Swing Bridge; Sizzles
This release brings together two works by Alvin Lucier centered on the pipe organ, a perfect instrument for Lucier’s compositional practice. Both are first recordings.“Swing Bridge” was commissioned by this record’s ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra, for the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ. The score requires that specific pipes be removed from the organ and run into three specially constructed offset chests, each accommodating two pipes (six pitches total). These pipes are manipulated by t…
11 Dec 80
11 Dec 1980 is a two CD set containing Eliane Radigue's live performance of Chry-Ptus (1971), her first work for modular synthesizer, and the world premier of parts one and three of Triptych (1978). Triptych part 2 is also performed. Upon hearing these performances for the first time in many years Radigue declared them to be the best versions she'd ever heard. Radigue's sublime renderings of these major pieces are full of illusory stasis, slow change and dense, slow motion drone that has charact…
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.
Chantbook for Lipparella
*In process of stocking* In intensive collaboration with the Swedish ensemble Lipparella, which specializes in creating contemporary repertoire for baroque instruments and countertenor, these 10 timeless contemporary songs were created.
Peter Söderberg, the founder of Lipparella tells: "After having met by chance at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin in 2019, Walter Zimmermann and I started discussing whether it would be possible to perform some of his music by Lipparella. After suggesting some …
Magna Mater
*In process of stocking* "Magna Mater for voices, ensemble and video installation (2013) is one of Maria de Alvears most important recent works. It constitutes a ritualistic invocation of all-nourishing Mother Nature. Sounds, words and images evoke her power and wisdom, the destructive power of earthquake, asteroid impact, drought and firestorm, and the life-giving elements of soil, sun, water, air, sky, clouds, rain.
In this decidedly visceral music, Maria de Alvear explores archetypal human c…
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 …
Enso: Strings & Percussion
*In process of stocking* "Cologne bassist and composer Stefan Schönegg seems drawn to sound without end, a vibrating mass that crawls like a glacier toward the infinite. He’s used the moniker Enso for five recordings now, and although each album has featured a shifting group of collaborators, his vision has persisted without distraction. Enso: Strings & Percussion, which was recorded following a performance with the same ensemble as part of Cologne Jazzweek in September of 2021, introduces a new…
Enso: Strukturen
*2022 stock. In process of stocking* The world slowed down immeasurably in 2020 as the Corona virus pandemic spread across the globe, and Cologne bassist and composer Stefan Schönegg applied that shift to his own music. “I developed a deep longing for reduction and deceleration—in music and in life,” he says. Indeed, Strukturen, the latest transmission from his ensemble Enso, is marked by a Zen-like serenity. Since launching the project back in 2016 Schönegg has embraced minimal materials for th…
Plays La Berge | Greenstone | Pluta | Wooley
*In process of stocking* The second release of the trio T.ON - Matthias Muche (trombone), Constantin Herzog (double bass) and Etienne Nillesen (extended snare drum). This time T.ON presents four fixed media commissioned compositions by Anne La Berge, Madison Greenstone, Sam Pluta and Nate Wooley with talkboxes, bells and tubes, which were performed in four churches of Gottfried Böhm.
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…
Diamorphoses / Concret Ph / Orient Occident / Bohor
Iannis Xenakis's early electroacoustic works define already the compositional space he is using later in his mature, almost one-hour long works like Persepolis or La Légende d'Er. After arriving in Paris as a Greek refuge in 1947, Xenakis quickly found a work as construction engineer with the architect Le Corbusier. He tried in vain for several years to become a member of the Groupe De Musique Concrète (GRM) and thus to gain access to the electroacoustic studios at the French radio. Pierre Schae…
Taurhiphanie / Voyage Absolu Des Unari Vers Andromède / Gendy 3 / S.709
Iannis Xenakis's late electroacoustic music became electronic: all sounds are synthetic "explicit computer music" as Peter Hoffmann called it. The music presented here shows Xenakis's way back from spatialized immersive music and multimedia spectacle to simple loudspeaker music. The sound does not move anymore, there are no synchronized visuals: nothing remains but structured noise. Xenakis used two inventions he had already presented in the context of the Polytopes: sounds created by stochastic…
Skullbase Fracture
Issued by Leo Fegin's visionary record label in 1993, this refreshed and revised reissue collection of Hungarian composer Tibor Szemző's chamber pieces with spoken text – composed at 1980s for the legendary GROUP 180 – is unlike anything else of its kind.
Heide
Nanook of the North is back with their second album, following the enthusiastically received 2018 debut "Nanook of the North," (Denovali). The duo of a composer and violinist Stefan Wesołowski and electronic producer Piotr Kaliński were acclaimed by Boiler Room, The Wire or NPR. Bob Boilen of Tiny Desk Concerts called Nanook of the North's performance at the famous SXSW Festival in Austin, US "one of the wow moments of SXSW". Their new material is a raw and minimalist sonic landscape, practicall…
Supermarket Variations 1+2
Tip! *100 numbered copies* Two pieces generated from musical material found within a 14-minute recording of Sainsbury’s supermarket, Chingford, UK, recorded by Thomas Haines at 17:26 on October 16th, 2020. The source recording contains music-like material. The material, once isolated, cross-processed and rerecorded, reveals extended electroacoustic versions of itself. In the source recording (audible in Variation 1), checkout scanners produce clusters of short pitched tones as the cashiers proce…
Apophany
If you were to connect seemingly unrelated things – Heavy Metal and the symphony orchestra, for example – you might be guilty of apophenia. That friction between opposites has never been a problem for Nick Vasallo, though – his music is equally at home in both worlds. Melding Xenakis, Varese, Extreme Metal, and Dark Ambient with gothic charm, Vasallo conjures up a muscular sonic battle that leads you on an inexorable musical journey to a conclusion where surrender is your best option. Catharsis …
Songs Of Synastry And Solitude
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Brooklyn-based string instrumentalist/composer Jessica Pavone is known for her sparse, melodic music inspired by folk music, improvisation and minimalism. Modeled after the legendary Leonard Cohen album Songs of Love and Hate, these eleven marvelous and lyrical songs for string quartet use hauntingly simple beauty to evoke the ghosts of things lost. Performed by the brilliant young members of the Toomai String Quintet, this is lovely and expressive instrumen…
Ugnayan
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* An important discovery of the original 1974 recording of a Maceda masterpiece! Recorded as 20 channels broadcast simultaneously on all of Manila's radio stations to the population gathered in public spaces with hand-held transistor radios, Ugnayan was a massive production supported by the Marcos regime intended to meld values of indigenous Filipino culture with modernist aesthetics. Though politically problematic and largely misunderstood, the effort involvi…