Sounding Numbers
Miguel Angel Crozzoli’s album "Sounding Numbers" explores the intersection of climate data and music. This album features two compelling works: I Am the Forest and I Am the Ocean, both born from transforming scientific data on deforestation and ocean contamination into sound. Through innovative sonification techniques and a blend of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, Crozzoli creates immersive soundscapes that resonate emotionally and inspire action against climate change. Let the haunting…
String Quartets Extended
This album presents the innovative works of Gabriel Iranyi composed between 2012 and 2022. It includes two string quartets and their unique extensions with human voice and the Chinese mouth organ sheng. Iranyi’s compositions explore profound musical spaces and subjective experiences. The album features the intense String Quartet No. 4, the intricate String Quartet No. 5, the emotive Four Love Poems by Paul Celan for soprano and quartet, and the captivating quintet for sheng and string quartet Th…
Portals
Felipe Lara’s music is a whirlwind of energy and motion, characterized by large, expressive brushstrokes that leave palpable traces. His works are in constant flux, pulsating with spectral harmonies and iridescent surfaces. This album includes the three ensemble works Chambered Spirals, Fringes and Ventos Uivantes, as well as Injust Intonations, a reflective solo piano piece. Each composition showcases Lara’s unique ability to combine intricate textures with dynamic, expansive gestures to create…
Outlines of the Night
Elusive and illusory, Age Veeroos’ music captures a unique tension between focus and ambiguity. The album "Outlines of the Night" presents compositions in which, for example, violin and electronics, as in Schattenseele, evoke corresponding sensations of a “shadow soul” through obsessive, circling motifs. In Keha for bass clarinet, physical and biological processes are musically embodied, oscillating between registers. Fantasia “A Threadbare Chant” and Ma olen suur kuu su silmapiiril further demo…
Harpsichords
Tip! "Three harpsichords in various states of disrepair were kindly offered to me by Leeds Conservatoire. I accepted, and a memorandum of understanding was swiftly drawn up. The offer was made under the condition that I might make some music from them, given my penchant for infirm instruments, and their conventional worthlessness to anyone wishing to use them for their intended purpose. There seemed to be an auspiciousness surrounding these harpsichords, the stories they might reveal, and more i…
Eonta
*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-third release »Iannis Xenakis: Eonta« featuring recordings by Ensemble Schwerpunkt, Lorenzo Soulès (piano), Edicson Ruiz (double bass), Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) und Peter Rundel (conductor). The album includes Iannis Xenakis’s music for brass from four decades, from Eonta (1963-1964) to Linaia-Agon (1972), Khal Perr (1983) and Mnamas Xapin Witoldowi Lutosławskiemu (1994), amongst others. In addition to the recordings produced by the WDR, it al…
Helmut Lachenmann: Mes Adieux
bastille musique presents its twenty-ninth release »Helmut Lachenmann: Mes Adieux« featuring Trio Catch, trio recherche, Karolina Öhman (cello), WDR Sinfonieorchester and Lin Liao (conductor). With Notturno (1966-1968), Allegro sostenuto (1986-1988) and the world premiere recording of Mes Adieux – Streichtrio Nr. 2 (2021-2022), the album brings together three outstanding works by Lachenmann from three different creative periods. The WDR recordings are complemented by a 48-page bilingual booklet …
Motor Tapes
Closing the achingly long four years wait since her last full-length, the American composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies returns with “Motor Tapes”, her second release with New World Records. Comprising three astounding new pieces, made in collaboration with three acclaimed ensembles - ensemble 0, Talea Ensemble, and Ensemble Dedalus - that simultaneously encounter her moving into new uncharted territory, while remaining rooted in her singular practice, exploring musical, sociopolitical, and psyc…
Mature Hybird Talking
On Mature Hybird Talking Frank Gratkowski, one of the world’s most advanced and original voices in the field of improvised music, teams up for the first time with one of the leading ensembles for composed contemporary music. He dedicates this 45-minute piece to James Joyce and Iannis Xenakis, who both had a major impact on him. Inspired by the rhythm and sound of Joyce's language, Gratkowski and the Ensemble Modern create a widely ramified, sensitive and incredibly vital musical organism. Energy…
Wanderer
Trio improvisations with Sophie Agnel - piano, Bertrand Gauguet - alto & soprano saxophones and Andrea Neumann - piano frame, electronic devices
Le Purgatoire
"Purgatory is part of a large cycle called Sunset Time which consists of seven days of ritual music. Rituality is one of Pape’s stylistic traits that is often expressed with imaginative and fantastic sound revelations, with unpredictable sound sequences, with powerful flows of voices and instruments in a continuous timbral transfiguration. Surreal and dreamlike sounds accompany the journey of Dante and Virgil and of the other characters they meet, following them to the threshold of Paradise, sou…
Vanishing Points / A Cappella
CD digipack. In his “Pulse Music” compositions of the mid-1970s, composer John McGuire forged a unique interpretation of European serialism. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Gottfried Michael Koenig, McGuire moved to Cologne, Germany in 1970, where he become associated with the world-leading Studio for Electronic Music at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. Like Stockhausen, McGuire found his musical imagination both constrained and inspired by the technology tha…
New American Music, Vol. 4
*2024 stock. Custon CDr* Noa Ain gives us a surreal portrait of violinist Yoko Matsua in “Used to Call Me Sadness,” Joel Chadabe encourages a solo percussionist to interact with an automated electronic system in “Echoes,” Ann McMillan manipulates animal sounds with recording techniques in “Whale I,” Gordon Mumma offers audience members “Do It Yourself” participation in “Cybersonic Cantilevers” and Vladimir Ussachevsky suggests a pre-biblical story of the creation of the world depicted by electro…
New American Music, Vol. 3
*2024 stock. Custon CDr* Works by Talib Rasul Hakim, William Bolcom, Howard Swanson and Frederic Rzewski are presented here. Highlights include Bolcom’s "Whisper Moon" for chamber ensemble and three of Rzewski’s songs, whose lyrics are drawn from words by Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Guatemalan revolutionary Otto Rene Castille.
New American Music, Vol. 2
*2024 stock. Custon CDr* Trumpets and trombones twist through dense pockets of sound in Lucia Dlugoszewski “Angels of the Inmost Heaven”; the voice of a lone guitarist punctures the silence in James Fulkerson’s “Patterns” II and VII; flute, bassoons, viola and vibraphone are intended to “turn some dancers on” in Carman Moore’s “Youth in a Merciful House”; and a guitarist laments to the hum of an Elizabethan-type string and woodwind consort in Stanley Silverman’s “Planh.” This is a thoughtfully b…
Three Cellos
The inaugural release in Greyfade’s innovative new FOLIO music release format, composer Kenneth Kirschner’s Three Cellos is the culmination of a five-year collaboration between Kirschner, arranger & producer Joseph Branciforte, and cellist Christopher Gross.
Dots Kinematics For Electronics & Chamber Orchestra Version II
The name Painjerk, the musical project of Kohei Gomi, didn’t come to mind for a long time. Offhand, I’d say it is likely that I reviewed very few of his releases. Many of those he released himself, and the ones of Harbinger Sound, Editions Mego, Alternative Tentacles and Hospital never reached me. He’s among the few musicians leaving the harsh noise behind and doing other projects. He calls it the “exploration and practice of kinematics of electro-acoustics using unorthodox methodologies, mainly…
Turzets
The latest in a prolific string of solo and collaborative releases by James Rushford, Turzets collects a pair of new works primarily created and recorded last year while the Australian composer-performer was in residence at La Becque, an art center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The side-length piece “Fallaway Whisk” explores hesitation in its many forms—reticence of speech, sonic restraint—using live, abstracted translations of text from English to German against a lush and swelling soundscape.…
Recomposed
*2024 stock* Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–1970) was one of the most distinctive composers in the musical avant-garde after the Second World War. While Karlheinz Stockhausen served as a kind of ‘generator’ in Cologne during the 1950s and 60s, inventing completely new sounds and techniques, Zimmermann was in many ways his opposite, a ‘transformer’ who redefined previously existing material by placing it in new contexts and collage-like structures, anticipating the ideas of the Postmodernists.
Zimm…
-> Sonic Patterns
For decades, Ludger Brümmer has represented a unique, courageous, and often instantly recognisable voice in electronic, algorithmic, and computer music. He develops structures that lead to aesthetic experiences normally found, if at all, only in the most expressive of instrumental works.
Ludger Brümmer’s music is dominated by processes. All processes are on a trajectory towards a climax or evolve from a climax to a minimum. Ultimately, a complete lack of orientation is to be achieved in the clim…