★Unseen Worlds
My Strong Will
My Strong Will is a new album of "Ethiopian Classical Music" by Girma Yifrashewa. Recorded with Bulgarian musicians and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria, the album is a return to where Yifrashewa completed his own conservatory training in the late 1980s and early 1990s, across both sides of the fall of Communism. Guided by Yifrashewa's piano, these chamber works bring the music of Ethiopia into a Western Classical format, uncovering meditative and emotional new vistas for both…
Electronic Music from 1972-2022
Electronic Music from 1972-2022 seeks to frame fifty years of Carl Stone's compositional activity, starting with Stone's earliest professionally presented compositions from 1972 ("Three Confusongs" and "Ryound Thygyzunz", featuring the voice and poetry of Stefan Weiser – later known as Z'EV) up to the present. This collection is not meant as a definitive history but rather as a supplement to be used alongside the previous two archival releases. It is simultaneously an archival release marking Ca…
Succo di formiche
Written and recorded with the goal of creating a one-movement suite in the least amount of time possible, "Succo di formiche" reflects the archetypal joy of music making, the spontaneous impulses underlying its formation, and a love of the record album form.
For Anyone That Knows You
For Anyone That Knows You, an album of mostly piano solos by Josiah Steinbrick, was recorded not for smoothness or posterity but to emphasize the piano as object, the person playing it, and the moment it sounds. On three of the pieces, the saxophone of Sam Gendel hovers over the piano like a faint change in the light, adding resonance and gentle reinforcement rather than counterpoint. Three others are delicate renditions: “Green Glass” interprets an untitled recording by Quechuan folk musicians …
Daytime Viewing
40th Anniversary Edition - newly remastered from the master tapes, with an additional bonus LP of instrumentals and the previously unreleased “Narration Theme.”
Pulse Music
*2LP Gatefold with tipped in booklet * Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seriali…
Wat Dong Moon Lek
Carl Stone continues his late career prolific renaissance with a new album of sculpted, tuneful MAX/MSP fantasias. Stone “plays” his source material the way Terry Riley’s In C “plays” an ensemble – with a loose, freewheeling charm connected to the ancient human impulse to make sound, melody, and rhythm from anything. Stone’s unique technique simultaneously focuses and sprays sound like a symphony of uncapped fire hydrants. Is this techno, avant-garde, sound art? It’s simply (or rather fantastica…
The Plains At Gordium
The Plains at Gordium was composed from June to August 2004 and is dedicated to Charlotta Kotik. The incentive to compose the piece came from a percussion group in Brno, Czech Republic, who asked me for a piece of music. Not being a commission-disciplined composer, I wrote a piece for six percussionists, while the Czech group, DAMA-DAMA had only four members and could not perform it. The size of the piece also defies the scale of a standard percussion piece, 1,290 measures over a 108-page score.…
The Expanding Universe
2022 Repress, in process of stocking. The Expanding Universe is the 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The original album is reissued here as a massively expanded 3LP or 2CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased and many making their first appearance on vinyl in this brand new 2018 edition. Since this album’s first reissue in 2012, it has gone on to be widely establis…
Out of the blue
* 2022 Repress* First-ever LP reissue. “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s debut album Out of the Blue — newly remastered with original cover art — which was among the first to releases on Lovely Music in 1978 alongside Robert Ashley Private Parts, David Behrman On the Other Ocean, Jon Hassell Vernal Equinox, Meredith Monk Key, and Peter Gordon Star Jaws. Disarmingly direct, funky, and profound, Out of the Blue is an equanimous, wide-open exploration of Tyranny’s musical world: equal parts song cycle, tone p…
Human Remains
*In process of stocking* Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our curren…
Música Callada / See the Welter
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and…
Mi specchio e rifletto
Tip - this is stunning! **CD version** Since their launch in mid-2000s, the New York based imprint, Unseen Worlds, has continued to set an incredibly high bar through the earth-shaking quality of their releases. As dedicated to historical artists and works as they are to those emerging in the present, they’ve always taken their time, slipping things into the world with remarkable care, that leave humble tectonic shifts in their wake. After an absolutely incredible couple of years with brilliant …
Felis Catus and Silence
Felis Catus and Silence is a breakthrough release for Tokyo composer-guitarist Leo Takami, following the milestone albums Children’s Song (2012) and Tree of Life (2017). Takami counterpoints the soothing aesthetics of prime-era Windham Hill New Age guitar-heroism with meditative, intellectual compositions comprised of ambitious, process-oriented arrangements. While Takami largely wears his genre influences on his sleeve -- jazz, classical, Japanese gagaku -- the influence of ambient music is a t…
Himalaya
Following his critically acclaimed collections Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, Carl Stone quickly follows-up Baroo with a double-LP album of recent works, including the final section of Fujiken, his epic journey through southeast Asian field recordings and street cassette culture.On all six tracks, composed between 2013 and 2019, Stone’s pan-global playground of looping synths and Asian pop culture remains as fertile as ever, …
Baroo
"I have always been searching for a way to articulate the intangible area between the recognizable and the unfathomable, a feeling perhaps informed by some long-abandoned experiments with psychedelics. This has been a continued pursuit starting with my tape experiments in the 1970’s until the present, with technological evolution driving new ways of expression.With the exception of Xé May, which is performed on an Elektron Octatrack, these pieces were constructed for live performance using a lap…
Moments
In essence, the sound of the piano comes in two parts: its attack and its decay. The striking of a hammer is followed by the resonance of a string or strings. (Much the same might be said about the vibraphone, as it happens.) This dual quality of sound comes to mind when listening to Moments by New York-based composer Michael Vincent Waller. Performed by pianist R. Andrew Lee and vibraphonist William Winant, Moments − his third album, following Trajectories (Recital, 2017) and The South Shore (X…
I'd Rather Be Lucky Than Good
I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Good is a new recording collaboration of Sam Ashley and Werner Durand. Sam Ashley’s mystic parables imbued with benevolent humor are drawn from a lifelong pursuit of a present-day shamanism. Werner Durand’s wind work on invented and traditional instruments stems from the minimalist tradition, routed through his unique study of obscure world musics. The two artists first met in Berlin in 1984 while Sam was touring Atalanta with Robert Ashley’s opera company, with whom he …
J. Jasmine: My New Music (Songbook)
Original printing of the 1978 J. Jasmine Songbook, which has scores, lyrics and images for all the songs on the "J. Jasmine: My New Music" LP. Printed but never distributed because of the book distribution house going out of business, this is a must-have item for fans of Humber and Rosenboom
EXTREEMIZMS early & late
Extremes are extreme, extremely. For Philip Corner, a lifelong commitment to extremes - extreme expression, extreme beauty, extreme noise, extreme silence - developed a mastery of expression, any one extreme may result in all of the others. In gripping new recordings by the duo of Silvia Tarozzi, violin, and Deborah Walker, cello - with assistance from Rhodri Davies, harp, and Philip Corner, piano - Corner's early ensemble works from 1958 are paired with newer, late works from 2015-2016. The wor…