Natural World
A haunting 55-minute work for voice, piano and electronics by one of the world's leading experimental composers. Natural World is in three sections - Field Guide, Chorus and Seascape. It starts playfully, with Juliet Fraser singing encyclopedia-style facts about birds and animals against Mark Knoop's stop-start piano motif. But, following the introduction of field recordings and then electronics, the music gradually - almost imperceptibly - becomes darker until, without ever explicitly addressin…
Evening Star, Vesper Bell
Beautiful 54-minute work by Magnus Granberg, written for and wonderfully played by Apartment House. As with almost all of Granberg's compositions, a strong ability in improvisation is essential as the score presents musicians with pools of musical material from which they have to select sounds according to what they are hearing in the moment from the other musicians. Sumptuously gorgeous music.
Sound Pieces
Apartment House realise seven works by the pioneering US experimental composer. The first six pieces are text scores for open instrumentation, while 'Peace/Tree' is a seven movement work for violin, cello and piano that specifies pitches, while still leaving a lot of freedom of interpretation. The download also includes an alternative realisation of 'Quintessential' that didn't fit on the CD
Naldjorlak
Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue’s first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This album brings together two complete performances …
L’Occhio Del Vedere
L’Occhio Del Vedere is a one-hour piece by the trio of Giovanni Di Domenico (piano), Silvia Tarozzi (violin, 1/16th of a tone tuned violin), and Emmanuel Holterbach (large frame drum). In July 2022, while Di Domenico was working on an artistic residency at GMEA in Albi, France, he and Tarozzi and Holterbach made a trio recording, which was later completed by Di Domenico as a one-hour piece. Within a ‘triptych’ structure framework, sparse melodies discreetly and repeatedly emerge from the three i…
Tom Johnson : Combinations
Tom Johnson uses numbers as base material, turning formulas, combinations and other mathematic phenomena into music. And somehow, this music becomes poetry, sometimes like a haiku, sometimes like a sonnet, sometimes descriptive and clear, often enigmatic but always beautiful.
Pulse Music
*2LP Gatefold with tipped in booklet * Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seriali…
Acustica < > Elettrica
*2022 stock* 'We can appreciate some musical works for a variety of reasons. Some unleash a narrative that can read our present and its problems very well, others prefer to move on abstract codes, whether experimental or electronic. Still others may propose ethnographic readings as much aimed at an examination of the past and tradition as they try to probe the future through spatial or psychedelic atmospheres. Then there are proposals capable of going beyond any stylistic framework and floating …
Ark Hive of A Live
Ark Hive of A Live is a 4 CD set of recordings by Andrew Poppy, along with a 128 page book, including writing by Andrew Poppy; an introduction by Paul Morley; other writing by Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English; and archival photographs.
Ys
Florence Cats is a poet, visual artist, sound composer, performer and acupuncturist. Born in Vilvoorde in 1985, she is currently living and working where Brussels meets the Sonian forest. Ys is a generous debut. A genuine personal statement. It's raw and courageous. Sunken Cathedral is Florence interpreting Claude Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie (trans. the Sunken Cathedral). The track reminds me of one of those fabled Charles Ives home recordings. Recording himself on Speak-O-Phone - an old b…
Mirrored
French pianist Vanessa Wagner collects solo piano studies of graceful minimalism and rare finesse for new album Mirrored.
Ripples On The Surface
*In process of stocking* Releasing music since 2006, Tiago Sousa is one of most talented and heartfelt pianists of his generation. His compositions are soulful, generous, and mindful. He has released records on Immune, Discrepant and for years oversaw Merzbau, a visionary Portuguese label that inspired many in the mid-2000s. After years of flirting, we are very happy to announce Tiago's first release on Holuzam, “Ripples On The Surface”.
The opener “Sunflowers” sits close to Steve Reich – “Music…
Sextet & Double Sextet
*Limited Edition of 500 copies. 2022 stock.* "This release couples two of Reich’s “sextets” for the first time: the Sextet of 1984 and the Pulitzer Prize winning Double Sextet of 2007. A striking difference between the two pieces is that the rhythmic world of Sextet mostly consists of a single-meter grooving, while Double Sextet works in the angular, off-kilter shifting meters reminiscent of Reich’s Tehillim (also of Stravinsky). Ekkozone impart a uniquely chamber music feel and color to these w…
Hymnkus Thoreau Drawings Two
"Some years ago we performed the John Cage Thoreau Drawings work at dawn break in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on a rather chilly November morning. As a visual artist I have always delighted in Cage’s own visual art and its connections to nature and Henry David Thoreau. The graphical notational elements used in Cage’s score are not, however, his own, but derived from the many small sketches of plants and other natural ephemera found in Thoreau’s Journal, (which I highly recommend also as a porta…
Betula
Dutch composer/clarinetist Germaine Sijstermans is one of the emerging artists of the new generation of the contemporary classical music scene, regularly and closely working with artists associated with Edition Wandelweiser. This is her debut album as a composer, a double CD containing seven of her recent pieces, all composed between 2017-2019 and performed by the ensemble of six musicians who had worked closely together from the very start of the project: Antoine Beuger (concert flute), Germain…
Two Skies
"Two Skies" is the first recording of an ongoing collaboration betweenviolinist Maya Bennardo, bass clarinetist Erik Blennow Calälv, and kacapi musician Kristofer Svensson, who have been playing together in Stockholm since 2020. Bringing together different performance and composition practices—contemporary classical, free improvisation, and Sundanese music—the music on this album represents a hybrid form of chamber music. In its origination, it is a form of music between improvisation and compos…
Residy
'The music on this album is a variation on a variation, the Goldberg Variation no. 21 by JS Bach. In a moment of realistic modesty, it struck me that I will probably never live up to my old dream of being able to play all the Goldberg variations in a way that’s at least close to the composer’s intentions and that pleases my own ears. However, I reckoned, perhaps I could use the score of one of the pieces as a foundation to build something else. Exploring and at the same time (re)creating the res…
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…
drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep
Rotterdam-based composer/pianist Reinier van Houdt created six pieces from March 22 to August 22, 2020 for a monthly 'quarantine' series of the online festival AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, commissioned by Jon Abbey. Each of the six pieces on 'drift nowhere past' was recorded on the 22nd of each month (#18, #75, #128, #155, #194, #211). "I've made these pieces from what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard, or imagined, each during one specific day in the quarantine of …
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 …