Reissues

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…

Esoteric Recordings is proud to announce the release of a new expanded and re-mastered 2 CD edition of the classic album “Alchemy" by Third Ear Band. One of the first releases on EMI’s progressive rock label, Harvest in July 1969, “Alchemy” was the d…

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 …

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 teachi…

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 be…

A collection of music pieces composed and performed by Enrico Serotti (of Confusional Quartet fame) for the works of Eva Marisaldi.  "Museum/Art" edition including 16 page coloured inner booklet with introduction by Guido Molinari.

From Richard Aicher and Andreas Merz' secret vaults: their own tape-production for Sinclair Computers at Rothof Studio near Munich - an unreleased recording, made to promote Sinclair ZX-81 computers!

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…

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 purel…

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…

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 tradit…

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 …

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…

Nakadai, which KPFA Folio/Other Minds Radio called “one of the most explosive LPs of the ’80s,” is a set of five works that offer a catalog of musical “waves”—from ripples to tsunamis. It features Smith playing pedal steel guitar solo, overdubbed, an…

As it casually explores the trombone’s timbres, The Webster Cycles is at times lush, at times stark. Mobile-like in the way that phrases and individual notes drift in and out and twist as if blown by the wind, it is something of a musical conundrum: …

The four pieces that make up this CD—Dark Waves, Among Red Mountains, Qilyuan, and Red Arc/Blue Veil—are for various combinations of one or two pianos, percussion, and electronics. Each piece is built from a complex, polyrhythmic layering of voices t…

Charlemagne Palestine's A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies For Maybeck is a piece for two pianos played simultaneously in a tremolo style that Palestine calls “strumming,” a technique that has defined his piano music since the late ’…

This CD is made up of three compositions: Sevan, The Tubes, and Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre.Sevan is built from a recording of Armenian musician Parik Nazarian’s vocalizations in massive pipes near the shore of Lake Sevan, Armenia. It explores resonance…

Chas Smith is one of the most unique musicians working today. He has created his own musical world—complete with its own instruments and “language.” It is a world of expansive musical tapestries and carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolute…

Daniel Lentz writes about the album, On The Leopard Altar:“The form and flow of Is It Love? is determined by that of the text/lyric. Unlike much of my music-with-text work, it does not use an additive process. Rather, it uses a subtractive one. The v…

JimFox's Descansos, Past, written in April 2004 in memory of composer-performer John Kuhlman, who died a few years earlier, was premiered in Los Angeles (by the same musicians who are heard on the present CD), June 2004, as part of a series of concer…

In three connected sections, Rick Cox's Fade offers a series of harmonic “moments” of various densities and complexities and timbres and lengths. Throughout the work, these moments, like elements in a mobile, are in a constant state of changing persp…

Kyle Gann's Long Night is exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding music for three pianos that sometimes play independently and at other times in synchronization with one another. Gann calls this “the most successful piece from my early, Brian-Eno-influe…

Just Another Asshole was an influential and now-legendary mixed-media publication series edited by Barbara Ess from 1978 to 1987. The submission process was open and collaborative, and each issue was produced in a different format (e.g., limited-edit…

Edition of 200. 550 pages, LP size. Top Ten: 2008-2018 is the second volume in James Hoff’s Top Ten series. In almost every issue since April 1998, Artforum has asked an individual from the art world to compile a top ten list of their favorite recent…

Edition of 200. 440 pages, LP size. Top Ten: 1998–2008 is a new edition of the long-out-of-print publication by James Hoff. In almost every issue since April 1998, Artforum has asked an individual from the art world to compile a top ten list of their…

Steve Peters's from Shelter is music written in 1997 for choreographer Lane Lucas’s dance/theater work Shelter, which deals with “the concept of metamorphosis, and the way connections between people can bring us to a greater awareness of our place in…

Michael Jon Fink's A Temperament for Angels (written in 1989 and fully revised for this recording in 2003) combines equal measures of beauty and grit in a powerful, kaleidoscopic, elusively shaped textural music that is compelling from its first quie…

Frequently shifting focus as its harmonies melt one into another, this swirling piece finds its wildly branching roots touching on many styles of music—from Delius and Debussy to bop to techno. Los Tigres de Marte is sometimes lush and enveloping, so…

The quiet rumbling of trombones and the soft keening of strings haunt the piano’s slow stream of notes. A mosaic, a tapestry. Rich harmonies and simple triads come and go, like the ever-changing, yet ever-similar, landscapes one passes while driving …

Back by popular demand (and available for the first time on CD), this boxed set of three CDs collects all the music released on a popular series of 10-inch vinyl records that were put out by Cold Blue in the early 1980s. During the Cold Blue label’s …

Chas Smith's An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Mur…

Continents of City and Love and Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and double bass. They both feature expanding piano lines that intersect and compliment individually expanding…

Over the past 25 years, Larry Polansky has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run a sonic gamut from wildly boisterous (#6) to serenely introverted (#17, Guitar Canon). Thi…

These three works exist amid an undeniable esthetic spirit of the times—the embracing of pre-compositional principles and structural processes in the service of a highly personal artistic statement. However, John Luther Adams’s recent work tends to t…

This album presents four noted West Coast composers—three from Southern California and one from Fairbanks, Alaska—writing haunting, generally quiet, sometimes lyric, occasionally pensive music for clarinet and bass clarinet accompanied by either stri…

Avant-garde and experimental musics are intrinsically connected to community, collectivism, support, and collaboration. Audiences and artists, stretching to every corner of the globe, continuously rely on each other to push into ever more ambitious r…

Back by popular demand (and available for the first time as a CD), this essential collection of West Coast new music—an anthology known simply as Cold Blue—is a classic. Originally issued on vinyl in 1984, shortly before the demise of the old Cold Bl…

Chas Smith's six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener’s sense of time—the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place—as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense.The …

This CD brings together six of Rick Cox’s elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Co…