Reissues
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…
Nakadai
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, and with a mallet percussion quartet made up of Bob Fernandez, John Fitzgerald, M.B. Gordy, and Theresa Knight.This first CD reissue of Nakadai allows today’s listeners to hear prototypical Smith—music composed when his present style was in its nascent…
The Webster Cycles
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: comfortably adrift in a sense of motionlessness yet definitely propelled by a sense of forward motion. From moment to moment, an individual voice calls out or a crowd murmurs or voices unite in contrapuntal or parallel efforts.The Webster Cycles, an …
Red Arc / Blue Veil
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 that combine to form large, multi-arch musical shapes that explore a rich palette of harmonic and timbral colors, lush textures, and clear, simple compositional forms. This is music of broad strokes and ever-changing ebb and flow. John Luther Adams ha…
A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies For Maybeck
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 ’60s. It spins out its sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs, and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones grow from its few opening pitches.This live recording from the Maybeck recital hall also contains Palestine’s short comments about his l…
The Tubes
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, echoes, and voice properties.The Tubes weaves together the breath-like sounds of the Atlantic Ocean as it strikes tubular volcanic rock formations on the Island of El Hierro (the westermost of the Canary Islands) with the breathy tones of Jon Hasse…
Descent
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 absolutely still, but evolve via a slow, constant change of aural perspective. Smith’s soundworld, however, it is not an altogether alien one, and critics, in their praise of Smith’s work, have repeatedly compared his compositions—some resonantly beautiful, …
On The Leopard Altar
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 voices begin each line with the nearly simultaneous sounding of all the phonemes of all of the words. As the work progresses, phonemes and notes are taken away until a finished line emerges.“Lascaux is scored for wineglasses, sixteen of which are rubb…
Descansos, Past
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 concerts held at the historic Schindler House.Descansos, Past sets an ever-pizzicato double bass (a five-string, extending to low B), which is featured in a few solo sections, alongside a choir of nine ever-arco cellos, one of which soars up to the highest…
Fade
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 perspective.
Rick Cox is a composer and skilled multi-instrumentalist whom guitarist/composer Ry Cooder called “the hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.” Cox was an early explorer/developer of “prepared electric guitar” techniques His conc…
Long Night
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-influenced, ambient period, a variable-length piece for three non-synchronized pianos at different tempos.”For this recording, all three piano parts were recorded by Sarah Cahill.The composer writes about the piece:“I wrote Long Night very much under the i…
Just Another Asshole
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-edition zine by Ess, tabloid-sized graphic arts magazine, 4 pages in an issue of Artforum, photography book, LP record album, paperback book). Several were edited with Jane Sherry or Glenn Branca.Issue 6 of the magazine, co-edited with Branca, was publis…
Top Ten: 2008-2018
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 exhibitions (or concerts, television programs, books, events, etc.). In 2008, Hoff compiled the first ten years of this column into a new publication, with all of the articles’ accompanying images redacted, rendering the pictorial layout and design …
Top Ten: 1998-2008
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 favorite recent exhibitions (or concerts, television programs, books, events, etc.). In this volume, Hoff compiles the first ten years of this column into a new publication, with all of the articles’ accompanying images redacted, rendering the picto…
From Shelter
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 life.” The gently undulating three-section Three Short Stories and the beautifully insistent My Burning Skin to Sleep form a suite that very successfully stands apart from the theater/dance work for which they were composed. Three violas calmly stro…
A Temperament For Angels
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 quiet violin note (to its full sixteen voices of strings and electronic/sampled sounds and percussion) to its final shimmer of decaying cymbals. Often dark and moody, this music speaks in broad, chromatic harmonies and light, nearly detached single pitch…