Dream House
The Dream House is still running. Third floor, 275 Church Street, New York, and it has been in that room since 1993. Thirty-two sine waves, amber and blue light, and you move around inside the chord rather than sitting in front of it. Marian Zazeela, who made the light, died in March 2024. Behind it is a rule La Monte Young set himself in 1958 and never broke. The Trio for Strings is an hour of held tones tuned to whole-number ratios, with no major third anywhere in it, because he had excluded the prime five. Almost everything here comes off that decision one way or another.
Some of these records were made by people who were in the room. Conrad, Flynt, Riley, Palestine. Others by people who reached the same place alone, the oddest case being Giacinto Scelsi, who in 1959 was in Rome writing four pieces on a single note and had no idea any of this was going on.
The Orchestral Works 2
Three orchestral works by Giacinto Scelsi recorded in Vienna in 2005: Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola), Uaxuctum, and the first recording of La Nascita del Verbo, with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and choirs.
Banshee / Basse Brevis
A split record in the Portraits GRM series. Davachi's Basse Brevis was co-commissioned by Radio France and INA GRM, and first played at the 2024 Presences festival, which was given over to Steve Reich.
Voice is the original instrument
For Circular Song she adapted circular breathing to the voice and sang on the inhale as well as the exhale. For Hear What I Feel she was isolated beforehand, then performed with her eyes taped shut, responding to materials placed in front of her that…
Pale Bloom
Davachi went back to the piano she had left behind as a student, recording at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The first side is a three-part suite in which the piano draws in a Hammond organ and a countertenor voice.
What Is Not Strange?
Eleven pieces built on Prophet and Oberheim synthesizers tuned to an eighteenth century temperament of Rameau's, with Julia Holter singing. Wada grew up in the Fluxus co-op building in Soho, with Simone Forti next door and Nam June Paik one floor up,…
Tkać
Two pieces from 2015, both made for light as much as for sound. In the first, Forsberg leaves the violin hanging on stage listening to itself while she plays only electronics, and the audience stays audible: bodies shifting, someone dropping somethin…
Magnetism
Recorded in a single day in 2022 at McDowall's Brooklyn studio, then mixed and remixed across three years and three cities. There is no organ anywhere on it: the sound is Karplus-Strong synthesis, a filtered delay line modelling a plucked string, tun…
Duo Geloso
Six pieces from a concert at Het Apollohuis in December 1987, unearthed by Black Truffle. Guitars and bass tuned by Dreyblatt and played with E-Bows and Panhuysen's motorised plectrums, plus a Mattel toy drum machine, pedal steel harmonics and a bird…
Nightclouds
Five improvisations recorded on four organs across Europe. On two of them Arkbro plays the 1922 Sauer and the 2018 Utopa Baroque organ at the Orgelpark simultaneously, from opposite ends of the building. She holds the chords down with weights and peg…
Solo For Tamburium
The tamburium is an instrument Hennix built: eighty-eight keys, each one triggering a recording of a precision-tuned four-string tambura. Documented in Berlin in 2017, it was her first solo release since 1976 and came out two months before she died.
Omniscient Voices
Five pieces for justly tuned piano and electronics. After a trilogy of long-form records, Pitre shortened the pieces, which gave him more harmonic room to move rather than less.
Music on a long thin wire
A fifty-foot wire runs through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator, with microphones at either end. Set going at four different frequencies, it produces not the low drone you would expect but a shifting set of chords.
The Black Record
Necessary reissue of a truly seminal, minimalist totem and founding document of the avant-garde underground!
The Black Record + Dream House
The only two full-length records La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela released, together. Four sides and four dates, each one printed in the title to the minute: August 1964, July 1969, January 1973, July 1973. Nine years, from a bowed gong to three sin…
Songs of Milarepa
Five pieces in tribute to Milarepa, the eleventh century Tibetan poet and saint. Radigue on synthesizer, Robert Ashley reading in English and Lama Kunga Rinpoche in Tibetan, the last track running sixty-two minutes.
415 Steppsss to DingggDonggg Paradise
A live carillon performance on the bells of St Rumbold's Cathedral in Mechelen, October 2017. Palestine started out on the carillon of St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue as a teenager, years before the Bosendorfer, and this is him going back to it with…
Music from the Resting State
Drawn from an installation about what the brain does when it is doing nothing. Cognitive research uses an 800 hertz beep to jolt subjects awake and ask what they were thinking; Dreyblatt kept the beep, at random intervals between 57 and 63 seconds, a…
Rhymes With Water
Two long pieces commissioned by the players themselves: DreGliss, written in 2015 for Erik Drescher's glissando flute, and Nataliawork, from 2005, for Natalia Pschenitschnikova's bass flute and voice
Music for Intersecting Planes
Recorded by candlelight in a Swiss church in 2021, in single live takes. Leila Bordreuil on cello and feedback, Kali Malone on a 1995 organ and sine waves. The bells outside and the motorcycles going past are left in, because the building counts as a…
Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss
First recordings of two long microtonal works by Kraig Grady, The Molten Wind and Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss, built from individually recorded single notes played by an international group of soloists in Grady's just-intonation tunings.