★Recital
Das Jahr 2020
* Edition of 200 copies, incl. 8 page booklet * Das Jahr 2020 is the first published recording of Molly McCann, my older sister of two-and-a-half years. After encouraging my sister to record her piano playing for years, she embarked on her first recording project with Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Das Jahr (“The Year”, 1841), a groundbreaking cycle of twelve thematically and harmonically interlocked character pieces depicting the twelve months of the year. Putting aside her usual toil for perfectio…
Days Off
**Edition of 200 copies, 4-page insert of photos** Alex Twomey’s Days Off, the second full length album under his own name, pronounces his evolving compositional approach. Following The Entertainer (Recital, 2019), this new album features a more intimate ensemble of piano, strings, bass, and guitar. Written between 2019 and 2021, the arrangements resemble pop-structured songs within the margins of sedate orchestral music. Twomey’s use of electric guitar is also unique; more as a blurred harmoni…
The Art of Mary Mazzacane
A new expanded reissue of the sold out & extremely limited LP from 2017.
Mother of Pearl
Edition of 400 copies on CD inside Gatefold CD wallet with gold foil printing, including 12-page booklet and 30 mins of additional music ('Red Sky' EP), available only on the CD. * Mother of Pearl is the first duo album from composers Sarah Davachi and Sean McCann. Two people, a couple, recording together at home. A slow, autumnal album made with no preconceptions or planning. Intimate, intended for ourselves. Sessions were captured simultaneously in two ways to build the shared space of percep…
Sounds from the Book of Bean
** Ltd. to 300 copies, incl. printed inner sleeve + 20 page full-size booklet ** The first vinyl LP release from Fluxus pioneer Alison Knowles (b. 1933). Sounds from the Book of Bean is an assemblage of noises and texts related to The Book of Bean (1982), Knowles’ 8-foot tall walk-in book constructed at Franklin Furnace in New York. This recording, the sounds of making the big book, was continually played back inside of the installation. Echoes of Yoshi Wada hammering together the circular spine…
Wildweeds (Book)
* 9″ x 12″ perfect soft bound, 120 pages First edition of 150, hand-numbered * Wildweeds is the first art book by musician Loren Connors. Following a series of LPs on Recital showcasing Loren’s haunting guitar playing, I am pleased to present a proper collection of his Wildweed drawings. Connors’ visual art has occasionally been included as little prints and pamphlets inside his LPs and CDs; though, always explored in a shade, an appendage to his music. Combusted bulbs of purple and yellow fl…
Dans le Sable (LP)
* Vinyl Edition of 500, 175 gram, ncludes 11″ x 11″ insert with program notes* Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New Yor…
Waves: Real and Imagined
* Edition of 300 LPs • Includes folded 11″ x 17″ insert with liner notes * Captain Rip Hayman (b.1951, New Mexico) has come ashore again, bearing fresh cargo. A student of John Cage, Ravi Shankar, and Philip Corner, Rip was a founding editor of the revered Ear Magazine (1975-1991), and since 1977 he has run New York's oldest bar, the Ear Inn. The focused minimalism of his new LP Waves: Real and Imagined varies from the collaged spectacle of his first Recital LP, Dreams of India & China (2019). …
Momentary Harmony
* Limited Edition of 250 LPs – (with download coupon) Includes set of 5 postcards made for the album * Recital is pleased to exhibit the new album by Swedish composer Kajsa Lindgren (b.1990). Typically working with field recordings and electroacoustic sounds, Momentary Harmony expresses her more emotive and lucent instrumental compositions. The music has taken a step away from her previous works, using only flickers of field recordings, instead tracing back to Kajsa’s childhood classical music r…
Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce
**Limited Edition of 80 copies. 102 pages, perfect bound 6″x6″ book, hand numbered. Includes glass-mastered CD.** Nour Mobarak’s Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce is the catalog for her sculpture and audio installation, which adorned the steep hillside of Los Angeles’ Hakuna Matata sculpture garden in the Fall of 2020. Eli Diner’s press release reads: "Up on the hill, Mobarak presents two related bodies of work. The six Sphere Studies are part of her ongoing examination of the material and…
St. Francis
**Edition of 200 - 180gram vinyl record - 18″ x 24″ folded color poster (blueprint).** The score by Schmid, reading by Landry, and edited/produced by McCann. Emily Martin and Derek Baron on St. Francis (Feb. 2021): What does it mean to pray? To address someone, to plead for something, to welcome humiliation and failure: Please, let me forget about the China Chalet parties, please let there be no countries and no war, please let me love you. Is prayer iteration, or just repetition: My god, my go…
Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas
** Edition of 250. Comes with 12-page pamphlet of scores and an essay by Corner ** Voice recordings from a small performance in Italy, early in 2020 -- Homages to/from George Maciunas (1931-1978). Philip Corner's piano meditative playthroughs of Couperin's The Mysterious Barricades (1717), from 1989 and 1992. These two elements (voice and piano) superimposed by Sean McCann, edited during the first month of the pandemic. Manic exaltation, distorted harmony things. Album cover is a few PC scores s…
Jubilee
**Limited edition of 100. Includes 20-page color booklet with photos. Numbered** Jubilee is an album of selections from the last five years of multifarious output by the art collective FPBJPC, including Jonathan Gean, Michael Pollard, Ben Schumacher, and Peter Friel. Including 8-hand piano arrangements of Schiller’s “An Die Freude,” helpful techno, free guitar quartets, music from their film The China Chalet Group, and more, Jubilee is an incomplete picture of FPBJPC’s life-long research into wa…
America Lament
**Edition of 300. It comes with a 20-page booklet, with program notes, scores, and an interview between Morrow & McCann** America Lament is a panoramic musical survey of legendary experimental composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow’s eclectic works. At just over 40-minutes, America Lament is mysterious, beguiling, and jubilant, comprised of pieces employing everything from hand-made electronics to Irish lap pipes, ecstatic jazz to Schubert recompositions, ambient flutes, and a string quartet.
Charl…
De Ossibus 20
**Limited edition of 100. Includes 12-page booklet** De ossibus 20 is the debut LP by sound artist and poet Kiera Mulhern (b.1992). Bridging classic sound poetry elements with micro studies of the artist’s body and environment. Burying a microphone in a book, this LP picks up fragments of words and memories, humming the rustles of parchment. It reminds me of Henri Chopin at times, busy mouth clusters bang against the air. Kiera made this album as a means of organizing loss after her mother’s…
Curtain
Limited edition of 150. Includes 16-page color pamphlet of artwork & text by Baron. Derek Baron is a composer, musician, and artist. Curtain is a diary. Both in musical and non-musical situations, they attribute a filmic quality to their journal-like aural self-documentation. Dreams turn real then dissolve. Single phrases and events arrive and leave, abruptly. Yet, the overall sense of place that Baron creates is understood. Opening Curtain is the eponymous piece. A 21-minute live chamber work f…
Dedicated to Dieter Roth
**Edition of 75 copies, wrapped in printed Schmid drawing, sealed with black rubberband** Visual and sound artist Eric Schmid improvising for an hour on an electronic piano. Schmid’s trampled notes and chords leak out of a big broken faucet on Dedicated to Dieter Roth. Relentlessly dripping and dancing down the drain, indifferent to anyone observing. Colloquial themes, “Chopsticks” and “Fur Elise” are discovered in the mist of his wandering, along with something he told me was an Idea Fire Compa…
Abies Firma
CD Edition. The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form. “We were like children playing with new toys,” Daniel recalls of the early days of American Gamelan music. “Though, as we moved into the 1980s, I moved away from Javanese traditional formalism compl…
Ten Impressions for Piano and Strings
**Edition of 200 copies**Sean McCann on the release (January 2020): "Ten Impressions dates from the fall of 2010, when I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I was contemplating starting Recital at this time, envisioning the first release to be a double-LP of my ambient, slow works. Amassing violin and piano fragments over the next months, I ended up with over four hours of recorded material. Well, then... I sat and looked at the files on my computer and lost all interest. An odd gapping per…
Electric Landlady
**Edition of 150 copies** Malcolm Green (b. 1952) is a British artist, dancer, and publisher. His eccentric, liquid ideas seem to come with a smile. Or is it a wry grin? His colorful paintings, usually adorned with phrases, are little riddled plaques. Luckily, Malcolm is of the ilk of visual artists who also records audio works (this multiplicity is always interesting). Green's own label Seedy CDs/Sieh Dies issued a number of CDrs between 2000 and 2005, including many of his own works, along tho…