Reissues
Alloy (Golden 1)
Originally released in 2000. The Golden Research is the name chosen for the complete documentation of previously unpublished works by Charlemagne Palestine starting from the early 1960s to the mid-late 1970s. Such a huge project will include seminal collage and electronic music, Bell Studies, New York and California drones, piano drones as well as more specific compositions. All the recordings will be exclusively available through Alga Marghen. Be ready to change your own opinion about minimalis…
The Instrument of Control
Rare recordings of William Burroughs in conversation and readings from the 1970s - 80s. This is an essential insight into the mind and writings of arguably the most influential writer from the Beat generation. Through his mordant satire of cultural aspirations, homosexual eroticism and political power, Burroughs focuses our gaze into the abyss. His cold language creates beauty through a terror that we are just able to bear.
Variations VII
In 1966, 10 New York artists and 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music and theatre performances, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, held in October at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. The artists were John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. Archival material has been assembled into 10 films, each of whic…
Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972-1973
Nearly 40 years after her passing, Judee Sill remains one of the most important and singular talents of the Laurel Canyon scene. Her two releases for David Geffen's Asylum (1971's Judee Sill and 1973's Heart Food) are critically celebrated masterpieces of orchestral folk. Her songs have been covered by artists as diverse as The Turtles and Will Oldham, and her fans include Jim O'Rourke, Devendra Banhart, Graham Nash, Sleater Kinney and more. This amazing collection of previously unreleased live …
silver apples
This is a reissue - in 1000 copies only - of the self-titled first album by '60s electronic legends Silver Apples, originally released by Kapp Records in 1968. Fresh off their stint as The Overland Stage Electric Band, Simeon and Dan Taylor formed their own extravagant, two-man electronic space-odyssey, Silver Apples, to pretty remarkable critical acclaim. Their debut enjoyed a 10-week stay in Billboard's Top 100 list, and the album's first track, "Oscillations," made the Top 10 list in numerous…
contact
This is a reissue (in 1000 numbered copies only) of the second album Contact by '60s electronic legends Silver Apples, originally released by Kapp Records in 1969. This enigmatic duo, armed only with percussion, vocals and an early, specialized synthesizer, is often credited with giving the musical world its first electronic album, as well as having a significant influence on bands which followed in their wake; bands such as Ultravox and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Silver Apples, named af…
Cobra
Above all, COBRA is a musical experience. Words cannot convey. Listen, just listen, and you're liable to find yourself lost in the magic of the game, and the music. Cobra is an unpublished but recorded and frequently performed musical composition by John Zorn that was conceived as a loosely structured system, or game piece, for a group of musical improvisors and a prompter.Zorn completed Cobra on October 9, 1984. The composition consists of a set of cues notated on cards, and rules corresponding…
Z=7L
Created in 1973 by two former MAGMA musicians, Yochk'o SEFFER (Saxophone) and François "FATON" CAHEN (Keyboards), ZAO displays a music both intriguing and complex. The band offers an original mixture between Progressive rock, jazz, traditional Magyar influences and modern classical composers (BARTOK, STRAVINSKI...). Sophisticated meters are punctuated by wind instruments and piano, putting the stress on strange-sounding themes. "Live !" is a never-issued album, recorded at the famous French club…
Osiris
Created in 1973 by two former MAGMA musicians, Yochk'o SEFFER (Saxophone) and François "FATON" CAHEN (Keyboards), ZAO displays a music both intriguing and complex. The band offers an original mixture between Progressive rock, jazz, traditional Magyar influences and modern classical composers (BARTOK, STRAVINSKI...). Sophisticated meters are punctuated by wind instruments and piano, putting the stress on strange-sounding themes. "Live !" is a never-issued album, recorded at the famous French club…
The End Of An Ear
At this point Wyatt was in between work with the Soft Machine and Matching Mole and was aided by the likes of Elton Dean (alto saxello), David Sinclair (organ), Mark Charig (cornet), Neville Whitehead (bass), Mark Ellidge (piano) & Cyril Ayers (percussion). Wyatt himself on drums, mouth, piano, organ. The album opens & closes with a baffling space-jazz 'cover' of Gil Evans' 'Las Vegas Tango' that is quite deep, and proceeds through various settings of psychedelic jazz, Gong-like jamming and free…
Third
The Soft Machine plunged deeper into jazz and contemporary electronic music on this pivotal release, which incited the Village Voice to call it a milestone achievement when it was released. It's a double album of stunning music, with each side devoted to one composition -- two by Mike Ratledge and one each by Hopper and Wyatt with substantial help from a number of backup musicians, including Canterbury mainstays Elton Dean and Jimmy Hastings The Ratledge songs come closest to fusion jazz althoug…
L'oeuvre pour piano
A beautiful boxed edition with an outstanding version of Satie's piano music performed by Ciccolini, who is totally inside this music and makes the most of its contrasts of mood and atmosphere. Ciccolini's playing is pliant and graceful, and under his fingers the music seems to breathe and come alive: in many ways this is the most distintive and 'definitive' Satie piano music
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
The People United Will Never Be Defeated! by the left-wing composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski is a landmark in American piano literature. The work comprises 36 variations on a protest song of the same name by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega. Almost every bar is laden with pianistic virtuosity, yet the listener is carried through some very complex music in a wholly natural way. The variations themselves all symbolize the different phases and aspects of a struggle: from angry, highly-energiz…
The Desert Music
The Desert Music is a work of music for voices and orchestra composed by Steve Reich based on texts by William Carlos Williams. It consists of five movements, and in both its tempi and arrangement of thematic material, the piece is in a characteristic arch form (ABCBA). The piece is scored for a chorus of 27 voices: nine sopranos, and six each of altos, tenors and basses. It calls for a woodwind section comprising four flutes with three doubling on piccolo, four oboes with three doubling on cor …
A Portrait
Arvo Pärt: A Portrait. His Works, his Life. It contains 2 CDs with over 2½ hours of music, richly illustrated with rarely seen photographs, and a detailed essay by Nick Kimberley. The music of Arvo Pärt draws on traditions stretching back across the centuries, yet it could only have been written by someone who had lived through the complexities and contradictions of the last half-century. In his native Estonia, his early music incurred the wrath of the Soviet authorities; when he moved to the We…
Ballet mecanique
Ballet Mécanique (1924) was a project by the American composer George Antheil and the filmaker/artist Fernand Léger. Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is Antheil's best known and most enduring work. It remains famous for its radical style and instrumentation as well as its storied history. In concert performance, the "ballet" is not a show of human dancers but of mecha…
Glassworks
In 1982 Philip Glass became the first composer since Aaron Copland to join the CBS Masterworks label. Glass had formed the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968, but it wasn't until his opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) that he achieved great critical and popular success. His first album for Masterworks, Glassworks, tripled all sales projections, pleasing audiences, critics and Glass himself: "I'm very pleased with it, the way it's received in performance. The pieces seem to have an emotional quality t…
Forms 1-4
Four works by James Tenney, each paired with music by an American composer to whom the Tenney composition is dedicated. The four 'Forms' compositions share with their senior partners -- Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, and Morton Feldman -- a focus on sound and, in a more intuitive way, mood. Tenney's music draws upon an unorthodox and original approach to harmony. The compositions include James Tenney's 'Form 1' (1993) and Edgard Varese's 'Octandre' (1923), James Tenney's 'Form 2' (1993)…
String quartet (1979)
Morton Feldman’s String Quartet (1979) follows over a decade of compositional activity where the composer was constantly occupied with a new piece for orchestra. In the eleven years before the Quartet he produced fifteen orchestral works, beginning with On Time and the Instrumental Factor (1969) up to Violin and Orchestra (1979). In the following eight years only three orchestral works were written, The Turfan Fragments (1980), Coptic Light (1986) and For Samuel Beckett (1987). With the String Q…
Inner Cities
Performed by Daan Vandewalle (piano), 4 hours, 24 minutes worth. "Alvin Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvises, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 100 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale s…