Composition / Electroacoustic

Time of year and day, light; warmth, coolness; wind, rain; breath of air, babbling of the stream; People and other beings going about their lives: a strangely unpredictable mix of expected and unexpected events that contribute to the precise conditions of the moment in which we find ourselves. The here and now conveys a special feeling and a unique sound identity. Mason enables us to connect with times, places, people and situations that go far beyond the here and now. Mason is one of the most i…

'A room outdoors' is a 48 minute piece written in 2006 by Michael Pisaro-Liu for sustaining instrument, harmonium and field recordings. This was the first work in which Pisaro-Liu incorporated field recordings into his score. This double CD contains two different realizations of the piece, one made in Brussels during the lockdown in April 2020 and one set up in Cremona in June 2023, each realized by the following artists: Disc 1 features Belgium-based Guy Vandromme (keyboards) and Adriaan Severi…

*2022 stock* 'We can appreciate some musical works for a variety of reasons. Some unleash a narrative that can read our present and its problems very well, others prefer to move on abstract codes, whether experimental or electronic. Still others may propose ethnographic readings as much aimed at an examination of the past and tradition as they try to probe the future through spatial or psychedelic atmospheres. Then there are proposals capable of going beyond any stylistic framework and floating …

Anton Lukoszevieze, cellist, composer and interdisciplinary artist, founder of Apartment House. Le Jardin des Plantes, in four parts, for cello and electronics. A place in Paris and a novel by Claude Simon. Memory spaces, a source, a scrying of time.

*200 copies limited edition* Theatre of the Mind is a work for bass clarinet and electronics by Swiss composer Roland Dahinden. It was commissioned by the Dutch Foundation Mousai, an organisation that uses contemporary music as a platform to explore and work with issues of mental health. It was written for bass clarinettist Gareth Davis. Roland's composition takes elements of his mixed background performing in jazz and improvised combinations with Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton while at the sam…

Like Hunt’s composition “Lattice,” released on Texas Music in the same year, the four pieces included on Cantegral Segment(s) (IR-0032, 1979) represent a culmination and transformation of Hunt’s investigations from across the decade. The “Cantegral Segments” are a body of scores (or strategies) derived from and developed alongside the evolving compositional procedure Hunt called Haramand Plane, first used in a large-scale performance of that name from 1972 that employed elaborate homemade audio …

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…

Tip! "Three harpsichords in various states of disrepair were kindly offered to me by Leeds Conservatoire. I accepted, and a memorandum of understanding was swiftly drawn up. The offer was made under the condition that I might make some music from them, given my penchant for infirm instruments, and their conventional worthlessness to anyone wishing to use them for their intended purpose. There seemed to be an auspiciousness surrounding these harpsichords, the stories they might reveal, and more i…

*2024 stock. Custon CDr* Noa Ain gives us a surreal portrait of violinist Yoko Matsua in “Used to Call Me Sadness,” Joel Chadabe encourages a solo percussionist to interact with an automated electronic system in “Echoes,” Ann McMillan manipulates animal sounds with recording techniques in “Whale I,” Gordon Mumma offers audience members “Do It Yourself” participation in “Cybersonic Cantilevers” and Vladimir Ussachevsky suggests a pre-biblical story of the creation of the world depicted by electro…

A documentary of pieces performed at the Inventionen Festival in Berlin, 1998. Features: Unsuk Chin, Patrick Kosk, Werner Cee, Francois Donato, Robin Minard, Wolfgang Mitterer, Francis Dhomont, Erik Mikael Karlsson, Trevor Wishart. "Not as much as a bringer-up to speed (or yet another history lesson at that) as a fine cache of current keepers of the crop. New ('93-98), complete pieces from Trevor Wishart (northern-UK composer/programmer known and loved these days for his mid-70's works such as M…

‘Scapegoat’ is the new album by Triola, the project led by the prolific Tokyo-based composer & experimental string musician Atsuko Hatano, featuring the Japanese violinist Anzu Suhara. Conceived as a string project, with Hatano on viola, cello, bass and Suhara on violin, Triola involves a rotating ensemble of guest musicians, including the likes of Chicago-born musician, composer & producer Jim O’Rourke (Drag City, Sonic Youth, Steamroom), the composer & musician Eiko Ishibashi (Drag City, Black…

"Other Minds is happy to present The Water Has Found its Crack, the debut album by composer Joseph Bohigian. Consisting of four new works written since 2018, the collection finds the composer expertly handling a variety of performing forces, from laptop ensemble to string quartet. Each piece engages with a different aspect of the California-born composer’s position as a member of the Armenian diaspora. These include the legacy of displacement since the 1915 genocide, maintaining culture in exile…

The name Painjerk, the musical project of Kohei Gomi, didn’t come to mind for a long time. Offhand, I’d say it is likely that I reviewed very few of his releases. Many of those he released himself, and the ones of Harbinger Sound, Editions Mego, Alternative Tentacles and Hospital never reached me. He’s among the few musicians leaving the harsh noise behind and doing other projects. He calls it the “exploration and practice of kinematics of electro-acoustics using unorthodox methodologies, mainly…

For decades, Ludger Brümmer has represented a unique, courageous, and often instantly recognisable voice in electronic, algorithmic, and computer music. He develops structures that lead to aesthetic experiences normally found, if at all, only in the most expressive of instrumental works. Ludger Brümmer’s music is dominated by processes. All processes are on a trajectory towards a climax or evolve from a climax to a minimum. Ultimately, a complete lack of orientation is to be achieved in the clim…

*200 copies limited edition* 'No Longer Human' is dedicated to the life and work of Osamu Dazai and his novel No Longer Human First notebook:Antonio Tonietti: chitarra battente preparata, duduktavola armonica, synthClaudio Milano: voceMassimo Amato: piano Second notebook:Antonio Tonietti: basso preparato, basso, synthClaudio Milano: voce Third notebook:Antonio Tonietti: basso, synth, field recordingGiorgio Pinardi: voce Epilogue:Antonio Tonietti: Electric Koto, field recordingSilvia Pegah Scagli…

Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release) is a composition for string quartet and harmonica quartet, meaning that Quatuor Bozzini is playing string instruments while playing harmonicas. "The title refers to different kinds of bubbly matter which are set to collide within the composition, leading to different ruptures and possible release of surface tension. The collision of bubbles unfolds partly in relation to sound, where small fluctuations appear in the encounters between harmonicas and…

Sofa is proud to mark its 100th release with the stunningly beautiful double album Hereafter, a new major work from guitarist/composer Kim Myhr, written for the 15-piece Stavanger-based ensemble Kitchen Orchestra. “Hereafter can be seen as a meditation on mortality and transience”, Myhr explains. “It was written at a time where the prime minister of Norway told the country’s population that ‘you have to be prepared to lose someone dear to you’. It was like taken out of Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice”. T…

This release brings together three Dutch composers/performers, Reinier van Houdt, Germaine Sijstermans, and Koen Nutters, who have each released their own work on elsewhere music in recent years. Nutters, who has collaborated in the past with both van Houdt (Cornelius Cardew project) and Sijstermans (DNK Ensemble, The Names), conceived the idea of a trio performance with the two musicians, which later developed into this three-way collaborative project. Last December the trio played a concert at…

"Olivier Messiaen once said that all you need to make music is a note and silence. For the composer Arash Yazdani, born in 1985 and raised in Isfahan, Iran (and now based in Tallinn, Estonia), a slightly adapted adage applies: All you need to make music is two frequencies – though Yazdani has a clear preference for notes extremely close in pitch. His music is full of tightly coiled beatings, both stationary and set in motion. These beatings function like black holes in his works, drawing other s…

*2023 stock* "This, the first CD dedicated entirely to work by composer Dario Palermo, features three substantial electroacoustic works written between 2009 and 2012. Palermo (b. 1970) has been involved with the use of new technologies in music since the early 1990s. His background includes studies with Giorgio Colombo Taccani and Giovanni Verrando and others, including Gerard Grisey, as well as in orchestral and chamber performance. His work, as typified in the three pieces presented here, is b…

*150 copies limited edition* "Most of the music I am attracted to represents some kind of undoing. Sun Ra's undoing of the big band, or of the jazz solo. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern's undoing of the classical music concert. The A.A.C.M.'s undoing of the jazz combo and the club date. Pauline Oliveros' undoing of the musical score. Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Cornelius Cardew's various undoings of the profession. What's more, none of these undoings are antagonistic or destructive. The thing u…

Tip! Gene Coleman is a composer, musician and video director, who has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Central to his work is the inventive use of sound, image and time, and the desire to create experiences that expand our understanding of the world. Since 2001 he has explored the global transformation of culture and music’s relationship with video, science and architecture. Gene has been developing a series of works around concepts of Neuro Music and Transcultural Mu…

*2023 stock* This CD documents a series of works that I call "Musical Procedure." In composers' usual works, the sounds to be performed are written in a score; but in these pieces the procedures (which could also be called programs, algorithms or specification sheets) for shaping music, such as performance methods and the general ideas of the works, are written as concisely as possible, and the type of sound to be produced is left largely to the performers. The score is merely an arrangement of …

*2023 stock* Published in the Edo era (1664), "Shichikushoshinshu" is a beginner’s guide to three musical instruments—the "hitoyogiri" shakuhachi, the koto, and the shamisen—which includes lyrics and fingerings for songs believed to have been popular at the time. Tai decided to create a new musical instrument in order to perform the shamisen music in "Shichikushoshinshu" (Japan’s oldest shamisen “scores”). The result was the self-made electric stringed instrument he calls the coiled cello. In 20…

Three years after the release of Black Angels Songs, Miroslav Tóth together with Dystopic Requiem Quartet comes up with a rare album inspired by non-places, i.e. buildings and objects that were either unfinished, abandoned, over-multiplied, or were marked by mining and yet had no meaning in the end. Also featured on Non-places is Nénia, a track dedicated to the victims in Ukraine, written three days after the outbreak of war during the album's creation. The recordings were made in the Czech Repu…

*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "A collection of five pieces, made between 2016 and 2019, in a short period that echoes, in part, the grief after my mother’s passing at the end of 2015. These pieces bring together artists from (a.o) Cape Town, The Hague, Toronto, Torino, and Johannesburg. Listening back to these earlier pieces I can discern feelings of emptiness, fleeting moments of joy and play. It is the unending sense of absence versus…

*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "During the period spanning from 2016 to 2020, I underwent a profound realization that led me to feel lost within myself. As each year passed, I found myself feeling a sense of rupture and absence, far from home. In search for comfort, I turned to my native language of Farsi. However, even within the confines of my language, I was unable to escape the feeling of fragmentation. Each sentence I read seemed to…

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…

*2022 stock.* This fine introduction to Hamel's varied style presents him in various moods from 1979 to 1983. Samples are taken from Transition, Colours of Time, Bardo, and a few previously unreleased selections.

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…

*300 copies limited edition* Timeless minimalist approach to composition braced by repetition and playfulness. Alberto Lizarralde’s music reflects calm, focus and intimacy. Ethereal and atmospheric, his pieces operate within the digital as well as the analogue realm in equal measures. Sampling, Midi sequencing and field recordings are the instrumentation used in these 15 songs recorded on a four track reel to reel tape. Highest possible recommendation for fans of Suso Saiz, Jon Hassell, Eno or H…

*2022 stock.* Actually, the CD "Nachthelle" should have been a concert for the 80th birthday of Johannes Fritsch (1941-2010). Because of Corona, it now became a CD. Luck in misfortune. Johannes Fritsch was a composer, improviser, violist, author, publisher, organiser and, last but not least, professor of composition at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, where his class was always open to guests over the years, also from the field of improvised music. The present publication contains the pieces "Vio…

The Multiple Joy[ce] Orchestra presents its new CD "works by Carl Ludwig Hübsch" with all kinds of illustrious musicians from Cologne (and non-Cologne)!

*2022 stock* In November 2020, stuck in cologne, Elisabeth Coudoux composed this pieces – more close to her own intuition. These ideas are a direct result of a conceptual processes that matured over the span of many years, shaped by the individual sound and the personalities of the musicians involved. 12 short sonic islands teem with abstract, experimental sounds that don’t shy away from melody or formal play. Earis - The ear behind the iris - the idea of seeing without words, of forming a music…

*In process of stocking* Play Off is the new record by the composer Vasco Mendonça, performed by Drumming GP and edited by Holuzam. Resulting from the accomplice creative partnership between Vasco Mendonça and the ensemble led by Miquel Bernat, all the works on this disc (which includes an unusual piece for countertenor and percussion, from poems by Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith) are commissions from the group to the composer, under the Composer in Residence programme in 2019/2020. At this l…

*In process of stocking* Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our curren…

Just arrived, this is the newest edition RZ release focused on a radical electronic (+ Ensemble) music by Clara Maida "During the first years of my compositional research, my goal was to mark out, in my music, the flux of the psychic energy at work in the unconscious and its underlying structure. At the time, I was going through an analytical process favouring access to this unconscious activity, and my readings in the field of psychoanalysis were helping me in the effort to elaborate a musical …

Five chamber works by Tim Hodgkinson, co-founder of Henry Cow, for ensemble and electronic sound, bass clarinet and strings, and string quartet with harp, trombone and synthesizer, played by Hyperion Ensemble and others.

Six compositions from 2001-2004 by Tim Hodgkinson, co-founder of Henry Cow, for ensembles, clarinets and electronics, with the Hyperion Ensemble and other guests and Hodgkinson himself on clarinet and bass clarinet.

From early beginnings to the present: The composer Bruno Strobl began his studies in composition comparatively late. First came his degree as a classroom teacher, the profession in which he worked until retirement, guiding countless pupils towards music, including contemporary art mu-sic. His own interest in electroacoustic music was triggered during his studies in the 1980s, and one of his early pieces for tape, Hiatus, can be heard on this CD. The Latin “hiatus” means gap, and the basis of thi…