Muted Stones: A Tribute to Yadollah Roayee
*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…
Scapegoat
‘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…
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…
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…
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…
Haizetxe
*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…
Natural World
Natural World by Laurence Crane offers an expansive and quietly subversive study in sonic ecology, blending piano, soprano, and field recordings. Written for Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop, the piece unfolds over three movements, combining encyclopedic texts, birdsong, and elemental musical motives in a measured fifty-five-minute reflection on beauty and environmental fragility.
Tête-à-tête
Over the course of a nearly 50 year romantic and creative partnership sound artist Annea Lockwood and the late pioneering electronic composer Ruth Anderson have shared space on a number of significant releases of early electronic and tape music, including Charles Amirkhanian’s trailblazing 1977 anthology of women electronic composers New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, a 1981 split LP on Opus One, a 1997 CD for Phill Niblock’s XI imprint, and 1998’s Lesbian American Composers compilatio…
Circles, Reeds, and Memories
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…
Walkabout & Back: Electroacoustic Works
It is refreshing to note that Mode Records gets into the endeavor of issuing new CDs with electroacoustic music. We have labels solely issuing this brand of music (which within its – artificial – borders harbor many different styles and idioms), like for instance INA (INA – GRM: Groupe de Recherches Musicales), empreintes DIGITALes and so forth, but I feel it important that the electroacoustic music – also including the electronic music in purer forms – is embraced by labels indulging in a more …
Electroacoustic Chamber Works
Composed between 1993-97, this second volume of works by Gerard Pape on Mode continues his richly darkly dramatic style with new compositional turns. Born in Brooklyn, now living in Paris, Pape is the director of the Atelier UPIC – an electronic music studio utilizing the unique UPIC computer developed by Iannis Xenakis – since 1991. While a resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan he ran Sinewave Studios, a state of the art New Music and Electronic Music studio and organized of the annual TWICE Festival…
Cinque Movimenti per A.
*200 copies limited edition* A captivating electronic symphony in five movements recorded live, which begins almost like a Pastorale. Bucolic atmospheres that, albeit through completely different sonorities, seem to link Fabio Orsi back to the origins of his music at the beginning of the millennium, when the inspiration drawn from his home territory and popular tradition was strong. The instruments then paint a sort of medieval dance, veering further into quiet, purely ambient atmospheres, among…
Plasmatic Music, Vol. 1
The three works on this disc explore different aspects of Radulescu’s theory of Sound Plasma as it evolved over the course of the 1970s, from Radulescu’s early to middle periods.
Pulse Music
*2LP Gatefold with tipped in booklet * Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seriali…
Acustica < > Elettrica
*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 …
Nachthelle (Works By Johannes Fritsch | Oxana Omelchuk | Simon Rummel)
*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…
Works By Carl Ludwig Hübsch
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)!
Earis
*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…