l'Infini des Possibles
l'infini des possibles is a set of twelve studies for solo piano, written by French composer Bruno Duplant in 2019. The score consists of lowercase letters (a, b, c, d, e, f, g) and spaces in between, which leaves the pianist an openness for interpretation and artistic determinations. The Belgian pianist/conductor Guy Vandromme intensely studied these 12 pieces via in-depth discussions with Duplant over two years, and realized them for this recording of a double CD in the spring of 2021, on a St…
In Better Shape Than You Found Me
* In pocess of stocking * In Better Shape Than You Found Me is a one-hour piece jointly composed and realized by American composer/violist Jordan Dykstra and Dutch composer/musician Koen Nutters in the year 2020. Dykstra plays viola, pitch pipe, crotales, piano EBow, electronic programming, field recordings, and Nutters delivers the piano programming and field recordings. The two bring together their sounds and structures in very organic ways, merging into a single, intriguing sound world. Maste…
For John Cage (2CD)
Tip! John Cage was an evangelist for a new mode of listening in which we would listen to everything with the same attention that we bring to music. For John Cage proposes instead that we listen to this music as if it were everything. While these two instruments are playing there is nothing else, just a violin and a piano. Even the process of remembering, normally so important in helping us make sense of what we hear, is altered: the ‘tenuous’ rhythms of For John Cage articulate patterns in which…
Ftarri's Harmonium
Why is there a harmonium (reed organ) at Ftarri? It all goes back to the Ftarri Festival held in Tokyo in November 2019. A quartet made up of Klaus Lang (harmonium), Johnny Chang (violin), Samuel Dunscombe (bass clarinet) and Michiko Ogawa (clarinet) was planned for the festival's final day, so Ogawa quickly purchased a used harmonium for Lang. As she lives in Berlin, Ogawa and Ftarri decided that the harmonium would be housed there temporarily and used in Ftarri concerts.Composer Masamichi Kino…
My Wounded Head 3
An indefinite, open-ended composition of short sections that allows the performer to decide what and when to repeat or to go on to the next phrase is not new. Terry Riley's In C is the milestone score of decades ago. Slow, prolonged, quasi repetitive and contemplative works in the Western classical style are also familiar though the scores of Morton Feldman, John Adams, Brian Eno, John Luther Adams, and Gavin Bryars. Thus, Marc Chan's piano piece, My Wounded Head 3, inspired by Bach's Passion Ch…
Señales
Señales —Señales, “Homenaje a Jonathan Harvey” for violin & ensemble (Irvine Arditti, violin. Ensemble Signal/Brad Lubman); Páramo de voces for piano & tape (Alberto Rosado, piano); Intermezzo malinconico for bass clarinet solo (Adrián Sandi); Homenaje a Remedios Vario; Recuerdos del Porvenir (ensemble recherche)
On the Edges
"The main focus of Gerald Eckert’s music is frequently not placed on a centrally triggered event or center of action, but on what has been triggered by this event and how the consequences are subsequently developed. In other words, he focuses his sights on what an impulse is followed by. For Außen, von tief innen (Outside, from Deep Within), the consistent subtle and quiet tonal structure of the work is the fine delineation of multiphonics in bass flute and double bass clarinet alongside the ton…
Afterglow
** 2021 Stock ** Keeril Makan composes without assumed expectations of an instrument’s sound or a performer’s capabilities, but by exploring the possible, by discovering the beautiful in the unexpected and following where that beauty leads. Makan’s relationship to the world of sounds has its connection to the work of Edgard Varèse and John Cage and by a broad American experimental tradition, with touchstones in the work of some of the European modernists. Afterglow is the outcome of hours spent…
Songs Of Innocence & Experience
** 2021 Stock ** This is the first complete recording of Walter Zimmermann’s string quartets. The 10 Fränkische Tänze, from the project Lokale Musik (Local Music) explore the folk music of Franconia in Germany. They are built on research of old peasant books of dances, some dating back to the early 19th century and the beginning of the notation of folk music. The many dance melodies including waltzes, Schottische [German polka], mazurka, galop etc. are captured, rejected and presented in just in…
Undersong
** 2021 Stock ** An American who came of age in the late 1980s, Jason Eckardt’s music captures the essences of the genres that led him first to performance (as a guitarist), and then to composition: heavy metal and art rock, jazz, gagaku and p’ansori, the Second Viennese School, American post-serialism, and the new complexity. It evokes the power of inspired, virtuosic improvisation, the incisiveness of classical ensemble playing, and the raw expressivity of ethnic music. The first complete CD o…
Made In America: The Complete Works Of William Russell
** 2021 Stock ** William Russell was, along with his friends John Cage, Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, one of the seminal figures in modern percussion music. Russell composed his landmark percussion during the 1930s, eventually abandoning composition to work in jazz and settle in New Orleans. He was the first composer in the western tradition to integrate African, Caribbean and Asian instruments along with found objects and the influence of jazz into his work, all the while maintaining a distinc…
Wolpe in Jerusalem
** 2021 Stock. Deluxe packaging in slipcase, including essays by Austin Clarkson and Yuval Shaked, and historical photos. Liner notes in English, German, French and Hebrew ** In 1931, Stefan Wolpe escaped from the growing Nazi threat, eventually arriving in Vienna to study with Anton Webern. When the Austrian authorities threatened to deport him back to Germany, he left and eventually settled in Jerusalem in 1934 where he began to teach composition and direct the choir at the Palestine Conservat…
The Echoing Green
** 2021 Stock ** Like Morton Feldman, whose music he acknowledges as an influence Walter Zimmermann (b.1949) is fascinated by the relationship between painting and music, and how material of an apparently simple nature played by apparently “normal” instruments is capable of almost infinite subtlety. Frankfurt’s HCD Ensemble are also members of Germany’s infamous Ensemble Modern. They are joined here by the superb violinist Peter Rundel and cellist Michael Bach. Wüstenwanderung [Wandering in the …
Final Fragments - Piano Music of David Kotlowy
** Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Notes by Jon Dale ** By the time I landed in Adelaide somewhere in the mid 1990s, to complete my secondary schooling and get the hell out of dodge – the tiny country hamlet that I’d been living in, in the northern parts of the Upper Hunter in New South Wales, at the foot of the Barrington Tops – I’d already been indoctrinated into a set of ideals through my reading, listening, and the questionable guidance of a few family members. Foremost was a kind of id…
Chord from the Second Delphic Hymn / Emerging like an Infant from the House of Truth
** Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Notes by Jon Dale ** Discovering Music Of Transparent Means was one of the three or so genuine revelations from my fifteen years of living in Adelaide, Australia. I was in my twenties and had spent some time wondering why the city I was surviving hadn’t offered much in the way of genuinely engaging and affecting ‘experimental music’ (all terms used advisedly) during my tenure. I’d also somehow glommed onto the work of a number of American composers and pol…
Idle Hands - Music of Luke Altmann
** 2021 Stock. Comes in a four panel case with 16 page booklet, designed by Sam Songailo ** Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray studied in Moscow at the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music with Professors Tatiana Zelikman and Vladimir Tropp, and the Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany with Professor Tibor Szasz. In 2008, Konstantin won First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition. Konstantin has performed with the Russian National Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Mos…
Holy Fools - Music of Luke Altmann
** 2021 Stock. Comes in a six panel case with 16 page booklet, designed by Sam Songailo ** One-composer records have somehow slipped out of fashion, but the chance to delve more deeply into the psyche of a single composer is a special indulgence for both performer and listener. Luke Altmann's music first graced our music stands in 2007, when we performed the slow and achingly beautiful ‘Prelude to New York’ at Manchester Lane in Melbourne. The piece’s honest conviction, simplicity and deep expre…
Listen How They Talk
** 2021 Stock ** One of Mexico’s leading composers, Hilda Paredes went to London at age 21 where she studied with Peter Maxwell Davies and Richard Rodney Bennett. Parades says that the longer she has been away from Mexico, the more she has felt drawn to it. For her, ‘Mexico’ means not the territory immediately beneath the US border, but the far south of the country – the home of the ancient Mayan cultures. Significantly, most of her titles are not in Spanish, but in Mayan (a language her grandfa…
Music for Strings
** 2021 Stock ** The present recording traces the development of Harrison’s creativity over a half century – from 1948 to his last large-scale composition (1997). The Suite No. 2 for Strings was written while Lou Harrison lived in New York. Having spent his formative years in San Francisco, Harrison had a great deal of trouble adjusting to East Coast big-city life. A nervous breakdown required him to be hospitalized for about nine months. The Suite No. 2 dates from the year after this traumatic …
La Terre et le Feu
** 2021 Stock ** This disc of French composer Joël-François Durand’s music amplifies his ongoing interest in the classical ‘four elements’: air, earth, fire and water. World class performers include the London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Pierre-André Valade, and renowned Swedish organist Hans-Ola Ericcsson. The oboe concerto, La terre et le feu features a hallmark of Durand’s work: rising figures that gradually strain upwards. The work consists of an introduction and four prin…