★Kairos
musique noire
Julia Purgina’s works tell musical stories. Abstract stories, which usually initiate her working process. It is her goal “to write works that are clearly located in the present through their musical language and by speaking of the present, but which both touch people in their innermost being and force them to reflect. In a way that would be ultimately timeless,” said the composer in an interview for the Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung. Through the musical description of mysterious characters, clouds …
Works for Amplified Piano(s)
With this album, Yoshiko Shimizu presents a second outstanding recording of works for amplified piano(s) by American composer George Crumb, being the only pianist who has created ‘solo’ realizations of his compositions Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), Zeitgeist and Otherworldly Resonances. George Crumb praised her superb 2018 Kairos release (0015029KAI), declaring, “I consider her to be one of my very finest interpreters. Bravissima!”
Propagation of Uncertainty
"Olivier Messiaen once said that all you need to make music is a note and silence. For the composer Arash Yazdani, born in 1985 and raised in Isfahan, Iran (and now based in Tallinn, Estonia), a slightly adapted adage applies: All you need to make music is two frequencies – though Yazdani has a clear preference for notes extremely close in pitch. His music is full of tightly coiled beatings, both stationary and set in motion. These beatings function like black holes in his works, drawing other s…
A Thing Made Whole
In music, we don't tend to talk about things. We're too concerned about the meaning of the story, about the dynamics of the performance, the reception, the syntax, the gesture, the movement; we're too concerned about how a sound got here, where it came from, how it was made, where it's going and why. We pretend that music is a language. Greenwald asks us to get busy with things. About a minute's worth of material becomes a cycle of seven works, performed in full for the first time on this album …
Little Jimmy
e piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place.
The Expanded Body
This CD by Alessandro Perini combines electronic sound manipulation with the creation of electromechanical and electroacoustic instruments and a reflection on sound environment, tending toward the exploration of unusual compositional solution. In short, it is experimental music and as such, it deserves to be listened to and commented upon. A few words about the composer. Alessandro Perini is a young musician: he studied composition (with Luca Francesconi and Ivan Fedele among others), electroni…
L'Afrique Et L'Asie D'Après Tiepolo
Inspired by frescos by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted in the residence of Würzburg, again two so rich universes of intoxicating sonorities. Let us quote the composer: “Nothing is more inclined to suggest space than color, which becomes the true mean of the musician”. Difficult to imagine two pieces as dissimilar as this Africa and this Asia. Tiepolo's allegorical depictions of Africa and Asia inspired the French composer Hugues Dufourt (*1943) to write two of his most powerful ensemble works.…
Works for Cello and Piano
With their 2018–2019 Isang Yun Recording Project, ItalianCellist Luigi Piovano and Pianist Aldo Orvieto pay homageto the late Korean composer and the tragic course of his life. “The events that marked Isang Yun’s life emblematically show the miserable short-sightedness of the human being, unable to act authentically and with love towards others, in striving for a common good and reach a common spiritual elevation. When confronted with the exceptional musical depth and the dramatic power of Isang…
Watercolors and Psychograms
"In the works of Martón Illés from the early 2000s, physically perceptible energy, gestural force, and visual conceptions of the sonic are already present. After 2010 the composer drew further implications from these for his work: since then, his musical thinking has no longer been based on fixed pitches, but rather on sounds – either as acoustic manifestations of imagined lines or as gestures modeled on the physical. The way he actually implements this by means of instruments is impressively de…
Painted Lights
Painted Lights, a new album of compositions by Kui Dong is now available on Kairos Music. The record, which features performances by Juliet Petrus, Deirdre Brenner, Third Coast Percussion, Arditti Quartet, Koehne Quartett, Volti, Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Robert Geary, and Raphael Schlüsselberg, comprises four pieces of chamber and choral music written by Dong between 2009 and 2017. California Shoreline (2017) for soprano, string quartet and prepared piano opens the album, followed by …
Things That Didn’t Work the First Time
With each composition, Annesley Black embarks courageously on a new experiment with an open future; while at the beginning of the compositional process the material can still mean many things, it gradually ceases to do so. And at some point, all ambiguities are cleared up: the piece stands. The paths that have led to this point are ultimately paradoxical: they are “immensely labyrinthine and completely logical at the same time” (Black). In their own unique way, the pieces gathered on this CD pre…
Ultima Thule
One could take Wolfram Schurig's Ultima Thule for five ensembles, a work whose mere instrumentation in-vokes that utopian place which, according to the composer, should automatically be the goal of any authentic artistic activity, as a motto for Wolfram Schurig‘s entire compositional œuvre. In ancient Greece, the name Thule referred to the northern-most part of the world, whose accessibility and actual existence, however, remained uncertain. Since Virgil, th…
Works for Ensemble
Wolfram Schurig's musical career began with instrumental playing. After basic training on the recorder, his concert studies with Kees Boeke, one of the protagonists of historically informed performance practice, left their mark on him. This experience plays an important role in Schurig's working method as a composer: "You simply write music differently when you are on stage yourself. You owe it to the performer to deliver something that is playable, and in which he can find himself as a co-creat…
Works for Piano
The music of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is one of in-betweens. Stylistically, Lang’s oeuvre occupies the space between a multitude of genres, ranging from contem porary composition and free improvisation to the wider realms of hip hop and DJ-culture. By virtue of Lang’s radical openness to creative conversation and collaboration, and to ideas and influences from other areas of artistic and scientific exploration, his oeuvre finds connections to the worlds of film, dance, theatre, …
General Theory Of Relativity
Wojciech Błażejczyk’s music feeds on scientific theories, internet streams and civilization waves or scrap. It sometimes looks like a nerd’s diary. Full of different colors and fonts, notes, charts, exclamations and underlined words. This diary is the composer’s reaction to what surrounds him every day. Global news often appear together with local events, fake facts – with perceptual illusions, war strategy – with a pacifist message. All of that put in a new music idiom spiced up with a pinch of…
Mosaïque
Could you imagine music as a geyser? Erupting violently, waiting on tense standby, forever renewing itself... Or, just the contrary, as a sigh? An operatic sospiri, inhaling and exhaling, a tangible, rhythmic fluctuation... Or as walking with your eyes closed with full alertness to the sounds of unknown origin? That’s what Marcin Stańczyk’s music is like.The milestone of his career turned out to be the composition Sighs (2008–10, rev. 2012) for chamber- or symphonic orchestra. It got him the pre…
PhonoPhantomatics
Cezary Duchnowski, although perceived as a specialized composer with consciously chosen specialization, is very open to extremely versatile activity in the musical field. Apart from absolute music, he’s also keenly interested in relations between music and the word, music and theatre (or rather performance art) as well as visual arts in the wide sense. What he aims at with this kind of syncretism is a genuine interaction of various media. In his musical activity, he explores various areas of the…
Interialcell
Aleksandra Gryka is undoubtedly one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures of the young generation of Polish composers. She does not comment on her works, does not give interviews, and does not provide critics with an insight into her scores (which even causes the occasional international scandal). She is also mysterious in her music: her works are like planets with their own atmosphere and laws. The narrative is usually torn, fragmentary and always incom plete, it leaves the listener uns…
Parametrical Counterpoint
** In process of stocking ** Kairos presents Parametrical Counterpoint by José Luis Hurtado. Composer José Luis Hurtado’s music has been performed across continents by ensembles and soloists such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, JACK Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, CEPROMUSIC Ensemble, Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, Quatuor Molinari, Émile Girard -Charest, Lora Kmieliauskaite, Tony Arnold, Garth Knox, Claire Chase, Le Nouvel En…
Und Du... et al
** Und du… was composed in 1963, commissioned by the Austrian Broadcasting Co. It was supposed to be played “radiophonically,” i.e. on tape and with loudspeakers only, to reach and involve a group of listeners corresponding to the medium’s effective radius. My own involvement with the nuclear situation – the dangerousness of which against the background of Hiroshima was clear, but not nearly to the extent it is today among the broad public – prompted me to take the equally fundamental anxiety I …