Reissues
Malachai-Shadow Weaver Part 2
Double LP version. "The Legendary Pink Dots' classic Malachai (Shadow Weaver Part 2) is now presented in a 2018 remastered version. Malachai is the second half of the Shadow Weaver project, recorded simultaneously with Shadow Weaver. Special guest for this one was Steve Stapleton (Nurse With Wound, Current 93). A tripped out, challenging dive into experimentalism and a favorite for fans of The Legendary Pink Dots."
The Golden Age
Double LP version. "Legendary Pink Dots' classic The Golden Age is now presented in a 2018 Remastered version. 1988. Half of the six-piece Legendary Pink Dots had quit after a long tour. Edward Kaspel & The Silverman were living in a caravan. It was never going to be a happy album, yet it remains a personal favorite for the two survivors of LPDs class of '88. A masterful set of avant-garde, experimentalist melancholia."
Shadow Weaver (Expanded-LPx2)
Double LP version. "The Legendary Pink Dots' classic Shadow Weaver is now presented in a 2018 Remastered & Expanded version. Reflecting the Dots moving away from their electronic-based origin, organic instruments knit rich yet fragile tapestry throughout. Still as vital & relevant as band's primary influences -- Can, Faust, Neu & Meddle-era Pink Floyd, Shadow Weaver shows the bands mastery of psychedelic sound designs."
Mare Australe
"Another brilliant posthumous album by Letha Rodman Melchior. Letha's music, as her visual art, was a great collaged pile of extreme strangeness, with seemingly irreconcilable objects butting heads in ways that end up making great sense. I met Letha a long time ago, when she was in Cell, but I had not much idea of her work beyond that until she had moved to North Carolina and I started hearing her health was bad. Siltbreeze put out an amazing album called Handbook for Mortals (2013), and it was …
Home Fi
Edition of 400. "Vinylization of the recent Home Fi cassette (originally released on the Australian Brierfirld Flood Press label) by this magnificent New Zealand singer/songwriter. We were never able to score a copy of the tape, despite the fact we released Maxine Funke's last LP, Silk (FTR 410LP), so we figured we would perform the public service of making it generally available to the whole wide world. That's just the kind of guys we are! Recorded in stark and simple terms, Home Fi represents …
freeHorn
The form of both freeHorn and ii-v-i consists of a continuous modulation between three different harmonic series. freeHorn weaves together the live interaction of acoustic instruments and computer software written by Larry Polansky and Phil Burk. ii-v-i, a reverberant cloud of moving intonation, gradually drifts from one natural harmonic series to another. Only open strings, 2nd, 3rd and 4th harmonics, and notes stopped at the 7th and 12th frets are used, and the guitars are audibly re-tuned fro…
Windmill
Stephen Whittington writes:“…from a thatched hut draws upon a particular strand of Chinese culture: the Chinese scholar who withdraws, temporarily or permanently, from society. The thatched hut was the place where the great Tang dynasty poets Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Li Bai (Li Po) withdrew from the world. Their example was followed by many others, including the poet Bai Juyi (Po Chu-I), author of Record of the Thatched Hut on Mount Lu, and Xia Gui, the Song dynasty painter of Twelve Views from a Thatc…
Ecstatic Descent
Erik Griswold's Ecstatic Descent is a prepared-piano work that melds composed and improvisational elements to create an intensely animated, one-of-a-kind textural sound world. Performed here by the composer, at times it may call to mind an enormous out-of-control music box or mechanical toy. It also readily lends itself to comparisons to various ever-changing (yet ever the same) natural sound phenomena, and has been likened by composer Annea Lockwood to the bubbling frequencies of a river.The co…
Bhajan
Nicholas Chase's Bhajan, described by one critic as “a pas de deux between violin and electronics,” is in four joined/continuous sections. Influenced by many musics from around the globe, the work tantalizes and bewitches the ear with a breadth of sounds that ebb and flow as if guided by an elusive but inherent sense of logic. The composer performs its electronics/computer part while noted violinist Robin Lorentz (who has appeared on four previous Cold Blue CDs) propels the music compellingly, i…
Twilight Of The Dreamboats
Chas Smith's Twilight of the Dreamboats, one of his quintessential electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures (instruments with such names as Bertoia 718, Que Lastas, lockheed, Mantis, Sceptre, DADO) and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars (Clinesmith, Emmons, Guitarzilla, Cadillac bass), performed by the composer. “Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and market…
After the Wars
Peter Garland's After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is quintessentially Garlandesque. In some ways it marks a slight shift of focus from his more overtly melodic and rhythmically driven material of the past 30 years. Garland writes about the piece:“After the Wars was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as part of her A Sweeter Music project. The idea (I believe) was to focus on the idea of…
In the Village of Hope
Michael Byron's In the Village of Hope is a restless (and in some ways relentless) virtuosic harp solo performed by Tasha Smith Godínez, who commissioned the work. This ever-changing, ever-churning, ever-developing music is unlike anything else in the solo harp repertoire, though not unlike some of Byron’s other recent work, such as his Book of Horizons for pianist Joseph Kubera.Byron writes about the music:“In the Village of Hope,” a purely sentimental title, was composed at the invitation of h…
In The Sea Of Ionia
In the Sea of Ionia is a wildly spinning, charismatically eclectic album containing four of Daniel Lentz’s recent piano works: (1) 51 Nocturnes (2011), a set of very short, contrasting nocturnes that are played without pauses, as one continuous work; (2) Pacific Coast Highway (2014), a primarily textural three-piano piece built of polyrhythmic layers of continuously shifting/drifting harmonies; (3) Dorchester Tropes (2008–09), a four-movement piano solo; (4) In the Sea of Ionia (2007–08) a piece…
The Wind In High Places
The Wind in High Places is an elegant, haunting collection album containing three of John Luther Adams’s serenely powerful recent string works: (1) The Wind in High Places (2011), a three-movement string quartet commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Theodore Front Musical Literature, performed by JACK Quartet; (2) Canticles of the Sky, a four-movement piece for four cello choirs, performed by the 48-member Northwestern University Cello Ensemble, directed and conducted by Hans Jørgen …
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…
Rock (Bande Originale Du Film, 1982) Lp
2019 Small Repress. The first release by Transversales, a French label based in Paris founded by Sebastien Rosat and Jonathan Fitoussi, is the original soundtrack of the film Rock, composed in 1982 by Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013). Parmegiani was a major figure of electro acoustic music and member of the historic GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) where he composed an important work of concert, among which is the masterpiece: De Natura Sonorum (REGRM 009LP). The work of Parmegiani, a virtuoso…