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…
Tabula Rasa
New vinyl reissue in facsimile gatefold edition, includes original liner notes by Wolfgang Sandner in enclosed booklet.
Piano Études
Absolutely beautiful LP of intimate drifting lo-fi piano nostalgia from Hokkaido’s Mashu Hayasaka on the store's own imprint.
Sérempie - Compositions For Ondes Martenot And Piano
This companion to our Messiaen et Autours de Messiaen collects together another classic group of works for Onde Martenot and piano, this time by Darius Milhaud, Andre Jolivet, Arvo Part, Kazuo Fukushima and Francisco Semprun, collected together here for the first time: an essential chapter in the history of a remarkable instrument. The performances are immaculate and the sound transparent. A pleasure from beginning to end. Historic.
Ftarri 16 07 2023
Taku Sugimoto is a Tokyo-based guitarist and composer known worldwide for his highly restrained minimalistic compositions and performances. Wakana Ikeda, also based in Tokyo, is a flute player who also composes music. Sugimoto and Ikeda pursue similar musical directions and often perform together. Pere Xirau is a drummer/percussionist from Barcelona.
Xirau came to Japan in the summer of 2023, and on July 16 he performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, in a trio with Sugimoto and Ikeda. This CD contains two pi…
Polytempo Music
Other Minds is pleased to present Polytempo Music, a new recording by American composer Brian Baumbusch with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Polytempo Music draws influence from Indonesian gamelan music and minimalism, with their interlocking rhythms, stable harmonies, and kaleidoscopic instrumental colors. Conceptually, it also owes a debt to Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic experiments. Building on those foundations, Baumbusch invites us to explore an advanced heterophony—multiple ins…
Liturgie
Huge Tip! The new Girolamo De Simone album is finally out. In his own words "The title, ‘Liturgy', refers to a certain method of creating music, it involves a process that is analogous to a ritual, starting from the moment of composition. This process has the ability to evoke a heightened state of consciousness, where the focus is on perceiving others from one's own perspective and being fully present in the current moment. The essence of the action or movement in this music lies in the transiti…
Since When Has The Bright Moon Existed?
Chinese-American composer Kui Dong draws inspiration from old forms, employs unusual instrumental combinations, and even commingles four languages within her compositions on this collection of world premiere recordings. The major work Shui Diao Ge Tou and Song is performed brilliantly by San Francisco’s adventurous choir Volti, led by conductor Robert Geary, who also presents the heartfelt Let Frogs and Crickets Carry It On with the Piedmont Children’s Choir. Pianists Sally Pinkas and Evan Hirsc…
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…
Antigone-Legend / Jefferson
Carol Plantamura and Frederic Rzewski met in 1965 when they were both at the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo. After beginning to work together in 1966, they collaborated in Rome as members of the improvising collective Musica Elettronica Viva, and from 1966 to 1970 they performed together throughout Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany as a piano-vocal duo. Jefferson was written for Carol Plantamura in 1970 as part of a seri…
Assemblage
George Lewis (b 1952) combines an astonishing level of creativity with trenchant critiques of many traditional conceptions about experimental music. The four compositions on this album reference a wide range of ideas, from rhetoric in Ancient Rome to actor network theory, and the album's eponymous composition finds its grounding in the concept of the "assemblage," (or agencement in French) a pragmatic, material, non-teleological approach to composition. Among the album's compositions, Mnemosis (…
Long Piano
The melodic and, in the case of the solo piano music, timbral materials from which Christian Wolff's (b 1934) music is made are rarely unusual; these are ordinary, everyday things. However, Wolff's rhythmic invention is of great range and variety: complex polyrhythms, speech-like-rhythms, the music flowing at a freely fluctuating rate or proceeding in a plain, straightforward manner, silences. This mix of unusual and ordinary results in a music unlike any other. And, in a piece of such length as…
Still
James Romig (b 1971) endeavors to create music that reflects the intricate complexity of the natural world, where fundamental structures exert influence on both small-scale iteration and large-scale design, obscuring boundaries between form and content. Still, for solo piano (2016), inspired by the paintings of Clyfford Still, comprises 43 individual "Iterations" that may be performed in a continuous unbroken strand of music that lasts approximately 55 minutes, or it may be divided into smaller …
Dialogues and Contrasts / Colloquy
The title Dialogues and Contrasts describes the nature of the exchange which takes place between the performer and the materials committed to tape. In the first movement the exchange is more in the nature of an argument. Though initially each side appears to favor an independent thematic course, as the movement progresses the performers engage in direct response to the statements on tape. The second movement is more subdued and reflective, with many solo passages, particularly from the French ho…
Lower Limit
The immersive sonic textures that characterize Michael Winter's (b 1980) music are crafted from comprehensive lists of data, with each composition encompassing a musical question that is addressed algorithmically. A performance lasts for as long as it takes to "answer" the question, expressing all results as efficiently as possible. Winter leaves room for unanticipated results by keeping things open, notably in the instrumentation, which, rather than specifying instruments, tends to designate ce…
Musing And Reminiscence
Ezra Sims (1928-2015) was known mainly as a composer of microtonal music. Surrounded by world-class performers who championed his music, he produced a large number of chamber and solo, choral, and two orchestral works. With his unwavering commitment to his unique vision, he made an enormous contribution to modern music. This retrospective spans his entire career, almost fifty years of compositional activity, and is an excellent introduction to his very distinctive sound world. Sims’s lyricism an…
Sonatas
Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) is, understandably, best known for his computer-assisted compositions and works utilizing electronics. The three pieces included in this collection span a crucial fifteen-year period in Hiller's career. The first was written two years before Quartet No. 4 for Strings, The ILLIAC Suite. The second work was written three years into his time as a music professor at the University of Illinois, while the final sonata in this collection was written during his second year at …
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…
Duo, Fives, Quintet, Trio
Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere points of interest. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contempor…