New Arrivals
35 Whirlpools Below Sound
35 Whirlpools Below Sound presents a fantastical soundworld of 19 short, richly detailed, multilayered electro-acoustic soundscapes jointly composed by Thomas Newman and Rick Cox, whose musical friendship and ongoing working relationship date back to 1985. These enigmatic works, built of often mysterious juxtapositions of sounds, have been gestating and changing shape for many years, with ever an eye toward their eventual completion and release, which this CD marks. The album’s title was taken f…
From A Folio
Michael Jon Fink's From a Folio, a suite of six short pieces for cello and piano and one central piece for six cellos, a set of songs without words, was composed for new-music cellist Derek Stein, with whom Fink has been performing in various small groups during the past few years.As the elegant, subtle music unfolds, radiating a deep, emotional sense of form, the listener is quickly drawn into a highly nuanced, lyrical sound world. Fink’s characteristically reductive but expressive style is evi…
Music For Airport Furniture
Music for Airport Furniture is Cold Blue’s first release of Stephen Whittington’s refined, beautiful music. Whittington is something of a musical vagabond, traveling widely and writing music that is often multicultural in its inspiration. With this in mind, this compelling and sublime string quartet could be heard as a strange homage to the act of traveling, airport to airport.Stephen Whittington writes about the piece, “Music for Airport Furniture is a work for string quartet that alludes to Er…
Patience Soup
Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements presen…
Ragnarok
Silence present a vinyl reissue of Ragnarök's self-titled debut
album, originally released on the same label in 1976. Some music never
becomes dated and this debut record by Ragnarök from Kalmar in Sweden is
just filled with that kind of music. Many listeners have tried to
describe the music they have carried in their hearts throughout a whole
life or just discovered. They all say it does not sound like anything
else they have heard, some say it sounds like looking at water, others
that i…
A Jamais / Ping
This is the third album by Laurent Perrier’s “Pylône”, Laurent’s experimental electro-acoustic project. Entirely composed and performed with modular synthesisers, it consists of 2 long tracks stretching across each side of the LP. Side A: “A jamais” was produced with the writings and sampled voice of multimedia artist Lyne Vermes. Her words are dissolved into a stream of digital treatments, creating new textures, long waves. With the use of granular synthesis it stretches out only to end up in s…
Bloom Into Night
Bloom Into Night is the new album from ByMyDelay, the solo project of Marcella Riccardi (Blake/e/e/e, Franklin Delano, Massimo Volume) started in 2011, initially as a one-woman band with an array of loopers end effects to accompany her own songs. During time she got closer to a lysergic kind of folk music, always in between British Folk and West Coast style and in recent times she further opened the structures of her songs, which became more and more stretched out and free-form, like a river wit…
Steadfast on our Sand
Steadfast on our Sand is a documentary about landscape creation and nature control. A mesmeric film about the islander community and its contradictory habits and traditions. A cowboy movie with herds running in the meadow at sunset and white horses resting in the dark of the night, a documentary film about artificial nature and landscape design, a scary movie with zombies and ghosts. J.H. Guraj contributed some music to the documentary by Zimmerfrei and we liked it so much we decided to release …
Black Water
Jim Fox’s music is usually noted for its quietude and ambling pace. In the mid-1980s, however, he drifted from these defining stylistic penchants for a couple of years, penning music that often bounced along, energetically and loudly, at a good clip. His clangorous Black Water, from 1984, is rich with dense, sometimes shimmering, sometimes rumbling tremolos and loudly struck chords covering the full range of the piano, set off by brief moments of quiet, twinkling serenity.Jim Fox writes, “Black …
Cold Blue Two
Cold Blue Two is an eclectic anthology of 14 new, previously unrecorded works—many of them written specifically for this CD—by a diverse collection of composers whose personal musical visions usually blend intuition with process. The composers include both the well-known and the not-so-well-known, most with longtime associations with Cold Blue, and two making their first appearance on the label: John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, In…
Four Thousand Holes
Four Thousand Holes is a sometimes lush, sometimes fragile, rhythmically complex and technically demanding work for piano and mallet percussion (performed by the extraordinary pianist Stephen Drury and percussionist Scott Deal) and ghostly electronic “auras”—electronic sounds created by processing the acoustic instruments’ sonorities.Unlike John Luther Adams’s other works, the pitch material used in Four Thousand Holes is drawn exclusively from Western music’s most basic elements: major and mino…
Macbeth
New Re-mastered & Expanded Release with four previously unreleased bonus tracks. Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a new
re-mastered and expanded edition of the classic 1972 soundtrack album to
Roman Polanski’s gritty film of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. Originally released on EMI’s Harvest label in March 1972, the album
featured a new line-up of Third Ear Band featuring Paul Minns (oboe and
recorder), Glen Sweeney (drums), Paul Buckmaster (cello and bass
guitar), Simon…
Last Cicada Singing
Four serene, unique, and entrancing pieces for solo qin (a zither-like Chinese instrument). Quiet, sparse, almost Feldmanesque, almost delta-blues-like, too. Performed by the composer, Christopher Roberts, who mastered the qin while living and teaching for many years in Taiwan. (He performs on a qin built by Lin Li-Zheng.)Christopher Roberts writes about the piece:“Chinese scholars in antiquity took their qins to the mountains to compose music in accord with the aesthetics of nature. They develo…
Sudoku 82
Sudoku 82, a spare, beautiful, spacious piece for eight pianos, was composed utilizing systems derived from Sudoku puzzles and the GarageBand computer program.Christopher Hobbs writes about the piece: “Sudoku 82 is one of a series of pieces I have been working on since 2005. There are now over 125 of them that use Apple’s GarageBand software and random procedures culled from the numbers found initially in hexadecimal Sudoku puzzles and latterly from online random number generators. I choose the …
The Place We Began
John Luther Adams's The Place We Began contains four mysteriously evocative electro-acoustic works that the composer built from short recorded moments—audio fragments—of his early music (circa the early 1970s). This is not a trip down Memory Lane: in The Place We Began, Adams has reappropriated and transformed these sonic fragments into completely new works that speak to his current musical interests and directions, especially his recent installation pieces, and refer to his past only in ways th…
String Quartets
This CD presents the premiere recordings of two spirited and enticing quartets that draw on Peter Garland’s well-traveled ear and great sense of personal vision. Both works move with a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is purely Garlandesque—marked by a sometimes lively dancing, a sometimes alluring stasis, and an often sauntering gait that allow musical ideas to seem to appear intuitively and develop subconsciously..Performed and recorded beautifully by members of the ren…
Music On The Desert Road
The late Deben Bhattacharya was a noted Bengali record producer, ethnomusicologist, poet, documentarian, radio producer, and all around renaissance man. Having moved from Northern India to London as a young man, Bhattacharya began working for the BBC as a radio producer. In 1955, having worked all possible angles to securing funding Bhattacharya traveled to India to record musicians. The success of this trip allowed him to travel again soon after to the countries of the Middle East. With recordi…
Singing The Traditional Songs of her Kentucky Mountain Family LP
In the world of American folk music, Jean Ritchie was a truly unique presence. Most of the younger artists of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s were middle class urbanites and liberal arts college students who helped "rediscover" the older traditional artists of the South. Though these two groups intermingled at concerts and the younger artists idolized the "true" folk artists, Jean Ritchie was an anomaly in that she fit equally in each crowd. Born in Viper, Kentucky in 1922, Jean was born i…
The Last Castrato
Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) was the last known castrato, and the only one to have ever made recordings. He was born into a Catholic family in one of the so-called Roman Castles, where he was castrated either for health reasons, or because of his singing talents, the history is unclear. But either way he was discovered soon after for his talents and by a very young age was known as “l'Angelo di Roma” and quickly became the First Soprano of the Sistine Chapel choir, a position he held for more…
Trios For Deep Voices
Christopher Roberts's Trios for Deep Voices, a five-movement work scored for the unusual ensemble of three double basses, is a sort of musical evocation—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—of the sounds and life that composer Roberts experienced in the jungles of the Star Mountains region of Papua New Guinea, where he lived in the early 1980s.Trios is an emotionally charged music of extreme virtuosity and extreme beauty—from passages laden with devilishly difficult harmonics and bowing tech…