New Arrivals
Chorales
*300 copies limited edition* Meditative solo piano excursions by Albert Alan Owen. The first widely available new work for many decades sees the British composer return to his principle instrument for a series of beautifully unadorned piano miniatures. The minimalist approach and effortless serenity put me in mind of the recent return of another veteran, Laraaji, who's Sun Piano LP from 2020 shared a similarly emotional weight. Strange how it's minimal music that often possesses the most affecti…
Issue 5, Vol. 2. (Magazine)
Issue 5, Volume 2. Along with the cover stars of Pharoah Sanders and Anri, the issue features Ron Trent, Dexter Wansel, Carolyn Crawford, Hyldon, Linda Lewis, Lance Ferguson, Psychic Mirrors, Liv.e, Bernard Wright plus Re:Discoveries, Record Rundowns and more...
Treatise on Musical Objects
*2023 stock* The Treatise on Musical Objects is regarded as Pierre Schaeffer’s most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer expands his earlier research in musique concrète to suggest a methodology of working with sounds based on his experiences in radio broadcasting and the recording studio. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also on philosophy and the relationship between subject and object, Schaeffer’s essay summarizes his theoretical and practi…
Living Genres in Late Modernity American Music of the Long 1970s (Book)
*2023 stock* Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: t…
The Hum of the World A Philosophy of Listening (Book)
*2023 stock* The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poeti…
Capturing Sound How Technology Has Changed Music, Revised Edition (Book)
*2023 stock* There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in fil…
Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America (Book)
*2023 stock* The experience of the divine in India has three components, sight, performance, and sound. One in a trilogy of books that include Diana Eck's Darsan: Seeing the Divine in India, and Susan L. Schwartz's Rasa: Performing the Divine in India, Mantra presents an introduction to the use of sound -- mantra -- in the practice of Indian religion.
Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (Book)
*2023 stock* In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human cultur…
Western Music and Its Others Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Book)
*2023 stock* This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant exampl…
Serial Music A Classified Bibliography of Writings on Twelve-Tone (Book)
*2023 stock* This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
Coverscaping Discovering Album Aesthetics (Book)
*2023 stock* Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to car…
You’ll Know When You Get There - Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Book)
*2023 stock* As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and el…
Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…
The Voice of Theseus
From Yann Novak In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos’ minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any orig…
Orbita
The live performance recorded in the ancient Church of S. Giuliano, in Vercelli, encompasses some of the music conceived and written over the last few years, which Francesco Aroni Vigone spent in Valle d’Aosta. The recording location was chosen for its particular acoustics, perfect for a saxophone ‘solo’ and its aptitude for meditation. The performance took place during worship hours to have an unusual ‘audience’ in an unusual ‘liturgy’. The pieces are monodic songs that can be traced back mainl…
7 rocks
"This is the whole improvisation session we had on the evening of 25 April 2014, after a day spent recording some duets for Enrico’s project “Girotondo”. In the afternoon I had recorded with Mario Arcari “La prostituta e il soldato”, one of his compositions. The next day I was going to record my song “Il soldato e la cameriera” with Alberto Mandarini. So, during the evening break, after years of not playing together anymore, a little bit on my insistence, because Enrico seemed to want it too, we…
High Tide In The Lowlands
Born in 2012 when the three were living in the same apartment building in Cairo's Agouza district, the trio's instrumental improvisation-based explorations are propelled by Louca's North African percussion loops and shimmering keys, Shalabi's West African tinged free jazz guitar and grounded by Bishop's driving Krautrock-style acoustic bass.
High Tide in the Lowlands was recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus on September 5, 2017 and is quite an intense experience. Most performances and reco…
Enz
"After two and a half years of refining, calibrating, and reconceptualising their approach, pianist Darius Heid, cellist Emily Wittbrodt, and double bassist Jonas Gerigk are now releasing their debut CD. With great enthusiasm, the trio met frequently for playful and dedicated rehearsals, improvising freely then observing and discussing the resulting phenomena, delving further into the depths of their music. A long and involved process - creating trialogues that weave through constant re-examinat…
Was ficht dich an?
impakt Records presents the new record by Huhn | Schönegg | Mahnig "Was ficht dich an?" with Leonhard Huhn (alto saxophone), Stefan Schönegg (double bass) and Dominik Mahnig (drums).
plays Herzog | Muche | Nillesen
impakt Records presents the new record by T.ON "plays Herzog | Muche | Nillesen" with Constantin Herzog (double bass), Matthias Muche (trombone) and Etienne Nillesen (extended snare drum).