★Unseen Worlds
Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties
Unsung West Coast maverick Carl Stone is subject of a necessary 2nd retrospective on Unseen Worlds following their Laurie Spiegel and Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom releases. As revelatory as the first volume Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties, the temporal shift into the ’80s/‘90s in this 2nd collection opens four hallucinatory new planes of ambient enquiry yielding some of the most beautiful electronic music we’ve never heard before. Progressing farther along Stone’s timeli…
J. Jasmine: My New Music
Privately pressed to LP in 1978 under the name J. Jasmine and made especially for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, with artistic collaboration from the festival’s founder and Once Group artist, George Manupelli, My New Music is the debut album by Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom. Featuring a cast of Mills College personalities like David Behrman and Sam Ashley on backup vocal duties, this song cycle is at every turn boundary-pushing and gender-busting, yet still hilarious, sweet, and ge…
Frühe Jahre
Frühe Jahre is the first time reissue of C-Schulz's early work from late 1980s and early '90s. Schulz's first LP, 10. Hose Horn, was introduced alongside other debut LPs from Jim O'Rourke and Frank Dommert on Dommert's Entenpfuhl label in 1991. Combining the cathartic sounds of industrial, early techno, and innovative pop with inspiration from acousmatic, New Music, and Dada, Schulz's music is a prime example of the Cologne experimental music scene of the time. Rhythmic delights, outlandish juxt…
10. Hose Horn
Schulz's first LP, 10. Hose Horn, was introduced alongside other debut LPs from Jim O'Rourke and Frank Dommert on Dommert's Entenpfuhl label in 1991. Combining the cathartic sounds of industrial, early techno, and innovative pop with inspiration from acousmatic, New Music, and Dada, Schulz's music is a prime example of the Cologne experimental music scene of the time. Rhythmic delights, outlandish juxtapositions and a sustained, unresolved, aurally-fascinating tension evoke dramatic, film-like m…
Fifteen Saxophones
First ever CD reissue of this little known classic from founding Philip Glass Ensemble member Richard 'Dickie' Landry. Following two jazz LPs issued on the Chatham Square label (which he co-ran), Dickie Landry released Fifteen Saxophones, a set of 1974 recordings done with engineer Kurt Munkacsi, on the Northern Lights and Wergo labels in 1978. Fifteen Saxophones simultaneously demonstrates Landry's boundary-pushing saxophone and his understanding of the minimalists' long-form treatises on sound…
Love & Peace
LP version. Unseen Worlds presents new recordings of solo piano pieces by Ethiopian composer Girma Yifrashewa, the first release of Yifrashewa's music outside of Africa. Born in Addis Ababa in 1967, Girma Yifrashewa is a worthy new torchbearer of African pianism. His highly personalized approach to the piano likens him to Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam, while his use of Ethiopian pentatonic scale within the Western Art Music format places his compositions in conversation with more academ…
Satie Slowly
American composer Philip Corner likes Satie too well not to object to how he is played. From the time of his participation in the first performance of Erik Satie's "Vexations" he realized that here was, lurking under the travesties of the 1st Gymnopédie, one of the greats of this or any other century... a "secret genius" who masked with humility and seeming conformity a profoundly innovative thorough-going critique of the limitations and pretensions of our High Culture as it has come down to us.…
Love and Peace
Unseen Worlds presents new recordings of solo piano pieces by Ethiopian composer Girma Yifrashewa, the first release of Yifrashewa's music outside of Africa. Born in Addis Ababa in 1967, Girma Yifrashewa is a worthy new torchbearer of African pianism. His highly personalized approach to the piano likens him to Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam, while his use of Ethiopian pentatonic scale within the Western Art Music format places his compositions in conversation with more academically minde…
Daytime viewing
Unseen Worlds follow a hugely appreciated reissue of Laurie Spiegel's 'The Expanding World' with this delightful slice of the 1979-81 avant-garde, rescued from private-press cassette. Amazing songs meditating on American daytime TV set to luscious Buchla synth arrangements. RIYL Robert Ashley, Julia Holter or Pinkcourtesyphone "Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresse…
The Expanding Universe
Restocked, LP edition: The Expanding Universe is the landmark and long out-of-print 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The album is reissued here for the first time in a massively expanded two-CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased. Some of the already well-know works included in this set are "Patchwork", the complete "Appalachian Grove" series, and "Kepler's Harmon…
Detours
"LP version. Limited to 250 copies with alternate artwork (from the CD). Detours is 'Blue' Gene Tyranny's first album of new piano works since 2003's Take Your Time. A beautifully recorded collection of tracks composed between 2004 and 2010, Detours belongs to a rarefied class of supremely listenable and beautiful piano albums that are not encumbered by any new-age shabbiness. It possesses the sort of timeless and elegant romanticism so unpretentious and accomplished it seems to at once eff…
KMH: Piano Music in the Continuous Mode
Lubomyr Melnyk's debut album from 1978, KMH, is an unheralded touchstone of minimalism. Performing solo on piano with a speed that suggests multiple pianos playing together in harmony, Melnyk nearly brings out the full sound of the instrument all at once. His music is lush and maximal yet it possesses the restrained, slowly evolving nature found in music by artists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Melnyk developed his unique approach to minimalism while working with dancer/choreographer …
Woo Lae Oak
Stunning drone work, rescued from oblivion, and an absolute minimalism classic. "First-ever CD of Carl Stone's debut album, originally released on Joan La Barbara's Wizard Records in 1983. Woo Lae Oak is a 54-minute tape piece based around minimal samples of strings and wind which layer, deconstruct and reform into an expansive, shimmering whole. Remastered for CD, with complete original artwork and new accompanying notes by Phill Niblock."
Piano Works Revisited
"A 2CD collection of piano works by postminimalist composer Elodie Lauten -- most of which is available for the first time ever on CD. The albums Piano Works (1983) and Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory (1984), both reissued here in their entirety with remastered sound, incorporate found and prerecorded sounds into lyrical, minimalist piano works in a highly personal, even baroque, style. They are deeply meditative and expansive but do not require the epic lengths enjoyed by Glass, Reich,…
The Death of Don Juan
CD debut of this 1985 post-minimal landmark by Elodie Lauten, featuring performances by Arthur Russell and Peter Zummo. Lauten has been active in the downtown New York classical and punk scenes since moving from France in the 1970s. The Death of Don Juan is a breakthrough for its bold, lyrical minimalism in concert with a dramatic sensibility that is deeply faithful to the modern existential emotional experience. Originally self-produced and released as a small LP edition on her own label, it ha…