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…
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…
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…
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 (…
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…
Clusters: American Piano Explorations
Rory Cowal is a distinctive pianist, one who draws liberally on classical chops, ample experience with improvisation, and a predilection for the new and uncharted. This makes him especially attractive to composers who wish to blur the boundaries between traditional styles and genres. A musical adventurer at heart, Cowal seems drawn to challenging and unusual projects. The eight pieces on this CD reflect this willingness to experiment, to not just play the same old (now canonic) warhorses of the …
Paul Hindemith, Alfred Schnittke, Anna Gourari, Markus Poschner, Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana Lugano
Paul Hindemith / Alfred SchnittkeAfter three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of…
In Glow of Like Seclusion
Samuel Andreyev’s music is incredibly varied, from the sparse resonance of the Sonata da Camera, the ‘cartoon music’ – as the composer puts it -of Vérifications, characterised by primary colours and strong instrumental timbres; the Sextet in Two Parts which in contrast focuses on minute timbral shadings; and of course the cantata for solo voice and ensemble which is the title track of the album.
Performed by Ensemble Proton Bern, conducted by Luigi Gaggero with the magical soprano voice of Peyee…
With love
Georgia Denham (b.1997) draws on anecdotal experience to create her music. She studied with Andrew Hamilton at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and now with Richard Causton at the University of Cambridge for her PhD. She lives with her husband, a theoretical computer scientist, and their many beloved plants. “This collection of chamber music from 2018–2022 wakes scores I thought were long since sleeping, where I first learned to write the delicate sounds I loved. With music written during my studi…
Supports & Surfaces
Paolo Griffin is a composer and curator based in Toronto/Tkarón:to whose music has been described as placing “… the listener in a kind of sonic microgravity” (PANM360) and as “…uncompromising and thoroughly engrossing.” (LvT). Paolo’s work involves ongoing research about the sounding and perception of microtonal rational intonation (Just Intonation) combined with a rigorous, process-based approach to sonic form and structure. The work he creates explores the creation of colour/shading/densities …
Outermost Melodies
Double CD of percussion works by Jürg Frey, featuring definitive recordings of works composed between 1994 and 2022. Performed by Ian Antonio, with members of Talujon percussion ensemble on one track. Comes with a pdf of the cover artwork, plus jpegs of the photos used on the cover, and an interview with Ian Antonio about the music
Nieuw Amsterdam New York
If music grows out of a sense of place, then it follows that related places might have related musics. That idea is the springboard for this album that nods at 400 years of links between two vibrant cities. When the Dutch founded Nieuw Amsterdam in the 17th century, they provided the impetus for the growth of a city that shared many values of its model. The multitude of languages, ethnicities and nationalities, as well as an atmosphere of religious tolerance, made for an astounding uniqueness of…
Where Songs Go at Night
During the Covid doldrums of 2020, the wind faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, like so many of us, experienced acute loneliness and isolation. As musicians accustomed to the musical and social connections that come from the intimate art of chamber music, they longed to channel their creative loss into something meaningful. Bandwidth – a mission as much as a group – emerged to champion chamber repertoire for wind instruments, foster connections between faculty, and provide a mode…