Desolation Pops
"James Moore (b. 1979) is a composer with an eye toward the world of games and experimental theater. He’s an electric guitarist who’s willing and eager to treat his instrument as a playground, not a reverent, static tradition. He’s a tinkerer, a charmer, and a fella who’s always up for another round at the bar of wacky ideas and intellectual questioning. He’s excited for new and unexpected opportunities for collaboration, but always maintains a voice that seems to stay recognizably his own throu…
Six Seasons
Tip! "A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, …
Homage to Annea Lockwood
*200 copies limited edition* Recital presents a book and CD homage to the New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939). The unique concept for this album was conceived by artists Noel Meek (New Zealand) and Mattin (Spain), who each share a deep admiration for Lockwood. A longform Skype conversation between the three artists was arranged at the end of 2020. They discussed politics, aesthetics, and Annea’s compositional practice, and as the conversation evolved, it was decided that …
Κλίμα (Klima)
Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett return with Κλίμα (Klima), their third album as CV & JAB. Using an extensive sound genealogy including piano, flute, voice, and field recordings, the duo dive deeper into their idiosyncratic collaborative language. A reflection on microclimates and their ecologies, Κλίμα (Klima) is an invitation to probe the implicit memories of animal, plant and place, and our connection to the environments we inhabit.
TV Songs
Lisbon based keyboardist, João ‘Shela’ Pereira, a frequent collaborator with many local bands (Paus, Rinding Pânico, LAmA, Linda Martini and others) presents a new strangely haunting album, TV Songs.
A scrapbook of recordings from the heart... Piano TV is a compendium of spontaneous notes of ideas on the piano, to the rhythm of a television set in the background... these are scraps of expression in a form of dirty bucolic sketches aspiring to a hypothetical larger, washed, pristine composition…
Current
The string quartet Current that provides the centerpiece of Adams’ new album dates from 2016, when Spektral Quartet commissioned the composer to write a short work that became the 12-minute study Quartet Movement. Though that piece stands alone, Adams sensed that it might also be used as the basis for something larger, so over the next few years he expanded its scope. The present five-movement work, completed in 2019, was co-commissioned by Spektral Quartet and Cal Performances, with additional …
Organic Music Tapes vol 2
*100 copies limited edition* As its now tradition we start the year with yet another fluid album from Portuguese pianist and composer Tiago Sousa. Presenting now the second volume of his ongoing series Organic Music Tapes, Tiago now adds the electric organ to his trademark piano compositions, broadening his palette of sounds into an even more fluid and organic world with references to American minimalism of the 60’s, in particular Terry Riley and Steve Reich’s influence both looms heavily over t…
Nova
Tip! *2023 stock* Kåre Kolberg (b.1936) is one of Norway`s foremost contemporary composers and is regarded as one of the pioneers of early electronic music and cross-artistic art in the Scandinavia. He has composed music for film, theatre and chamber orchestras to jazz acts such as Svein Finnerud Trio and Jan Garbarek.
The electronic tape composition presented on this CD was composed for the multi-media work NOVA created together with the artist Anders Kjær, presented at the Henie Onstad Art Cen…
Sigils
*80 copies limited edition. 2023 stock* r
ecorded, mixed and mastered by Theo Karonall music and bass playing by Devin Hoffcover photo by DHphoto of DH by Lenny Gonzalez
Insulated Paradise
Atsuko Hatano is a contemporary classical viola player who works with electronics to add textures and layers to her sound. Located in Tokyo, Japan, she is a commanding instrumentalist and composer who constructs innovative compositions with strings and layered electronics. Working in isolation due to the Covid pandemic, Atsuko Hatano played violin, viola, synthesizer, and electronics to create these powerful, unique compositions. Insulated Paradise is an investigation into the social nature of h…
Peach and Tomato
Leonor Falcón and Sana Nagano met in graduate school at Queens College in 2015, and have since collaborated in many projects. On this release, ‘Peach and Tomato,’ the duo offers fresh new compositions that display both their sense of imagination, and their deep appreciation for classical influences. This is particularly true with their version of two movements from the Prokofiev Sonata for Two Violins and the composition Etude 1 and 2, an homage to Bela Bartok and a fluent conversation between t…
Woodwind Multiples
Biggest Tip! Mary Jane Leach is a composer focussed on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC’s pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman’s work since his death in 1990, compiling the ‘Unjust Malaise’ 3CD set in 2005 and editing the 2015 book ‘Gay Guerrilla:…
Jerusalem
From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of piano pieces, unreleased or virtually inaccessible until now! Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – an Ethiopian nun whose recordings have funded orphanages back home since the early ’60s. Her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever he…
Sound Plantings
Jonas Gerigk is a double bass player who is active as a composer/performer in the fields of improvised music. In addition, he collaborates in projects of contemporary composers and is involved in the realization of their works. A main focus of his work deals with the term Explorative Music. He is doing intensive research on the expansion of the sound spectrum of the acoustic double bass. With a physical as well as technical approach and the use of objects he explores the variety of timbres of hi…
A Basement Suite
“Even without detecting in the figure of the refugee or exile the emblematic figure of our time, the loosening of the bonds with a place of origin is no longer rewarded by a search for a promised land. The loss of a deep-rootedness that would provide an identity is no longer perceived as a lack that needs to be filled. We strangers in our own land, and conversely we feel at home everywhere.”Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking (tr. Massimo Verdicchio)The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in his 200…
Spring & Neap
In 1996 I went on a tour of Japan with Orchestra Carbon; a highlight was the Music Merge Festival in Tokyo. A colorful selection of wonderful musicians from the international scene met there for three days at the Shinjuku Pit Inn: Michiyo Yagi, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Jim O'Rourke, Yumiko Tanaka, David Grubbs and others. In addition to performing with Orchestra Carbon and my solo Tectonics, I was allowed to develop a new algorithmic template for a small orchestra of festival soloists under m…
Echo Stane
Nine solos for Hardanger fiddle, composed and performed by Sarah-Jane Summers, a virtuosic Scottish musician based in Norway. Sarah-Jane's music stretches from traditional folk music to experimental work. This album is one of experimental solos, but nonetheless contains references to traditional music both in the titles of the pieces, and sometimes in the music itself.
Blumenstück
Blumenstück for piano was composed in 1984 as a sound meditation for private use and it celebrates the beauty of the piano sound through tenderness and slowness. All the sounds of the work derived from a word list that lists 168 flower names. All the letters in these names were assigned to notes on the keyboard according to a fixed system. Each sound has to be played softly and as long as possible. After the attack, all sounds should fade away into silence...
Piano Songs
Celebrating Meredith Monk as composer, these Piano Songs give us a world at once playful and earnest. Written or derived from work composed between 1971 and 2006, the pieces inhabit Monk’s unique universe, as played by two of new music’s most distinguished interpreters, pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. These pieces are ‘songs’ because they have strong roots in Monk’s pieces for voice, and because they are direct, specific, and imagistic. Meredith Monk on composing for two pianos: “I de…
On Behalf Of Nature
For five decades, vocalist-composer Meredith Monk has explored what she calls “primordial utterance,” or non-verbal vocal sound that lay beneath and beyond language, expressing “that for which we have no words.” This exploration has led her to create music that The New Yorker describes as simultaneously “visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt,” an art that “sings, dances and meditates on timeless forces.” With her latest, multivalent ECM New Series album, Monk aimed to address ecology and climate c…