Computer Music From The Outside In
*2024 stock* A 1983 Folkways release, Computer Music from the Outside In showcases three composers narrating the ideas and processes behind their computer music compositions, as well as the compositions themselves. The first two pieces are by Barton McLean: “Etunytude” is an etude-like piece made of gradually changing harmonic sounds, and “The Last Ten Minutes” is meant to be an abstract representation of the devastation of “the last nuclear holocaust.” “The Whistling Wind,” by Karl Korte, is ba…
A Different View
*2024 stock* Contrabass (double bass) solo virtuoso Bertram Turetzky performs seven solos on the contrabass in this 1981 release. Using bow, plucking strings, tapping on the instrument’s wood body, and employing a little audio technology, Turetzky demonstrates the full range of musical sounds that can be produced on the contrabass. His repertoire on this recording includes a piece dedicated to him (“The Last Contrabass in Las Vegas”), two of his own compositions, and the Lennon-McCartney ballad …
Sveglia
In May 2022, at the age of 88, Christian Wolff performed once again at AngelicA, nine years after the monographic concerts the festival had dedicated to him in 2013 (documented on the cd album Angelica Music, IDA 030). Among the greatest and most singular living composers (in 1950, at a very young age, he was already a member of the legendary New York School along with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and John Cage), for the opening of the thirty-second edition of the festival he presented a world-ex…
Lauschgut. Works for (Inside) Piano (1989–2022)
“In art, you can have a look at the world as the world wouldn’t see itself. I find that incredibly exciting,” says Charlotte Seither, presenting ten outstanding works for piano written between 1989 and 2022 – over a period of 33 years. All of these works on make use of playing techniques in which the grand piano is not structurally altered. The sounds are therefore only created in the act of playing and make the individual work a risky event. Some pieces were created in closer succession to each…
Musica Automata
From the composer, Leonardo Barbadoro, comes “Musica Automata”, an engrossing foray into the expressive possibilities of electronics and robotics implemented by an acoustic instrumentation, culminating as a genre-blurring excursion into the outer reaches of experimentalism. Created with entirely digital source material, rendered by the Gent based Logos association's orchestra of automated, robotic instruments - percussion, woodwind, brass, organ, and numerous unconventional instruments - this st…
Invisible Story
In the last few years Tibor Szemző has been revising some of his past recordings, rearranging, changing instrumentation, remixing and remastering them for new releases on vinyl LP on his Fodderbasis label. Now he is releasing a new limited edition of the album “Invisible Story” on a 10’’ vinyl EP. The title refers to the collection of essays by Béla Hamvas (1897-1968) published in 1943. Hamvas was an outstanding Hungarian thinker even in the European context. Due to his anti-materialistic concep…
How Lonely Sits The City?
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* Composer/improviser Magnus Granberg, who lives in Stockholm, has presented outstanding composed works through Skogen, the ensemble he directs, and experimental music ensembles, projects and labels from around the world. He has released three CDs on the Meenna label: "Whose Words?"(meenna-983 / 2017), documenting a trio improvisation performance with Tetuzi Akiyama and Henrik Olsson; and two albums titled "Come Down to Earth Where Sorrow Dwelleth" (meenna-…
And / In
*2023 stock. 300 copies limited release* And / In is the Amsterdam/Berlin-based duo of Heather Frasch and Koen Nutters creating music with objects, text, and vibrations. Shadows and light, audible and inaudible movement, air, liquids, and solids. They conduct musical investigations of objects, bodies, agents, sounds, actions, text and silence. Objects and/in silence. Text and/in sound. Reading and/in actions. A spatio-vibrational theater workshop approaching the meaning and the life of objects a…
Kanon Aonami Composed Works: Performed by Sean Colum, Kanon Aonami and Fumi Endo
Born in Yokohama in 1994, Kanon Aonami is an alto saxophonist and composer who plays jazz and improvised music at performance venues mainly in Tokyo and Yokohama. She is also a talented composer, and at Ftarri she often performs her own compositions in addition to improvised music. In June 2021 Aonami started appearing periodically at Ftarri; she has performed with musicians including pianist Fumi Endo, alto sax player Masahide Tokunaga, and British guitarist and Tokyo resident Sean Colum.
Focus…
A History of Musical Pitch
This album contains three works by Seamus Cater, including his creative response to the work of Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), who presented a paper 'The History of Musical Pitch' to the Royal Society in 1880. Ellis was a mathematician, collector, philologist and musical enthusiast, who spent a lot of time measuring the exact frequencies of contemporary and ancient musical instruments, and so is remembered as one of the founders of comparative musicology. Two of the pieces on the disc are 're…
A room outdoors
'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…
Study In Fifths I (For Two Flutes, Keyboard And Electronic Sounds)
*2023 stock* Contemporary classical composer Masamichi Kinoshita was born in 1969 in Ono, Fukui Prefecture. He currently lives in Tokyo. Kinoshita regularly performs at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo. In February 2020 he held the first concert in the series "Ftarri's Harmonium," featuring the harmonium housed at Ftarri. The series has since continued at a rate of one concert every few months; the fifth was held on July 3, 2021. In each concert, Kinoshita (on harmonium) performs his own compositions…
Touch three
*2023 stock* This is Phill Niblock's third release on the Touch label. Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten minimalist. His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V. Vierk, David First, and Gl…
Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court
Tip! *300 copies limited release* Henry Birdsey - best known as one half of the microtonal multi-instrumentalist duo known as Tongue Depressor - is a master of dualities. He writes music that is both fundamental and complex, tranquil and fierce, and conceptual yet familiar all at once. His music often reflects the expansive and isolated regions of his home state of Vermont with its vast natural splendor, both lush and harsh, haunting and entrancing. It is also often about nothing more than the p…
Cantegral Segment(s) 16.17.18.19. / Transform (Stream) / Transphalba / Volta (Kernel)
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 …
Texas Music
Tip! One of the first Irida releases, Texas Music (IRIDA 0026, 1979), collects compositions by Jerry Hunt (hailing from Dallas), Philip Krumm (based in San Antonio), and Jerry Willingham (“in and out” of Austin). The record was produced in two editions: one for mass consumption in a corrugated plain brown sleeve featuring a single fish stamp on the cover by the artist David McManaway, and a small “fundraising edition” sold in the same packaging at a higher price with a numbered print by McManawa…
Hybrid Musics
Larry Austin (1930–2018), thirteen years Hunt’s senior, was a key interlocutor for the composer. The two met during Austin’s term as editorial director of the magazine Source: Music of the Avant Garde and both had studied music at the University of North Texas. Following stints at the University of California, Davis, and the University of South Florida, Austin returned to UNT as professor in 1976 and took over its electronic music studio, the Center for Electronic Music and Intermedia. When Hunt…
Music of Dary John Mizelle
Music of Dary John Mizelle is a recording of three densely layered compositions by the eponymous Oklahoma-born composer. Originally trained in trombone performance, Mizelle was a graduate student in composition at the University of California, Davis, under Larry Austin. The two, alongside Stanley Lunetta, had founded the free improvisation group New Music Ensemble in 1963 on campus with the intention of exploring the outer limits of performance and composition. Mizelle became the youngest member…
Music Of BL Lacerta
Tip! Music of BL Lacerta is an album of spontaneous music featuring two live performances, one at the University of North Texas art gallery and one at the Second National Tuba-Euphonium Symposium-Workshop, and a stray studio recording done at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky. The collective BL Lacerta, whose name is derived from a distant astronomical constellation, formed in 1976 (Lacerta also translates to “lizard,” accounting for the group’s reptilian cartoon logo). They began as classical m…
Cartography
“Mapping” here refers to the interest of composer Larry Austin (1930–2018) in the adaptation of external structures (such as mathematical figures or shapes observed in nature) for the purpose of generating compositional material. This concern was shared by his PhD composition students at the university of North Texas, three of whom—Rodney Washka II, Gene De Lisa, and Robert Michael Keefe— are represented on Cartography. Each experimented with the possibilities of the Synclavier digital music sys…