Pathological Curves
To sonically modify sound, not as a composerly or listenerly injunction but as a condition of its possibility: such is the task of Elizabeth Hoffman. Hers is not merely a music of the "verb" - that composers "do" something or "perform" something on the sonic. Hers is an "adverbial" music.
Above all, adverbial music modifies - sound, yes, but more fundamentally the space in which sound appears and the temporality that it solicits as it vanishes, always. Adverbial music, reticently and generously,…
Painted Cakes Are Real, Too
When you are listening to his pieces and are completely at ease, they offer the listener the beauty of pure sound: I believe this also applies to his likeminded friends. Even when and if they are of a continuous narrative type, they just create the right situation to listen to sounds. As the title reveals: Painted cakes are real, too. The beautiful sounds are repeated in order to remain purely sound. This repetition does not build up a narrative, it becomes more complicated and excited not in or…
Der Uhu des Ihi
"Leukert brings back intuition into the computer-mechanical techniques of contemporary classical music. His compositions derive from the hearing experience - he has become a David Lynch for the ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, who is operating with the ironically associative scepticism of Godard. A blessing that Maria De Alvear’s small label ‘World Edition’ now produced eight of Leukert’s audio pieces on CD; among them the enchanting trilogy Wildwechsel" . - Alban Nikolai Herbst
Improvisation
That’s the name of the game... Marco Blaauw plays on a quartertone double bell trumpet, a shell, brought from Madagascar,a slide trumpet, piccolo trumpet, quartertone flugel horneven megaphone and flexible tube. Gijsbrecht Royé plays on a self-made bass-zither. To play on the four groups of bass grandpiano strings, he uses different kinds of sticks; two bows (normally used for double bass), metal strings, nails, brushes, knives, rat-tailed files and metal scouring pads.
Sitting Between Chairs
* 2021 Stock * Metamusic. A suitable term for all these works, if by this we understand that musical aspects are somehow transcended, transgressed.
Sitting between chairs. A transgression which leads, through interactions of materials and intentions, controlled use of randomness or indeterminacy, conceptual game of measurement or definition, to the contemplation of music itself as yet another fragment of the whole, because the sound objects may have a dramatic or musical nature.
How could this w…
World
* 2021 Stock * A sprawling, wandering hourlong geological survey of the composer’s ambitious spiritual world. Her music does not develop; it accumulates. - Bernard Holland, New York Times
The only single, continuous orchestral movement I know of to surpass the finale of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in duration. - Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Hildegard Kleeb - pianoJoseph Kubera - pianoThe Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble Petr Kotik - conductor
Libertad
* 2021 Stock * "There are pieces which must be done. The work Libertad is one of them. Inspired by the lyrics of Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazo, it is one of those compositions that gave me enormous pleasure while working and that accompanied me with a wave of very great power [...] Perhaps this work [...] is one of those that carry the most power. There is an enormous mysterious protective circle around it. It is one of the works that has given me the most riddles, that contains knowledge that I can on…
Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound
Between 1920 and 1933, the American poet Ezra Pound composed two complete operas and several pieces for solo violin, all in a very personal language that drew from sources as diverse as troubadour music and Igor Stravinsky. The resulting body of music is of surpassing beauty and casts new light on the practice of prosody, the elusive craft of setting texts to music. The first and only available CD recording of its kind, Ego Scriptor Cantilenae features outstanding historical performances from En…
Antheil Plays Antheil: The Rare SPA Recordings and Private Audio Documents 1942-1958
The rare SPA recordings and private audio documents, 1943-1958. Composer George Antheil (1900-1959) is most remembered for his mechanistic piano music hailed by 1920s Paris, but by 1948, when he’d become the third most-played American-born composer of orchestral music, his style reflected a more emotional, more mature personality. This centennial collection highlights selections from Antheil’s later “neo-romantic” period and includes the only recordings of Antheil himself at the piano. A 60-page…
Lost Works, Last Works
Hidden treasure is always thrilling, particularly when it means recovering the forgotten works of a great artist. This historic CD offers a selection of previously unrecorded rarities by composer Conlon Nancarrow, including Piece for Tape, a dazzling rhythmic exercise in musique concrète. Listeners are also treated to the composer’s own recording of his study for prepared player piano, as well as a rare interview with the composer himself.
Explorations (1970 - 1973) 3CD Box
The first ever survey of the seminal British experimental music collective, Gentle Fire, "Explorations (1970 - 1973)" offers a remarkable and previously unavailable glimpse of their activities during the early 1970s.
Rise, Follow
* Edition of 200 * A composition for two bass Renaissance flutes. Performed by Mara Winter and Johanna Bartz. Rise, follow is a dialogue of long tones played by two bass Renaissance flutes, featuring subtle but persistent changes over the duration of one hour. It is performed in one sitting without interruption. The composition adopts the principle of instrumental ‘consort-style’ playing in Europe during the 16th century: a family of similarly pitched and constructed instruments performing polyp…
Prisma Interius VII & VIII
* Edition of 500 * In Catherine Lamb's Prisma Interius series the unpredictability of the outside articulates the field of perception through precise bandpass filters, while acoustic instruments and musicians guide the unfolding of its harmonic space. A series of nine pieces exploring the potential of the Secondary Rainbow synthesizer, an instrument developed in 2016-2017 with Bryan Eubanks, that uses the live environment outside the performance space as a noise generator for basic subtractive s…
Gioseffo Zarlino - 2015/2019
* Edition of 500 * Marc Sabat's Gioseffo Zarlino is "the third in a series of pieces inspired by ideas in the history of music theory, which I seek to experience and unfold in a sounding world" (taken from the liner notes by the composer). In the piece, unfolding cyclically over 70 minutes, voices, strings, harp, and flute, weave through each other exploring a novel tonal space developed by the Renaissance Italian Composer-Theorist, Gioseffo Zarlino in 1558 and reinterpreted in the 21st Century …
Vortice Rosso
Putojefe Records is proud to present Vortice Rosso, the first album by Italian composer Flavio Bonometti: a tumultuous journey through the languages of the avant-garde masterfully synthesized in 12 pieces of contemporary classical. After a brilliant career as a violist at La Scala Theatre in Milan and in many other orchestras, Flavio Bonometti gave up the stage to dedicate himself exclusively to his music. The tracks of Vortice Rosso, produced and recorded over the last 10 years, are born from t…
These Are the Generations
The title of this recording has multiple meanings for its composer, Larry Polansky (b 1954). These are the generations... is a translation of the Hebrew title for the second work on the program, Eleh Tol'd'ot, the first words of the thirty-fifth verse of the first book (B'rey'sheet) of the Torah. Beyond referencing Polansky's Jewish heritage, the phrase reflects this particular collection of works on several levels.
The compositions included stem from different generations of Polansky's musical …
Kutra Bégulma - Unfinished Altar
* Limited Edition Green vinyls + insert * Ars Subtilior (14th century) and the Noise: the two inspirations of Christophe Guiraud which are like two rivers which are woven in a writing of great power. The French young composer is the link between the most accomplished scholarly music and some radical aspects of noise. Born in Toulouse mid-seventies, he settles in Brussels - which becomes the crossroads of a continuous creation. Currently works and has been collaborating since several years with …
Sexo Puro
* 2021 stock * Nobody who attended the first performance of Sexo Puro is ever likely to forget it. On that October afternoon, the conciliatory power of this work, which Maria de Alvear sees as a “meditation on inner goodness”, came into sharp collision with the irreconcilable powers that sometimes gather at contemporary-music festivals.
It was probably not even the theme of sexuality that so profoundly disturbed a part of the audience at the 1998 Donaueschingen Festival, even though it is seldom…
Section
* 2021 stock * The structures of Chris Newman's music are apparently simple, like his music pictures: large, thick dots of notes, but a lot of space in between: "The raw and the cooked" (Roland Barthes). He himself likes to cook well and with pleasure. Just his lamb chops, for example. He only puts them in a hot pan with oil; there is also chard, just pulled out of the water, but also more complicated things: coq au vin or bœuf bourguignon.His music has a strong physical structure, is quasi carn…
Legende
* 2021 stock * Acousmatic events dispense with performers. There are no musicians, even at public concerts. The audience is able to follow what is emanating from the loudspeakers with eyes closed and still not miss anything. What it hears is composed, and demands the same attention as any other kind of music listened to on a stereo system or via headphones. It is worth remarking this fact because so many people are no longer able to hear things without seeing something as well in video clips or …