Hope Lies Fallow
Six pieces developed by Johnny and Keir from music by Hildegard van Bingen and Orlando de Lassus. Three violin duets, + three tracks for violins and the voice of Celeste Oram.
Tehran Dust
Three chamber pieces by the Austrian composer Klaus Lang, plus two arrangements by Klaus of early music by Johannes Ockeghem and Pierre de la Rue.
Played by Trio Amos with Klaus Lang
The Pankow-Park Sessions
What happens when a composer starts improvising in his mid-80s… Duo from Berlin for cello and piano.
Gold
* Digipack CD* The lightning rod for Alabaster DePlume’s luminous follow up to the widely-acclaimed 2020 release To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 was personal. “Someone was going through a thing,” says the Mancunian poet-performer. “I said, ‘go forward in the courage of your love’. And then I thought 'yeah, that's what I need to hear as well’.” Gold is a sonorous double album that celebrates the communal act of making music and the relationships that can be explored when you purposefully avoid …
Michael Pisaro-Liu: Radiolarians
*In process of stocking* Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world-in-variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms “transcriptions” of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel’s drawings. Radio…
World in World
Black Truffle is pleased to announce World in World, the latest solo offering from prolific Berlin-based guitarist-composer Julia Reidy. Where the recent trilogy of LP releases – brace, brace (Slip, 2019), In Real Life (Black Truffle, 2019), and Vanish (Editions Mego, 2020) – focussed on increasingly lush electronic settings for Reidy’s propulsive fingerpicking and auto-tuned vocals, arranged into wide-ranging side-long epics, World in World finds Reidy refocusing on the core elements of their a…
In Otherness Oneself
Kaja Draksler states that “as a person who speaks and understands different languages, I have an impression that my identity is multifaceted, I have to lose something in myself in order to let the “spirit” of a new language inside me. So in this way I am constantly becoming in otherness myself.” In building this album pianist and composer Kaja Draksler worked on developing specific musical languages for each piece. She attempted to restrict herself to maintaining each language although as she po…
Caspar
This habit some experimental musicians have of applying forced context or stories to what is essentially pure improvised music does sometimes perplex me. Here Janek references Kaspar Hauser with the title and in the sleeve notes. He also states the intention “…to de- and reformulate the idea of beauty”. When referencing the case of Kaspar Hauser, I assume Janek sees himself as “…set free…” from traditional technique, and aims, on this disc at least, to “…redefine by discover[y] and recover the p…
Two Extended Pieces for Four Pianos
Building on the back of their stunning release of Ensemble 0’s rendering of "Femenine" issued earlier this year, Sub Rosa returns with "Two Extended Pieces for Four Pianos", featuring brand new recording of two seminal works composed by Julius Eastman between 1970 and 1980 - "Evil N*gger" (1979) and "Crazy N*gger" (1980) - realised by Nicolas Horvath, Melaine Dalibert, Stephane Ginsburgh, and Wilhem Latchoumia.
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
58'
58' was composed in 2010 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of d-zAkord. I wanted a very minimalist piece with few sound events and long silences. At that time we presented t'Drone(s)Scape', a sound/living installation lasting 3 hours. The public was invited to sit or lie down in the center of the sonic maelstrom for a multicast travel. It is in this context that 58' was imagined.
Although unconventional, the 58' score is extremely precise. The musicians follow a graphic score, with time p…
Seminal
A two-part composition that combines two antagonistic and complementary dimensions: a text of data read by the artist Orlan and a virtual orchestra composed of four singers (Loré Lixenberg, Joan La Barbara, Wills Morgan and Jacques Lizène) and 124 different instruments.
Approdi 3, Avanguardie Musicali a Napoli - Volume III
**300 copies** Konsequenz has released a new anthology that offers another incredible window into the Napoli’s remarkable experimental endeavours, another essential artifact for any fan of Italian border and avant-garde musics.
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 realms. This spirit of …
Anagnorisis
Robert Hughes, composer and author, is a graduate of the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) and composition student of Aaron Copland, Carlos, Chavez, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Lou Harrison. He has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensemble, voices, performance art events and a wide variety of media, including twenty film scores and a large body of electronic music. His compositions include commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival, Oakland Symphony, Arch Ense…
Music For The Kama Sutra
*2022 stock* Robert Hughes, composer and author, is a graduate of the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) and composition student of Aaron Copland, Carlos, Chavez, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Lou Harrison. He has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensemble, voices, performance art events and a wide variety of media, including twenty film scores and a large body of electronic music. His compositions include commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival, Oakland Sympho…
Sonatas And Interludes For Prepared Piano
**2022 stock** Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, a cycle of 20 short pieces for prepared piano (a piano modified by inserting nuts and bolts and other objects between the piano strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects) by American composer John Cage. Created in 1946–48 after the composer had been introduced to Indian visual and performing arts, the cycle was intended to represent the so-called permanent emotions—the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the comi…
Because a circle is not enough
music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…
3 String Quartets
Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968–71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers— timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials—were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musici…
Approdi 1, Avanguardie Musicali a Napoli - Volume I
Approdi is a cultural operation involving thirteen composers and numerous other artists from heterogeneous segments of the Neapolitan visual arts. The guest composers of the first volume are Carlo Vignaturo, Enzo Amato, Max Fuschetto, Girolamo De Simone, Giusto Pappacena, Piero Viti, Vito Ranucci, Gabriele Montagano, Patrizio Marrone, Enrico Iannaccone, Alessandro Petrosino, Carlo Mormile and Gaetano Panariello. The album was then joined by the poet Luca Buonaguidi, with a lyric for the late com…
Pulse Music
*CD gatefold wallet with tip in booklet* Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seria…