In Principio
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* "His music makes the basic human need for a link between aesthetics, ethics and spirituality clear and perceivable – a need so often subordinated to politics and economics in our society." Thus the words with which Arvo Pärt was awarded the International Bridge Prize of the twin cities Görlitz and Zgorzelec in 2007. His new CD, ‘In Principio’, demonstrates the extent to which his more recent music manifests this very link. Twenty-five years ago ECM launched its New…
Symphony No. 4
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Premiere recordings of Arvo Pärt’s music belong on ECM New Series. This recording of the 4th Symphony – Pärt’s first symphonic work in more than 30 years – documents also the premiere concert performance at L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Before Pärt started work on the composition, his thoughts had been circling around texts related to guardian angels. Then he received the commission from Los Angeles, a city whose very name means ‘the angels’. His decision to mak…
Tabula Rasa
*2024 stock* Original CD and all materials from the original booklet. Music scores of all four compositions of the album. Previously unreleased facsimile of Arvo Pärt’s autographs of “Tabula rasa” and “Cantus”. Introductory essay by Paul Grifftiths. Exclusive photographs from the ECM archive. All texts in English and German. In 1984, ECM brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint. Now, on the occasion …
On A Dark Night
*2024 stock* Berlin Strings is a string quartet consisting of Lisa Marie Vogel, Johanna Wundling, Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann and Luisa Babarro Fernández. Since meeting in the National Youth Orchestra and founding Berlin Strings 13 years ago, they have developed into explorers of their own sound. A sound that has always been imbued with the discipline of classical music, pure craftsmanship, the sublime rules of composition that make communication wordless. But also experimentation, flirting with dis…
Ovidono
*2024 stock* Ovidono is an auditory art project by Markus Popp (aka Oval) and Vlatka Alec, a fascinating scenario for a new kind of musical storytelling. Sensual, dazzling and multi-layered, the project - originally codenamed "ASMR 2.0" - combines a new interpretation of the epic, timeless poetry of Ovid and Ono No Komachi (performed in Japanese by Eriko Toyoda aka SO) with Oval's electro-acoustic compositions, post-digital soundscapes and ambitious vocal processing. The complex, whispered vocal…
Dach
*2024 stock* When two worlds collide, you clean up afterwards. That's how the first impression of Dach, the joint work by the Frankfurt sound collective Ensemble Modern and Paul Frick, known from Brandt Brauer Frick, feels. Few people know that Paul studied classical composition and that it is therefore not particularly surprising that, in addition to his work with BBF and Tangerine Dream, where he has been dribbling synthesiser capers with the electronic music legend from Spandau for some time …
Looking for Daniel
We commemorate the late Phill Niblock with this release made in close collaboration with the composer just before his passing in January 2024. His life and work have had a profound influence on many contemporary composers, performers and artists, so it is a great honour to be able to present here, together with Echonance Festival, recordings of some of his very last compositions. The two works on this album, “Biliana” (2023) and “Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel” (2019) represent t…
Boston Tenor Index
CD Edition. Alga Marghen returns with what might just be their most historically significant release to date, “Boston Tenor Index”, comprising three, never before released compositions - “Index”, from 1969; and “Tenor” and “Boston III”, both from 1972 - by Phill Niblock, that represent some the earliest works in his catalogue to have ever appeared. Truly stunning in audio terms, and an absolute revelation toward understanding how Niblock arrived where he did a few short years down the road, it’s…
Collected Works 2018-22
'Collected Works 2018-22' coalesces three deeply personal works that were created by Elms for three of the UK's most innovative ensembles and supporters of contemporary music. The three works explore misremembrance and the degradation of memory over time (Consolations in Travel), cyclical patterns of thought and resultant behaviour (The Age of Spiritual Machines), and the perception of reality orchestrated through expectation and misconstrued senses (100 Demons).
Fame di Vento
Huge Tip! Fame di Vento is Manuel Zurria's latest work. A triple CD to evoke the many suggestions and projects that have taken place in recent years, full of collaborations, of the Sicilian flautist. Fame Di Vento is also an idealized homage to Alighiero Boetti, a nomad by culture and vocation. In his footsteps, Manuel draws on the most diverse cultures, from the Lithuanian mystics to India and Sicily, from just-intonation to European-style minimalism. As he has already done in the past, Zurria …
Construire Sur Les Ruines D'un Passé Encore Fumant
Music performed and shaped collectively by Les Certitudes: Juliette Adam (clarinet), Félicie Bazelaire (cello) and Léo Dupleix (harpsichord). Score composed by Léo Dupleix. The ensemble Les Certitudes was created in 2021 as a means for developing acoustic music focusing on justly tuned tones and harmonies, taking as a starting point the physicality of the instruments –resonating wood and metal– in a long musical form.
Screens
An extraordinary album of compositions by Frank Denyer, played by Octandre Ensemble. 'Screens' contains five pieces, whose dates of composition range from 1973 to 2021. Anyone listening blind would struggle to identify which were early pieces, and which were late; they all simply belong to and come out of Frank Denyer unique and idiosyncratic soundworld.
A list of the instrumentation for the first piece, 'Broken Music' from 1990, gives an indication of the peculiarity and eccentricity of the mus…
Flax
'Flax' is a 79-minute solo work for piano by the Canadian composer Martin Arnold. It was commissioned in 2020 by the pianist Philip Thomas, but sadly Philip became seriously unwell shortly afterwards. Martin Arnold completed the composition in 2021, and - as Philip was now unable to perform it - the project was taken on by Kerry Yong, with Philip's agreement and support. 'Flax' was premiered by Kerry Yong at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2023, when the CD recording was…
Himorogi
Himorogi is the tenth album by Ironomi. Divining Japanese mythology and its relationship with nature, the new album is an aural pastorale that fosters deeper territory in the realm of spiritual searching through dreamy, drifting piano, 17-string koto (jūshichi-gensō) and new form electronic processing. ironomi’s desire to commune with mother Earth and its season’s colors has always served as a continual inspiration for their music. In himorogi, the duo delves into a more spiritual focus in their…
Works for Amplified Piano(s)
With this album, Yoshiko Shimizu presents a second outstanding recording of works for amplified piano(s) by American composer George Crumb, being the only pianist who has created ‘solo’ realizations of his compositions Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), Zeitgeist and Otherworldly Resonances. George Crumb praised her superb 2018 Kairos release (0015029KAI), declaring, “I consider her to be one of my very finest interpreters. Bravissima!”
Propagation of Uncertainty
"Olivier Messiaen once said that all you need to make music is a note and silence. For the composer Arash Yazdani, born in 1985 and raised in Isfahan, Iran (and now based in Tallinn, Estonia), a slightly adapted adage applies: All you need to make music is two frequencies – though Yazdani has a clear preference for notes extremely close in pitch. His music is full of tightly coiled beatings, both stationary and set in motion. These beatings function like black holes in his works, drawing other s…
Frédéric Lagnau
*200 copies limited edition* A half-voiced sieve whose method is the title (Je me souviens de do dièse majeur dans un prélude en do majeur de Jean-Sébastien Bach), an impressionist loop that becomes a groovy construction (À mesure et au fur), a repetitive mechanic that fuses (Solar loops), rocket scales that color each other (La gamme qui teinte), an ecstatic, pulsating teenage cantabile (Morning song of the jungle sun), a harmonic march that traverses the keyboard, out of phase with itself (Les…
All Life Long
Created between March and May 2020, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece, positioned as a “study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns”.
For Bunita Marcus (1985)
Proudly co-produced with Teriyaki records, this volume is simply Unique!
Série Réflexion 1
A mysterious entry in the canon of Japanese minimalism, Série Réflexion 1 was the debut and swan song of Oscilation Circuit, a short-lived ensemble helmed by composer Kenichiro Isoda. Released in 1984, the album was intended to launch a new series for Satoshi Ashikawa’s Sound Process label, whose Wave Notation albums had already heralded a new phase of ambient composition. Where composers like Ashikawa and Hiroshi Yoshimura took ques from Satie, Eno, and Budd, Oscillation Circuit’s interests lay…