Lovely Music, Ltd.
Lovely Music (full name Lovely Music, Ltd.) is an American record label devoted to new American music. Based in New York City, the label was founded in 1978 by Mimi Johnson, an outgrowth of her nonprofit production company Performing Artservices, Inc. It is one of the most important and longest running labels focusing exclusively on new music and it is devoted to recording American experimental/avant-garde music.
Upper Air Observation
2025 stock 1992 release. Flutist Barbara Held presents works by Alvin Lucier, Nils Vigeland, and Yasunao Tone and a composition of her own. Known for her collaborations with composers, Held has beautifully chosen and performed this wide-ranging sampling of contemporary musical styles. Vara features Joseph Kubera on piano.
An Hour For Piano
**Original 1979 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** A trance music piece made up of repeating 4/4 cells in which an absolutely steady eighth-note motion predominates. Often several cells are going on simultaneously, and one cell frequently mutates into another through the addition or subtraction of a note or two. One has to step back far enough to get a perspective on the large-scale shifts in density and tonality before the impact of An Hour For P…
Fire & Ice
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Intriguingly sets the apocalyptic Robert Frost poem, with trumpeter Yousef Yancy as the ice and Garrett List as the fire. Haunting settings of vital dada poet Blaise Cendrars' incandescent lines and Sweetness, an ineffably lovely poem by Bayard Lancaster, whose alto parallels soaring synthesizer parabolas, and the riveting voice of Genie Sherman, whose sinuous, sibilant messages are those of pure…
Star Jaws
**Original 1978 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Peter Gordon and 'Blue' Gene Tyranny were long-time Lovely Music stalwarts, having contributed their talents to many a LML release: Peter Gordon has acted as producer for a few early Robert Ashley recordings; 'Blue' Gene Tyranny is Robert Ashley's go-to pianist. Gordon and Tyranny have also collaborated in Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra (aka LOLO) and on Jill Kroesen's Stop Vicious Cycles. So, it…
Distant Images
A delicate and mysterious vinyl LP release of two works for chamber ensemble in which Reymolds addresses the dualistic nature of aural perception, approaching the elusive territory between the polarized pair and the unified whole.
Settings For Spirituals / Solo
**Original 1984 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Joel Chadabe, computer/synthesizer; Irene Oliver, soprano
In Settings for Spirituals Chadabe uses a computer programmed to follow the soprano's voice in every nuance and to generate "settings" to expand the musical quality of the vocal sound. In Solo, Chadabe uses a computer-music system that determines the notes of a melody and its accompaniment chords. Chadabe performs the piece by moving his h…
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
Chris Mann And The Use
2001 release. Chris Mann, an Australian poet, writer, performer and composer relocated to New York City, brings a recording of his signature works to Lovely Music. With the participation of Christine Bard, Anthony Coleman, Christian Marclay, Jim Pugliese, Mark Stewart, and David Watson. Chris Mann's works for voice are based on complex texts, freely composed to allow a play of wit and humor. He explores the textures and gestures of Australian speech, with its rhythms and qualities of color, pitc…
Foreign Experiences
This new release from Lovely Music features Robert Ashley's famous ensemble, the "band" who interpreted his work for 20 years, from 1992 through 2012. They included Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Marghreta Cordero, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and Amy X Neuburg. This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe. Foreign Experiences i…
Chanteuse
Since the early 1970s, Jacqueline Humbert has collaborated as performer, visual artist, and designer with leading innovative artists, filmmakers, choreographers and composers worldwide. Her approach to vocal performance has influenced many composers, and the works in Chanteuse represent a new and exciting extension and reinterpretation of the "song" genre. Humbert on the release: "Chanteuse is a collection of new or previously unreleased songs, many of which were written for me by a broad range …
Two Lines
1995 release. Two legendary composer/performers, David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, join forces on Two Lines to unite composition with improvisation, "new music" with "new jazz". Starting from David Rosenboom's notated score for Two Lines and his musical computer program, these musicians have achieved, to paraphrase Rosenboom, created a composition that is immediately heard. Duets with interactive HMSL software. Includes Rosenboom's Two Lines, plus compositions in collaboration with Braxton: L…
Free Delivery
1990 release. Some of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's greatest keyboard works/performances can be found here on Free Delivery. The Nocturne With and Without Memory was commissioned by Lois Svard and has also been recorded by her for Lovely Music (LCD 3051CD, 1994). Sunrise or Sunset in Texas is from Philip Makanna's film The Crack of Dawn (1983). Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards; Timothy Buckley - accordion; Joel Ryan - computer analysis.
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is the first of four operas about the "American" consciousness. The tetralogy, including Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado and Now Eleanor's Idea, is based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. The operas share principal characters and vocal techniques (including the relationship of the voice to instrumental settings). The singers are used interchangeably as soloists and members of a chorus. The immediacy of choral respons…
Crone music
2019 repress on CD; 1990 release. Commissioned by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group from New York, for their interpretation of King Lear, Pauline Oliveros's Crone Music is a subtle and haunting electronic music endeavor. Interfacing an abundance of digital delay processors, reverb effects, and foot pedals to bend pitches from piercing to twisted, sonorous tones, with her one-of-a-kind expanded accordion, Oliveros produces rich, eerie textures. Personnel: Pauline Oliveros -solo accordio…
Music as a second language
2019 Repress. Speech melodies extracted from sources as various as language instruction recordings, hypnotists and televangelists are re-synthesized and applied to digital musical instruments, becoming eerily beautiful, "the singing of voices more ancient than language." Performed by Paul DeMarinis Hidden beneath speech's words and music's melodies I hear the singing of a voice more ancient than language. Brain's secret convulsions making muscles articulate, shaking the world with a song now lo…
Atalanta (Acts Of God) Volume II
2010 release. Three of the satellite songs from Robert Ashley's opera Atalanta (Acts of God) - each inspired or revolving around one of the main characters of the opera, Max, Willard and Bud. Atalanta (Acts of God) was written in the 1980s, begun while Ashley was still in production for the television opera, Perfect Lives.
The many hours of material were performed throughout the world in many
different configurations, but this is the first time these songs have
been available on CD. Personnel…
Sferics - Music for solo performer
'Sferics is the shortened term for atmospherics, natural radio-frequency emissions in the ionosphere, caused by electromagnetic energy radiated from nearby or distant lightning. These signals - resonant clicks and pops, called tweeks and bonks by scientists - occur in the audible range of humans and may be picked up by antennas and amplified for listening. They are best received at night, far from power lines. Occasionally, certain sferics get caught on and travel long distances along the magnet…
A Sound Map of the Danube
Annea Lockwood has been recording rivers since 1970, "not to document them, but rather for the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches."' Lovely Music, Ltd. released Annea's seminal work A Sound Map of the Hudson River in 1989. Nineteen years later, we are proud to present A Sound Map of the Danube, her largest river recording project to date. Recorded over three years and five trips to Europe, A …
Key
1995 release. Originally released in 1971. Key contains Meredith Monk's earliest compositions for voice. The songs that make up Key
were composed and performed in a three year period between 1967 and
1970, when Monk collected them into this 45-minute "invisible theater"
experience. Meredith Monk on the release: "In Key I wanted to
create a constantly shifting ambience. Each song dealt with a different
vocal character, landscape, technical concern or emotional quality. I
was trying for a vi…
Concrete
Concrete follows from Robert Ashley's preoccupation in two previous operas with the kind of speech that has not been explored in opera -- in Dust (LCD 1006CD), the speech of the homeless; in Celestial Excursions (LCD 1007CD), the speech of people living together in a home for old people. The three operas are not a "trilogy" in any sense, but they all come from this preoccupation with or fascination with special kinds of speech and special kinds of states of mind. "The characters I'm interested i…