things that happen again
A portrait CD of UK composer Paul Newland's music, with five pieces dating from 2009 to 2023, all recorded by Apartment House in 2023. A rich variety of music, ranging from string quartet, two different trio combinations, a short work for solo piano, and a score for open instrumentation, realised in this recording by a septet.Cover artwork by Paul Newland
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…
Six Seasons
Tip! "A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, …
Little Jimmy
e piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place.
Helikopter-StreichQuartett
*2022 Stock. Includes a 100-page booklet.* Helikopter-StreichQuartett (Helicopter String Quartet, 3rd scene of Wednesday from Light) for string quartet and 4 helicopters (1992/93). The 3rd Scene from the opera Mittwoch Aus Licht (Wednesday from Light) is centered on a string quartet piece, accompanied by the sounds of close-miked helicopter rotor engines, and interrupted throughout by shouted numbers in German (by the string quartet players). In a staged concert, members of the string quartet ar…
Not An Elegy
Tip! First pinging our radar with her ‘Headflush’ album for Catch Wave back in 2019, Leila Bordreuil has a tactile, extreme approach to the cello, one that focuses on its visceral aspects in a way that mimics the most spirited, fraught and melancholy human emotions. Despite the complex nature of her playing, you can trace Bordreuil's lineage back to Arthur Russell’s defining ‘World Of Echo’ in methodology and spirit - Leila plays with no processing or effect pedals, everything stems from the pla…
Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions
In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…