Composition / Avant-Garde

200 copies. Light blue vinyl. Including an original insert that functions as Obi, with liner notes by Bradford Bailey and James Rushford.Fortunale is a string quartet by Marco Baldini, composed between 2024 and 2025 and recorded by Quartetto Maurice with Manuel Volpe at Okum Studio in Rivoli, near Turin, in October 2025. It began as a duo for violin and viola and found its final form as a quartet.The title is an archaic Italian word for an event brought about by chance, long used for a violent s…

John Cage's Five Stone Wind (1988) and Cartridge Music (1960), both written for Merce Cunningham dances, played by David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi and Michael Pugliese. 2008 remaster of the 1991 release, Cage Edition volume 4.

Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise- sculpting, as well as invented and real instruments played by Fred Frith. This was a hard time and the mood is intense, lean and not cheerful, though there are some gruesomely cheery inserts. There's no fat but a lot of meat here.

Luigi Nono's Risonanze erranti, the 1986 song cycle for Massimo Cacciari on texts by Melville and Bachmann, for mezzo, flute, tuba, percussion and live electronics: Ensemble Prometeo and the SWR Experimentalstudio. SACD.

Facsimile reprint of Walter Zimmermann's book Desert Plants, his interviews with American experimental composers from a 1976 trip to America

Buh Records is proud to announce the release of "Cello in My Life", the new album by the renowned Ecuadorian composer Mesías Maiguashca. This deeply personal work reflects an intimate exploration of the relationship between the cello and the artist's life, realized in collaboration with celebrated cellist Gaby Schumacher. The album features six remarkable compositions spanning Maiguashca’s career from 1972 to 2015. Each piece offers a unique perspective on his groundbreaking approach to music, b…

Five works for six or four percussionists in surround sound: Xenakis's Persephassa, Mâche's Aera, Zihua Tan's Sorites and two pieces by Alcides Lanza, played by the Music in Motion Ensemble directed by Aiyun Huang.

The complete Imaginary Landscapes 1-5 and Credo in US by John Cage, with radios, phonograph records and percussion, played by Percussion Group Cincinnati in the first volume of the Mode Cage percussion works.

Dr. John Chowning (b. 1934) is a pioneering computer musician, composer and professor who, in 1967, discovered the FM synthesis algorithm. This breakthrough in electronic music allowed for  simple, yet rich timbres described as sounding "real." With this discovery, Chowning composed singular, dramatic electronic music and changed the timbre of music forever. Chowning utilized the potential of computers to synthesize sounds according to programmed instructions. The composer's use of his own FM al…

Tip!  Frozen Reeds is proud to present Mark Fell’s ‘Psychic Resynthesis’, an instrumental work performed by Explore Ensemble. This double LP, with included digital download, is the label’s 8th release, arriving 13 years after its foundation. Fell is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and theorist based in Rotherham, UK. Renowned for his rigorous and conceptual approach to electronic music and sound art, his work explores the limits of structure, rhythm, and perception through a blend of compu…

Christian Wolff's complete works for bass, played by Robert Black under the composer's supervision: Look She Said, Jasper (with violin), String Bass Exercise out of Bandiera Rossa, Dark as a Dungeon (with trombone) and Untitled for electric bass-guitar.

Xenakis Edition volume 13: works for soloist and ensemble by Iannis Xenakis, played by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble under Steven Schick, with the first recording of Zythos for trombone and six marimbas.

A new vision of John Cage, via his complete works for string quartet. Spanning forty years of the artist’s activities, these three masterworks illuminate the different stylistic periods in the output of this 20th century icon.

Jürg Frey, the Swiss composer, clarinetist, and central figure in the Wandelweiser collective, presents three recent chamber works—all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, with one piece featuring the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa. These compositions mark a significant evolution in Frey's aesthetic. As Ian Mikyska of the Prague collective explains, "Jürg is neither writing the music he used to write nor writing the music that anyone expects of him"—moving beyon…

Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two features three rarely encountered works by John Cage, interpreted by Apartment House. The album brings together the sparse, spatial interplay of “Two”, the poised transformations of “Thoreau Drawings”, and the hypnotic, layered repetitions of “Hymnkus” in performances marked by clarity, restraint, and ensemble sensitivity.

Mind is moving (IX) is a composition for guitar by Michael Pisaro-Liu, affiliated with the avant-garde composers group The Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. Pisaro's work can be characterized as experimental minimalism, often utilizing silence, a minimum of musical material, and extended composition durations. This version is executed by Slovenian guitarist Primož Sukič.

Iannis Xenakis's late electroacoustic music became electronic: all sounds are synthetic "explicit computer music" as Peter Hoffmann called it. The music presented here shows Xenakis's way back from spatialized immersive music and multimedia spectacle to simple loudspeaker music. The sound does not move anymore, there are no synchronized visuals: nothing remains but structured noise. Xenakis used two inventions he had already presented in the context of the Polytopes: sounds created by stochastic…

Roberto Fabbriciani plays the complete flute works of Henri Pousseur, including Flexions I, Éclipticare and Zeus joueur de flûtes with live electronics by Alvise Vidolin, plus the 1957 tape piece Scambi.

anabasis (1) is a composition in 72 parts for five musicians, based on four kinds of materials: Sand, Wind, Tone and Wave; these materials are arranged and intertwined with a fifth ‘Interludes’ strand that interacts with the four materials. All of these are then ‘unbound’ over the course of the piece by changing continuity in a variety of ways outlined in the score. This interpretation of the score is a live performance that features prepared reed organ, electromagnetic pick-ups, sand, pedals, D…

This album presents Annea Lockwood’s complete concert piano works, born from a deep collaborative journey. It culminates in a new version of Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano, where voice and memory resonate through the piano’s frame via transducer speaker.

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…

Acclaimed NYC composer, producer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion on "Of Shadow and Substance".

DVD of two filmed portraits made by Luc Ferrari and Gérard Patris for French TV in the 1960s: Stockhausen rehearsing Momente, and Hommage à Edgard Varèse, released here for the first time with English subtitles.

The first ever survey of the seminal British experimental music collective, Gentle Fire, "Explorations (1970 - 1973)" offers a remarkable and previously unavailable glimpse of their activities during the early 1970s.

Nippon Cultural Broadcasting (= Bunka Hōsō) is known for airing Toshiro Mayuzumi’s composition for “Works for musique concrète X.Y.Z.” the very first Japanese work of musique concrète. Now, for the first time, the long-lost broadcast recordings produced by the director of that era are being released! These include a piece by Yori-aki Matsudaira's father, Yoritsune Matsudaira, created by repeatedly dubbing instrumental material, as well as an experimental work unique to Bunka Hōsō, produced throu…

First released in 1969 on the Advanced Recordings label, this album represents Richard Maxfield’s music manifesto. A wild collage of highly manipulated sonic events from an extreme variety of analog sources.

Iannis Xenakis's early electroacoustic works define already the compositional space he is using later in his mature, almost one-hour long works like Persepolis or La Légende d'Er. After arriving in Paris as a Greek refuge in 1947, Xenakis quickly found a work as construction engineer with the architect Le Corbusier. He tried in vain for several years to become a member of the Groupe De Musique Concrète (GRM) and thus to gain access to the electroacoustic studios at the French radio. Pierre Schae…

Chamber works by Irish composer Gerald Barry for solo piano, violin and piano, piano trio and piano quartet, played by the Fidelio Trio with Rose Redgrave and the composer. All but In the Asylum are first recordings.

Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's Baobab and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the…

"In September 2019 I was asked by cellist Leo Svensson Sander and harpist Stina Hellberg Agback if I would be interested participating in a project together with them, violinist Eva Lindal and a couple of visual artists, a poet and a scenographer, which would deal with questions concerning how to make art in times of crisis, something I gladly and curiously accepted. The project would take Messiaen's ’Quatuor pour la fin de temps’ and its genesis, creation and historical context as a point of de…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "This is pure intuitive music, full of improvisation and spontaneity. here we have amazing musicians that interact between them in an amazing way creating pasages that despite using heavily experimentation and improvisation are really coherent and also they explore without falling into chaotic musical pieces. I am really amazed by this musicians that are constantly exploring new sounds with their instruments yet retaining a "group spirit" that allows them to …

The idea for this album began taking shape in 2021 and has slowly evolved into a seven-track snapshot of Juli Deák’s musical world and artistic thinking. Coming from the challenging, refined, and often seemingly flawless sound of classical music, the flutist began redirecting her musical voice toward a much more personal space through experimentation and improvisation. What eventually grew into this project originally began as a handful of unfinished ideas—which only revealed their true meaning …

Tricatel is proud to present, in a limited edition of 777 hand-numbered copies, the superb double vinyl/book dedicated to 7×7, inspired by Bertrand Burgalat.

1991 release ** Works by six composers from new music's acclaimed baritone, Thomas Buckner who's been called "the voice of the new". Works written by: Robert Ashley, Jon Gibson, Nils Vigeland, Peter Gena, Annea Lockwood, and Roscoe Mitchell.

James Opstad is probably better known as the double bassist with Apartment House than as a composer. But this should change with this release—the first CD of his music as a composer. Five beautiful pieces tracking the evolution of Opstad's work as it moves from textural electro-acoustic music to pieces exploring the layering of instruments playing at slightly different tempi. The album begins with "Nymphaea" (2020), performed by the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys, piano; George Barton, vibraphone), follow…

*300 copies limited edition* Combining the lyricism of chamber music, the raw tones of punk and metal, the clarity of post-rock, and the abstraction of electroacoustic music, Dionée offers a unique, cinematic musical journey. The trio, with its colorful instrumentation, delivers with Mille-feuilles an astonishing, orchestral‑sounding work in which oboe, accordion, and electric bass converse with a range of electronic instruments and effects.

The sixth and final volume in Wergo's acclaimed series of recordings, Earle Brown - A Life in Music completes the label's reissue of the eighteen LPs of Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series, recorded between 1960 and 1973. The first disc in the set contains works by John Cage and Christian Wolff from the early 1960s. Disc two presents violinist Paul Zukofsky accompanied by pianist Gilbert Kalish in works by Crumb, Yun, Wuorinen and Cage. The final disc contains works by South Americ…

Three discs, three distinct worlds - each one a landmark. Vol. 5 of Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series may be the most dramatically varied installment in the entire programme, arcing from the handmade electronic circuitry of four American mavericks to one of the great piano sonatas of the 20th century, and closing with the golden tone of the most celebrated flutist of the post-war avant-garde. The first disc is Electric Sound, the only album the Sonic Arts Union ever released as a group. Or…

"Wergo's reissues of the legendary Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series have been a big hit with fans of contemporary music around the world. Each set is a treasure-trove of works by a wide range of composers, performed by some of the finest musicians of the time. The three CDs of volume four feature string quartets by Boulez, Scelsi and Earle Brown, works for chamber orchestra by Xenakis, Aldo Clementi, Bo Nilsson, Wlodzimierz Kotonski and Yuji Takahashi and works by Milko Kelemen, Niccolo Cas…

The voice as instrument, the temple bell as orchestra, the piano as detonator. Vol. 3 of Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series traces three radical propositions about sound and its sources - each originating from a different continent, each redefining what was possible within its medium. The first disc belongs to Cathy Berberian. Originally issued on Time Records in 1962, it captures the American mezzo-soprano - then based in Milan and married to Luciano Berio - at the height of her extraordin…