixth, stood an imposing blind man with a druidic beard, dressed and helmeted like a Viking. Every day, he played music with home-made percussion instruments and declaimed poems. A simple eccentric or picturesque figure? No. Louis Thomas Hardin, called 'Moondog', was one of the true geniuses of his time. And even one of the geniuses of all time, prolific and visionary, capable of linking Bach, jazz and Amerindian rhythms, writing min…

Exclusive remixes from Ricardo Villalobos and Carl Craig, 23 extended minutes in total. Brilliant, epic new mixes of Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald's sleekly magnificent Recomposed.

Cornelius Cardew's "The Great Learning," is a great example of his struggles to reconcile his innate musical aesthetics and his intellectual belief that the "avant-garde" was inherently elitist. Written for a mix of musicians & non-musicians, it is a grand improvisatory work that nicely exploits the talents of whomever is performing it. Two of the seven "Paragraph's" are performed here by  The Scratch Orchestra, who give the expected first rate performance. Bedford is known to many in the rock w…

Luigi Nono began Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a wave of strength and light) as a piece for piano and orchestra in 1971, at the instigation of Maurizio Pollini. While the composition was in progress, Nono learned of the death of a young Chilean revolutionary and recast the work in his memory, with added parts for soprano soloist and tape. The resulting half hour work is clearly a lament, encompassing various expressions of grief, from stunned sorrow to anguish to the fiercest rage. As a kin…

With the passing of Gyorgy Ligeti on 12 June, 2006 at the age of 83 in Vienna following a lengthy illness, the musical world has lost a true maverick. An independent thinker, Ligeti charted a singular route in his music with the evolution of a voice that is hard to ignore. In this respect one is tempted to put him alongside figures such as Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Xenakis when considering the major shapers of late 20th century composition.

Original 1st pressing on German Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde series, that are by far the most scarce and hard to find, released in a really very small quantity and most never re-released on any format. It features an amazing work by Sylvano Bussotti and Nicolaus A.Huber: "Cinque Frammenti All'Italia" was composed in 1967/68. As opposed to the "cosmic" music, accomplished by the accumulation of musical happenings or mathematical treatment of masses, which becomes more and more common from Stoc…

Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Harlekin' ('Harlequin') for clarinet; and 'Der Kleine Harlekin' ('The Little Harlequin') for clarinet (performed here by Suzanne Stephens). Only one copy available.