Intermediate Obscurities III (Live At Spontaneous Music Festival October 5th 2019)
**200 copies limited edition** Live recording from Dirk Serries’ Tonus project, which explores long-form, minimal, graphic score pieces.
String Quartet II
* 2021 Stock ** During the decades following the Second World War, all eyes shifted toward New York, a city which, at that moment, played host to some of brightest creative minds of the century. Innovations were abound. Visual artists, writers, thinkers, musicians, and composers continuously pushed into previously unthinking ground. While the United States had been previously known to give birth to a wild and distinct breed of composer, from Charles Ives to Nancarrow, Harry Partch, Cowell, and b…
Ursae Minoris
**300 copies limited edition** "Ursae Minoris, meaning ‘of Ursa Minor’, is the title of this work because in this album we encounter this constellation not as a singular instance but as an evolution of multiple perspectives to ruminate upon. As our view of the stars changes with time and place, the three movements of this piece each offer a different aural interpretation. While working on his string quartet Perpetuo Motum, Baroni happened upon the diaries of Ciriaco d’Ancona (1391-1455), an Ita…
Voces
Voces documents many of Walter Zimmermann’s compositions for voices from 1979–2016. The words set range from Meister Eckhart and Hadewijch to Lermontov, Mandelstam, Jabès, Tranströmer, Ingold and Robert Creeley (with his voice accompanying the musicians). Performers include: Claudia Barainsky, the musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (including David Tudor & Takehisha Kosugi), Tehila Nini Goldstein, KNM Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Peter Schöne / Jan Phili…
Works for Piano
"The piano was the favourite instrument of Morton Feldman (1926 – 1987). “What is the difference between an orchestra and a piano? A piano has pedals”, he once said. The three works on the CD – Triadic Memories (1981), For Bunita Marcus (1985) and Palais de Mari (1986) – are iconic of Feldman’s compositional trajectory. Firstly, because of their length. The first two pieces each last almost an hour and a half, Palais de Mari 25 minutes. Furthermore, the limitation of the musical material is stri…
Works for Ensemble
Wolfram Schurig's musical career began with instrumental playing. After basic training on the recorder, his concert studies with Kees Boeke, one of the protagonists of historically informed performance practice, left their mark on him. This experience plays an important role in Schurig's working method as a composer: "You simply write music differently when you are on stage yourself. You owe it to the performer to deliver something that is playable, and in which he can find himself as a co-creat…
Aggregate Forms
"The radically mind-expanding challenges of Catherine Lamb’s string quartets have given me great joy and satisfaction. Imagining and creating the sonic relations yields an integration of number and sound, offering a pathway toward ultimate oneness. Opening ears and mind to infinitely rich patterns, these resonances penetrate deeply to the core. The recording is not an endpoint, but part of a broadening process, a continuous evolution of abstract relationships becoming concrete, erasing artificia…
Krypta
The Swiss composer, sound and video artist Jannik Giger lifts the veils and creates access to the usually rather hidden, private worlds of music making on this album Krypta. The rage, teachings, interjections and body sounds of the mostly already deceased world-famous conductors are embedded like relics in the morbid-ritual accompaniment of the fictional orchestra.Can the ex-patriarchs one day be resurrected? At least they are brought to speak in a new way in their own requiem, come to unusually…
1. Keintate / Eine Letzte Art Chansons
Friedrich Cerha, whose monumental Spiegel cycle and his completion of Alban Berg's Lulu have secured him a place amongst the most eminent composers of our time, celebrated his 95th birthday on 17 February 2021. This album presents two of his lesser known very typical Viennese works, featuring chansonnier HK Gruber. While somehow in the tradition of the local music played at the Heurigen, both pieces dig deep into the musical and spiritual soul of Viennas folk and art music. This extraordinary …
Organic Music Tapes Vol. 1
As its almost tradition now we start the year with a meditative album from Portuguese pianist and composer Tiago Sousa. Using the piano as its primary tool of expression, Tiago has been slowly cementing his place as one of the most distinct voices to emerge out of the modern wellspring of piano driven minimalism. After last years Angst (CREP81, Discrepant) and 2015’s Um Piano nas Barricadas (CREP23, Discrepant), Tiago returns with a deeply meditative album of synesthetic organic musical patterns…
Speaking Rzewski
"This album is the result of years of work and friendship with the composer. It started with De Profundis, a piece which has had a deep impact on me as a musician and a person, and ended with it. Frederic attended many of my performances of the piece, the last one during our last public concert together in early 2020 in Brussels. In the meantime, he wrote Dear Diary (2014) and America: A Poem (2020) for me which were both premiered at ARS MUSICA festival. I am very happy to present these pieces …
Mind Is Moving (IX)
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.
An Den Mond
“An den Mond (To The Moon) is a recent release bringing together two compositions by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. The first is for seven violins and is all about creating a feeling of searing/pitch wavering intensity. And the second is for chanted female voices/violin, and creates a feeling of witchy dread and fear. Together these pieces create a compelling, at points unsettling release, which uses two different tacks to unbalance the listener. The release appears on Slovenia-based Inexhaus…
Univers Parallèles
“Univers Parallèles presents us with two around twenty-minute slices of sparse piano wonderings and low-key sound making. It’s a release that shifts between just awakening drowsiness, and very creepy unease, with each track managing to create its own distinctive, and compelling atmosphere. The release appears as a CD/digital download on Slovenia-based Inexhaustible Editions, who are rapidly becoming one of my favourite labels. As they’ve been putting out some of the most worthy and interesting r…
Roger Reynolds at 85, Vol II: Piano Etudes
Reynolds’ Etudes allows the performer to not only choose the number of Etudes to be presented (even repeating them, if desired) as well as their order. In this way, the performer becomes a co-creator with the composer. All 12 Etudes are presented in this recording by Eric Huebner. Each etude inhabits a world distinctly its own. Reynolds dares a remarkable leap from the first to the second book. Rather than merely continue the premises and promises established by the first six etudes, the second …
Piano and String Quartet
A late work of extraordinary sensual beauty, realised by Apartment House, and – at 79’50” - only just fitting on a standard CD. Not to be missed
Works for Piano
The music of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is one of in-betweens. Stylistically, Lang’s oeuvre occupies the space between a multitude of genres, ranging from contem porary composition and free improvisation to the wider realms of hip hop and DJ-culture. By virtue of Lang’s radical openness to creative conversation and collaboration, and to ideas and influences from other areas of artistic and scientific exploration, his oeuvre finds connections to the worlds of film, dance, theatre, …
Mosaïque
Could you imagine music as a geyser? Erupting violently, waiting on tense standby, forever renewing itself... Or, just the contrary, as a sigh? An operatic sospiri, inhaling and exhaling, a tangible, rhythmic fluctuation... Or as walking with your eyes closed with full alertness to the sounds of unknown origin? That’s what Marcin Stańczyk’s music is like.The milestone of his career turned out to be the composition Sighs (2008–10, rev. 2012) for chamber- or symphonic orchestra. It got him the pre…
PhonoPhantomatics
Cezary Duchnowski, although perceived as a specialized composer with consciously chosen specialization, is very open to extremely versatile activity in the musical field. Apart from absolute music, he’s also keenly interested in relations between music and the word, music and theatre (or rather performance art) as well as visual arts in the wide sense. What he aims at with this kind of syncretism is a genuine interaction of various media. In his musical activity, he explores various areas of the…
Tombstones
Tombstones is a collection of twenty songs composed by American composer Michael Pisaro-Liu between 2006 and 2010, journeying into experimental pop with pieces that are "experimental or indeterminate but still a song". This disc features eleven songs under the artistic direction of the Lille-based pianist Barbara Dang. Dang and six members of the Muzzix collective (Yoann Bellefont, Ivann Cruz, Raphaël Godeau, Peter Orins, Christian Pruvost, Maryline Pruvost) recorded the pieces in June 2020, wit…