Contemporary Composition / Minimalism

A concert-length work for pipe organ, piano and percussion, created by the composer and the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys and George Barton) at the recent Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Wonderfully brooding music, beautifully played.

Adjacent Sound positions Gabriel Paiuk as a composer attuned to the phenomena of perception, proximity, and the thresholds where listening itself becomes the subject. Rather than presenting a collection of isolated pieces, the album unfolds as a unified exploration into how sound delineates and dissolves boundaries - between performers, between recorded and live presence, between the material and the ephemeral. Every aspect of the release is shaped by a careful questioning of what it means to li…

Discreet Angel brings to light the uniquely understated voice of Mark Ellestad, gathering three chamber works composed between the late 1980s and early 1990s. What unifies the album is its atmosphere of meditative quiet and fragile resilience, qualities honed through Ellestad’s focus on pared-down gesture and subtle shifts in form. Rather than presenting polished showpieces, these compositions favor modesty, restraint, and an honest vulnerability - traits that resonate strongly with listeners se…

Snare Drum + is the latest piece by legend composer/guitarist Taku Sugimoto in 2021, containing some variations of his snare drum solo piece which was written in 2011. In Snare Drum +, three or more additional performers try to follow the sound of snare drum as immediately as possible with percussion instruments or objects which decay quickly, while walking around the snare drum. In the recordings, different walking routes were used for each take.

Seventh entry in Claudio F. Baroni's SoLo series, scored for double bass and loopstation and performed by Dario Calderone. Three movements derive their pitch material from a transcription of the celestial map of Ursa Minor, a method indebted to Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis but permitting performer freedom: pitches notated as loop sequences whose entry, exit and length the bassist controls, each tied to a specific extended technique. Acoustic drone of starfield variety.

**150 copies limited edition** "Although he had accepted my request for an interview about his practice as a rhythmist, Fernand Schirren observed me with a more interrogative look than my questions could ever warrant. From the outset, he warned me that he preferred to be called ‘Schirren’ without the addition of his first name, which he despised. It is of course a contraction of Ferdinand, the name of his father, a painter, but we did not discuss the reasons for his aversion any further. On the …

Fourth chapter of Éliane Radigue's Occam Ocean: three long pieces for alto saxophone, voice, treble viol, birbyné and bass clarinet, shaped with Bertrand Gauguet, Yannick Guédon and Carol Robinson through oral transmission.

As its almost tradition now we start the year with a meditative album from Portuguese pianist and composer Tiago Sousa. Using the piano as its primary tool of expression, Tiago has been slowly cementing his place as one of the most distinct voices to emerge out of the modern wellspring of piano driven minimalism. After last years Angst (CREP81, Discrepant) and 2015’s Um Piano nas Barricadas (CREP23, Discrepant), Tiago returns with a deeply meditative album of synesthetic organic musical patterns…

Mind is moving (IX) is a composition for guitar by Michael Pisaro-Liu, affiliated with the avant-garde composers group The Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. Pisaro's work can be characterized as experimental minimalism, often utilizing silence, a minimum of musical material, and extended composition durations. This version is executed by Slovenian guitarist Primož Sukič.

Éliane Radigue's Occam Ocean 3: three pieces for viola, violin and cello with Julia Eckhardt, Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker, recorded in 2019 in an abbey near Bologna. Music born of oral transmission and water images.

Tom Johnson (b. 1939) is a key figure in the contemporary music scene whose voice as a composer is instantly recognizable. A major champion of minimalism in the 1970s as a writer, he remains one of its most important adherents as a composer, although the word 'minimalist' does not cover everything that his music does. The characteristic elements of repetition and sparse material are there, but his extensive use of mathematics and, especially, counting, makes him unique. Johnson relies on more th…

As the title and subtitle imply, this is a kind of greatest-hits album, with music selected by ECM label producer Manfred Eicher from the 12 albums on the label devoted to the music of Arvo Pärt. Pärt's music is so malleable that people tend to make their own versions of it rather than collect it, but if you wanted an anthology as a starter box, this would be the one to choose. Eicher has worked closely with Pärt since the 1980s, and he has indeed made a sensible "sequence" out of works that do …

* 2021 Stock * LSO Live explore the music of America’s most influential living composer with performances of three of his most iconic works: Sextet, Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood.  Employing Steve Reich’s universally recognisable sound-world, Sextet uses hypnotic repetitions of a sequence of harmonies, which gradually overlap and interweave, resulting in a complex yet utterly compelling musical landscape. Introducing more dissonance and aggressive rhythms than previous compositions…

* 2021 stock * Steve Reich's landmark Music for 18 Musicians is perhaps Steve Reich’s most popular, if not most important, piece of music. Defining characteristics of Music for 18 Musicians piece include an ethereal, trance vibe, pulsating bass clarinets, a consistent beat, and slowly developing chord progressions unfolding over the length of approximately one hour.  Steve Reich’s genre-defining minimalist compositional tool, phasing, is demonstrated in full force here. We will dive deeper into …

Marc Chan's My Wounded Head 3, an open-ended piano piece inspired by Bach's Passion chorales, played in a 72-minute continuous recording by Rob Haskins.

The first complete recording of Walter Zimmermann's string quartets by the Sonar Quartett, with Songs of Innocence & Experience after William Blake, Festina Lente and Fränkische Tänze, plus solo works for violin and for viola with voice.

First CD recording of Songbirdsongs by John Luther Adams, a cycle for piccolos, ocarinas, flutes and percussion based on real bird songs, with Callithumpian Consort, plus Strange Birds Passing.

John Luther Adams's Strange and Sacred Noise, a nine-movement work for percussion quartet, in the composer-supervised first recording by Percussion Group Cincinnati, with a 60-minute interview with the composer.

Three works by Peter Garland, Another Sunrise, Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage and I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last, for pianos, harpsichord, voices and percussion, with Aki Takahashi and Essential Music.

*Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes* Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers litt…