★Neuma Records
Landscapes and Lamentations
“Music and nature have a long and illustrious history together,” writes violinist, composer, improvisor, hiker, Richard Carr. “It’s been done a zillion times, but I can’t fight it anymore. True, I spend more time than most knocking around the woods and winding up and down the trails. Over the course of six decades, I have explored the major mountain ranges of six continents. This has been long enough to witness first-hand the changes that have been so apparent not only to the naked eye but also …
Orchid Music
There is no shortage of songs about flowers, but few actually let the flowers themselves do the singing. Now, thanks to advances in genome sequencing and data mapping, we can, as it were, hand them the mic and hear their side of the story. With a little help from experimental composer and orchid whisperer, Juraj Kojš, brings their inner world to life, revealing its musical potential. You have heard the sonified data of black holes, gravitational waves, weather, and the stock market. Now make way…
Arkinetics
There are many cultures that use repetitive, percussive music to induce meditative states. In cultures as diverse as those in Asia, the Middle East, and West Africa, the drum has been used to weave entrancing patterns that move the body and mind. Drummer/composer Dan Kurfirst has been studying the drums, rhythms, and their combined effects on the body and mind. His new recording, Arkinetics, provides a fascinating encapsulation of his study of global rhythms, free improvisation, and engaging pro…
Tourmaline
*CD with 12-page booklet* Tourmaline is a semi-precious gemstone that appears in a multitude of color schemes and is found throughout the world. It is known as “the stone of reconciliation” and is believed to foster positive energy, healing, and connections with the Earth. Tourmaline also serves as a symbolic representation of the philosopher’s stone, of the alchemical tradition, believed to be capable of transforming base metals into gold, attaining divine wisdom, perfecting the human body and…
Transparent Waves
*2022 stock.* When does our experience of sound become "music"? In the tradition of John Cage and Morton Feldman, in which sounds – and silences – can just be themselves, Thomas DeLio plays with the spaces between your ears as much as the sounds he puts there. In short, be advised this album is replete with clicks, silences, and brief sound events. Stripped bare, it plays with time and space and the minimum conditions for music. It gives the term ‘experimental music’ meaning. DeLio’s approach to…
Apophany
If you were to connect seemingly unrelated things – Heavy Metal and the symphony orchestra, for example – you might be guilty of apophenia. That friction between opposites has never been a problem for Nick Vasallo, though – his music is equally at home in both worlds. Melding Xenakis, Varese, Extreme Metal, and Dark Ambient with gothic charm, Vasallo conjures up a muscular sonic battle that leads you on an inexorable musical journey to a conclusion where surrender is your best option. Catharsis …
Orchard
*2022 Stock.* “I was born and raised in Kentucky, and for many generations my direct ancestors and extended family have been farmers. So, creating music that is ‘about’ soil, plant life, and the natural world, is my way of honoring that legacy.” Composer Tyler Kline’s tools, though, are not the plow – and vegetables are not the crop – in this collection of brief piano pieces commissioned by and for over a dozen pianists. Instead, Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific…
Transmutation of Things
There is a venerable history of popular songs used as the starting point for elaborate classical compositions, but 500 years ago Josquin and Dufay never imagined using a gargantuan digital orchestra with up to 300 layered tracks pushing architectural proportion and human perception to the max. And yet, that is exactly what composer, MC Maguire, does in his Toronto studio. It’s daunting, it’s overwhelming, and it has to be heard (preferably loud) to be believed. Dubbed “the most irritating and sp…
Signals
Lawson & Merrill are not financial advisors. But if electroacoustic bliss is what you seek, you would do well to make an appointment with them. They – David Margolin Lawson and David Merrill – met a number of years ago while engineering sessions at the revered CityVox Studios in New York City. They discovered they both had a love for “mid century” electronic music and composers like Morton Subotnick, Eliane Radigue, Edgard Varèse, Ilhan Mimaroğlu, and Steve Reich. It wasn’t until recently, thoug…
The imagE - imAge Set
Neuma presents the complete recordings of Roger Reynolds’s "imAgE" series (2007-2015). The series features six pairs of comparatively short, related works that showcase several solo instruments: flute; viola; cello; contrabass; piano; and guitar. Each pair, composed for the same instrument, represents opposing ideas- the first is evocative, and the second is more articulate and punctuated. All works were composed for the performers on the album.
Personae - The Vanity of Words - Variation
** 2021 Stock ** Neuma Records presents Personae - The Vanity Of Words - Variation by Roger Reynolds. Personae (1990) violin, ensemble, and tape; The Vanity OF Words [Voicespace V] (1986) tape; Variation (1988) piano. Baritone Vocals – Philip Larson. Composed By, Liner Notes – Roger Reynolds. Conductor – Rand Steiger. Ensemble – Sonor. Liner Notes – Thomas DeLio. Piano – Aleck Karis. Violin – János Négyesy.
Drumming in the Dark
Neuma presents Drumming in the Dark by Steven Schick. Engineer, Josef Kucera. Production assistance: Roger Reynolds and Terry Longshore. "In 1938 when John Cage formulated his famous dictum, "Percussion is revolution," I doubt that he had my mother in mind..." - Steven Schick
Pocket Music
James Caldwell’s creative life is the embodiment of the principle, Start at Home. In his case that is not only Macomb, Illinois, but even more precisely, in his pockets. Whereas some might consider music to be a soundtrack to their lives, an add-on, Caldwell reaches deep into the spaces around him for sonic potential and helps it emerge. For more than twenty years I have pursued a sporadic project of making small musique concrète pieces. The original set used sounds I made with things I found in…
Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire
Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…
The Paris Pieces
** 2021 Stock ** This is invaluable documentation of the electro-acoustic works of Roger Reynolds. The product of time spent at IRCAM, Pierre Boulez' Paris institute, some of the pieces bear a strong resemblance to "Repons," the highest-profile Boulez composition using the state-of-the-art IRCAM technology. This is even less surprising since they were recorded by Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain. "Archipelago" was composed in 1982-3, for 32 instruments and 8 tracks of computer generated sound…
Verdant
As a composer, David Dunn is probably best known for his interdisciplinary work that crosses the boundaries between art and science. This has included the fields of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, interspecies communication and scientific sonification while creating a body of innovative sound work that has contributed to projects as diverse as sensory enhancement of healthcare environments and intervention strategies for forest and agricultural pests. He has invented microphones to record such p…
Subtle Matters
How many sounds can a piano produce without using the keyboard? Some answers can be found in this recording, where the whole instrument is investigated using different techniques to reveal a world of unexpected richness, textures, and resonances.But it’s not just that: it’s also a journey in what the concept of “piano” became in the imagination of three composers (and a pianist). Each, in fact, gave shape to an original sonorous universe, and the task of reconnecting the subtle threads between c…