★Other Minds
Great Star Theater, San Francisco
Joëlle Léandre and Lauren Newton have been performing together for nearly 30 years, having met in the mid-1990s in Paris. Throughout that time, they have always favored exploring the textures of music that are not arranged conventionally but rather are scattered, diffused, and dispersed through layers of sound. The voice’s high notes forge a variety of color fragments, while the low notes of the double bass create substance and depth. These two components remain inseparable as the sound settles …
The Possibility of A New Work for Electric Guitar
Other Minds is proud to present The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, a new limited-edition 12” 45 RPM vinyl disc of music by Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, performed by Wolff and Wendy Eisenberg. Side A features two performances of Morton Feldman’s The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, written for Wolff (who professes to be “not really a guitar player”) in 1966 as an experiment on the instrument. On his way to perform The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Gui…
The Light is Real
Tip! Other Minds is pleased to present The Light is Real, featuring the trio of Thollem (voice and wavestate synthesizer), Terry Riley (voice), and Nels Cline (electric guitars, effects, and megamouth). This recording is the sixth iteration of the Thollem/Cline trio, with previous installments including performances by William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, and Michael Wimberly.
The origins of this recording go back to an epiphany Thollem experienced in Northern New Mexico during the Covid-19 pandemi…
The Water Has Found its Crack
"Other Minds is happy to present The Water Has Found its Crack, the debut album by composer Joseph Bohigian. Consisting of four new works written since 2018, the collection finds the composer expertly handling a variety of performing forces, from laptop ensemble to string quartet. Each piece engages with a different aspect of the California-born composer’s position as a member of the Armenian diaspora. These include the legacy of displacement since the 1915 genocide, maintaining culture in exile…
Jepson Prairie
Other Minds is proud to present Jepson Prairie, a new album of recent work by Bay Area composer Tom Bickley. Jepson Prairie continues Other Minds’s tradition of presenting work by under-recorded yet notable composers. Bickley has long been a presence in American New Music as evidenced by his long-standing Deep Listening work and affiliation with the Cornelius Cardew Choir, among others. Despite his many years of composing and performing, Jepson Prairie is Bickley’s debut commercial release as a …
Tierceron
Other Minds is proud to present Tierceron, the first collaborative release between Senso di Voce (Esin Gunduz, voice, harmonium, composer, and Megan Kyle, oboe, English horn) and multi-instrumentalist Henry Birdsey.
Current
The string quartet Current that provides the centerpiece of Adams’ new album dates from 2016, when Spektral Quartet commissioned the composer to write a short work that became the 12-minute study Quartet Movement. Though that piece stands alone, Adams sensed that it might also be used as the basis for something larger, so over the next few years he expanded its scope. The present five-movement work, completed in 2019, was co-commissioned by Spektral Quartet and Cal Performances, with additional …
Lockdown Fantasies
*In process of stocking.* Other Minds is pleased to present Lockdown Fantasies, the new album from composer Neil Rolnick. The album features two new works for piano and electronics written for and performed by Geoffrey Burleson and Kathleen Supové. Both works are dense and thoughtful with an emotional edge, much like the oeuvre that Rolnick has built up over his 40 year career as a composer.
The album opens with its titular piece, "Lockdown Fantasies," performed by Geoffrey Burleson. The piece w…
An Anthology of Chants Operations
Few copies available - This bundle includes the longtime sold-out Raven Chacon LP on Ouidah (thanks to a recent distributor return) and the recent For Zitkála-Šá Book asd well as the Inhale/Exhale LP now out at Other Minds
Hypothetical Moments
Other Minds is excited to present Hypothetical Moments, a DVD of the collaborative works of Carol Law and Charles Amirkhanian, available on video for the first time. Some of the work included within will be familiar to followers of Amirkhanian’s work (Dog of Stravinsky, Mahogany Ballpark), but the vast majority of Hypothetical Moments has been entirely unavailable until now. Both video and audio have been lovingly restored and remastered, opening up a new pathway into the densely layered and ref…
Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin
Other Minds is excited and proud to bring you a near-unheard early composition by legendary American Maverick composer Lou Harrison, Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin (1936), performed by our friend Kate Stenberg. This short piece was written by the precocious composer when he was barely out of high school, still a teenager, but already a year deep into studies under Henry Cowell, studies that occurred during Cowell's stint in San Quentin State Prison.
The piece was entirely unheard from its comp…
Duet
“Composition 429” is the first piece using a new writing method that Braxton calls “Lorraine.” The composer’s notes to the piece describe Lorraine as “a music system that governs the ‘sonic winds’ of breath.” Saxophonist and longtime collaborator James Fei contributes an essay detailing the Lorraine system, which uses a combination of traditional notation and color-coded symbols of the composer’s design to indicate “specific sound types or performance techniques,” drawing from Braxton’s long his…
Inhale/Exhale
Other Minds is pleased to present Inhale/Exhale, the debut recording from the New Mexican trio of Pulitzer Prize winning composer/guitarist Raven Chacon, percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, and bassist Carlos Santistevan.
Antarctica: Music from the Ice
A participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, Leonard lived and worked at Palmer Research Station for five weeks in 2009. At this remote outpost on the Antarctic Peninsula, the composer made pristine field recordings of ice, water, wind, and wildlife. During this time she also gathered (with the proper permits) rocks, shells, and penguin bones which she later fashioned into the penguin bone idiophones, and sculptural percussion instruments featured on …
In Between The Notes : A Portrait Of Pandit Pran Nath
William Farley’s 1986 documentary portrait of the Indian classical figure, who considered by many to be the godfather of drone. Featuring interviews with Terry Riley, Mariam Zazeela and La Monte Young.
Solar One/The Watts Towers
Other Minds is excited to bring you an EP of two archival works from Bay Area composer Charles Boone. Both pieces take their inspiration and titles from man-made landmarks across California. Solar One from a monumental power station near the desert city of Barstow, The Watts Towers from Simon Rodia’s outsider art masterpiece in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. In much of his work, the composer seeks to create sonic landscapes that are simultaneously static and dynamic. Certain elements, ha…
Half-Dragged
Henry Birdsey is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and audio engineer based in New Haven, CT, working primarily with the pedal steel, lap steel, microtonal organ, violin, and homemade instruments. Educated by microtonal theorist and composer Kyle Gann, among others, Birdsey has emerged as a prominent voice in the avant-garde music scene over the last several years. Touring extensively in the United States and abroad as a solo act and as half of Tongue Depressor with Zach Rowden, Birdsey has dev…
De Revolutionibus
Tip! * 300 copies * Other Minds Records is pleased to announce de revolutionibus: sound homage to Copernicus, a new limited edition LP release from legendary text-sound poet Enzo Minarelli. Minarelli compares the revolution of sound poetry to the revolution that Copernicus brought about with his discovery of the heliocentric nature of the solar system. Just like Copernicus put the sun at the center of the solar system, sound poets centered the human voice—and thus the sensuous nature of a text—…
Miatsoom
* 32-page booklet featuring an essay by Peter Garland *Other Minds Records announces a new album from composer Charles Amirkhanian titled Miatsoom (mee-aht-soom) - a collection of pieces that draw on his Armenian heritage - central to the composer’s identity but until now unexplored in his discography. The centerpiece of the album is the 30-minute title track, “Miatsoom” which means “Reunion” in Armenian. A long form radio play of sorts, the work’s source material comes from recordings made dur…
Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns
In 1982, Bill Fontana mounted a monumental outdoor sound installation called Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns that would near-impossible to realize today. Live audio feeds from eight foghorns around the San Francisco Bay were routed to a central listening arena on city’s waterfront at Fort Mason. As a pioneer in the developing field of Sound Art, Fontana’s fusion of sound and sculpture was virtually unheard of, much less on the region-encompassing scale that he was working with for Landscape S…