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.
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 …
Improvised Varieties
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "This CD features music from concerts with Intuitive Music Group (founded 1990) and from some of its members' touring activities in Poland and Russia. It centers around composer and pianist Henrik Ehland Rasmussen. There are three long solo pieces, including one based on a formula given by his countryman Niels Viggo Bentzon, in which countless varied statings of the formula produces an astounding number of ever-developing pianistic phenomena. The other pieces…
La Legende D'Eer
Tip! Individual LP from the Electroacoustic Works boxset. The second release in the Perihel series is one of the most famous electroacoustic compositions by Iannis Xenakis. When Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), who had fought against the occupation as part of the communist resistance, moved to Paris in 1947 it was the start of a highly creative and impressive career. Xenakis not only studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and became one of the most innovative composers of the 20th century, he also…
Irida Records: Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986
An incredible set of vinyl reissues explores the unfolding sonic fiction of Texan composer Jerry Hunt and others affiliated with his Irida label.
BFHC
Limited edition of 100 copies. On her second album (first one on Umor Rex), the Minsk born / Paris based artist Lina Filipovich continues her experiments on deconstruction and re-appropriation of classical pieces. BFHC includes seven electronic interpretations of the works of Baroque composers such as Bach, Handel, Frescobaldi, Carleton and Couperin. Inspired by memories of her experience of interpreting Bach's pieces in early childhood, Filipovich explores the desire to push the limits of perfo…
Seduced by (a) last year
Seduced by (a) last year is artist, musician, and researcher, Andreas Hiroui Larsson’s first album under his own name and which features his interdisciplinary music. Larsson weaves together materials from his art,music, and philosophy practices by way of an interdisciplinary artisticmethod, in which imagery, live improvisation, recordings, and text investigate the purpose of one another by entering each other’s fields, andperforming each other’s roles. Larsson’s music constitutes a layered hybri…
James Tenney
By Zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl's personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: Zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of groundbreaking compositions by James Tenney.James Tenney (1934 - 2006) was a composer, music theorist and pioneer especially in the field of microtonal music, being an influential part of the so-called New York avantgarde scene (Cage, Feldman). Besides his compositonal work, Tenney was teacher at various universities with students like Charle…
Block Gifts
*300 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* Block Gifts is a collection of three works for organs composed by James Rushford between 2015 and 2018. Using harmonium, portative organ and electric organ, each piece is linked by Rushford’s idiosyncratic combination of strict intervallic systems in different tunings (Werckmeister, quarter-tone, equal temperament), and haptically-informed rhythmic and expressive freedom. Creaks, stutters and sweeping fingers on keys become instrumental sounds…
Monochromes
*In process of stocking* “Tolimieri makes a universe of micro-nuance audible, with each piece consisting of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of points of contact. Each point is just a little different from its predecessor. One by one, the points carry the music outwards, until the sound canvas is radiantly filled with the sensation of a particular touch.
The succession of Monochromes on these discs has a beautiful logic. I hear it as an attempt to “begin again”, to rediscover the pi…
Ocean
*Restored and remastered from the original tapes* "My task is to allow the listener to penetrate deeper into the music. The music is wholly improvisational. It has no concept in the rational sense of the word. It’s concept is purely intuitive. It presumes The Law of Analogies: “As above so below. Man is the same as the Universe. The Universe is the same as Man.” ("Emerald Tablet” by Hermes Trismegistus"). This intuition is a kind of rephrased logic which uses many more symbols which contain not …
Suite 8 & 11 per pianoforte
Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces…
Music For The Double Life Of Amphibians (Landmark Recordings)
'The literal meaning of “amphibian” is “double life” and applies to animals living part of their lives in water and part of their lives on land. In the program note to his electroacoustic classic Music for the Double Life of Amphibians, Morton Subotnick states that “amphibian” is to be taken as a metaphor for the work’s structure and programmatic content, which follow a metamorphosis of being through the stages of amphibian to beast to angel. But it also applies to the musical material, the doub…
Heliogabalus Imperator / Works For Orchestra
*2022 stock* The relationship between Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen was one of great mutual respect. The German composer admired the British conductor and composer for electrifying performances of Henze’s own and other composers’ works. Knussen was an untiring and enthusiastic champion of his friend Henze’s music. The recordings collected here display Knussen’s deep understanding of Henze’s music. Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in sensitive and meticulous performances of comp…
Nam June's Spirit Was Speaking To Me
A spellbinding tribute from one multi-faceted artist to another. New York-based artist Aki Onda (b. 1967) conjured a transduction to the Korean multi-media pioneer Nam June Paik (1932-2006).
Canti Del Capricorno
*2022 stock* Michiko Hirayama inspired Giacinto Scelsi to write his twenty-part cycle "Canti del Capricorno" between 1962 and 1972. To this day the Japanese singer (b. 1923) is a unique performer of this spiritual yet energy-filled work for solo voice, with instrumental accompaniment for certain songs: Scelsi’s notes in his own hand in the score; that is her treasure, when she comes to Ulm in May 2006 to give a concert in the series neue musik im stadthaus. Michiko Hirayama is a vocal power stat…
Nothing Is Real ...
*2022 stock* The focus of the pieces by Alvin Lucier on this CD is on the phenomena of resonance – sympathetic vibration – in many variations. “Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece,” says Alvin Lucier.The composer knows which ideas he wants to liberate. But the process of causing the environment to resound is always a collaborative, interactive project. It needs someone who is creatively engaged, even obsesse…
s/t
Yiran Zhao makes use not only of musical elements but also of objects, bodies, movements and light-sources as compositional material. Many of her pieces inhabit the various boundary states between instrumental music, performance, sound-installation, and video-art. Leonie Reineke describes the composer in the CD-booklet as a “prudent researcher“, who encounters the sonic cosmos of her environment with great earnestness, and comes microscopically close to things.
In the composition “Piep“ she focu…
James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet
*2022 stock* This work began life as a radio play in 1982, a commission from and for Klaus Schöning and Cologne’s WDR. Working on the principles of collage, Cage brought together 15 unlikely characters – Narrator, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Vocoder, Erik Satie, Jonathan Albert, Mao Tse Tung (as a child), Henry David Thoreau, Rrose Selavy, Thorstein Veblen, Buckminster Fuller, Brigham Young, and Robert Rauschenberg – who speak together, their dialogue comprised of literal quotations, freely ada…