Open the windows and let the spirits in and out
Warm Winters Ltd. welcomes Argentinian, Berlin-based composer Ángeles Rojas with her new piece ‘Open the windows and let the spirits in and out’. Originally commissioned by the Buenos Aires festival Ruido, the work documents Rojas’s closing performance of its 2023 edition.
Performed on a Klais Opus 1912 organ with an ensemble of violin, cello, soprano flute, piccolo, baritone saxophone, trombone and bass clarinet distributed throughout the space, the piece unfolds over 30 minutes. Sustained tone…
Midmeste
Australian composer-performers Judith Hamann and James Rushford have worked together in countless projects for two decades, perhaps most notably in Golden Fur, their trio with Sam Dunscombe. Black Truffle is pleased to announce Midmeste, their first work as a duo. Its title is Middle English for ‘the middlemost point’, alluding to how the piece builds on the points of overlap between the highly personalised musical languages Hamann and Rushford have developed in recent years.
Performed on cello …
Cracked Glaze
Matthew Wright’s album Cracked Glaze is performed by virtuoso vocalist Sofia Jernberg, Ensemble Klang (Michiel van Dijk, Erik-Jan de With, Anton van Houten, Pete Harden, Saskia Lankhoorn and Joey Marijs) and Wright’s improv/electronic group Spheric Totemic (Mandhira de Saram, Neil Charles, Alexander Hawkins, Stephen Davis and Matthew Wright). The 46-minute piece was performed live, and is built around a ‘spine’ of one long, descending scale which takes nineteen minutes to unfurl, and which then …
Press
“It’s hard not to figure Jack Sheen’s compositions primordially; they lurch and rock with an abortive conviction, as if heralding culture’s approach—still half-submerged, slouched and red, ages ago. His work is somehow determinedly before almost everything; it feels like a dialectical twin to Beckett’s afterwards. Press moves with grossly impoverished intent—almost as if composed—while trembling and stumbling on the cusp of accident. This projected bodily timidity corresponds with a situation ri…
Glorious Mahalia
Midway through Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington, a voice rang out from behind him: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” That voice belonged to Mahalia Jackson, King’s close friend and one of the most revered gospel singers of the 20th century. Glorious Mahalia, a visionary tribute to Jackson’s life by the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet, uses that moment as a springboard to explore the depth of Jackson’s musical craft and its impact on the Civil Ri…
Libelocus-(alpha), Libelocus-(beta), Libelocus-(gamma)
Big tip! Romanian composer, conductor, and musicologist Iancu Dumitrescu is often described as one of the leading figures of spectral music, yet he has produced a body of powerful works resonating with explosive sound and friction that places him very much in his own universe. Dumitrescu studied under his compatriot, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who rarely left behind concert recordings. From him Dumitrescu absorbed phenomenology and conducting techniques, incorporating them into his own co…
Ashes
Davor Vincze is a composer of contemporary music who immerses himself in phenomena and experiences and conveys them musically through a powerful narrativity. Whether it is technology in his use of machine learning, or philosophy, mathematics, or the experience of visiting a Taoist temple or a gallery, Vincze hears music and searches for hidden acoustic spaces. The six compositions featured on Ashes unmistakably convey (and confirm) the composer’s aesthetic and expression, his identifying signatu…
Getting Personal
2024 was for me the year to look inwards and address in my work a couple of personal, somewhat uncomfortable subjects, something I wanted to do for a long time. This double-album is the result of this process. My deep gratitude goes to Benedikt Müller, Hans Martin Müller, Thomas Baerens, Csaba Kézér, Hermann-Christoph Müller, Stefan Deistler, Pavel Borodin, Erhard Hirt, Alex Minkin, Maciej Karlowski, Semafor and all the musicians who made it possible.
The fate of my grandfather was shared by cou…
Incommunicable
*2026 stock* "I had in mind recording a monographic disc of Yair Klartag’s music many years ago. After a long period of artistic and practical anticipation, I am pleased to present the recording as the final result of our collective work. In my personal artistic universe, contemporary music represents a moment of aggregation of artists. I believe that this album is the concrete result of this desire and vision of mine: collective energies combined for a single artistic purpose. Not even a minute…
Con Slancio
“These performances, by Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach, are simply astonishing in their fluency,” wrote UK magazine Gramophone of Holliger’s album Zwiegespräche, and the description applies with equal pertinence to con slancio, with its inspired and inspiring play of energies. The title piece, which opens the programme here, was written by the Swiss composer and nonpareil oboist as a tribute to musical partner Schüpbach: “Since I began playing in duo with Marie-Lise, I’ve been fascinate…
Atlas Eclipticalis - The music of John Cage & Earle Brown
The John Cage Trilogy – Inspired by Hidekazu Yoshida’s interpretations of Japanese Haiku poetry, John Cage formed a trilogy of his existing works honoring the essence of the poetry. Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), the first piece in the trilogy, represents nirvana. Variations IV (1963), the second work, represents samsara—the turmoil of everyday life. 0’00” (1962), the third piece, represents individual action. Simple Harmonic Motion Records is proud to be the first to present a realization of Cage's…
Four Systems
Four Systems (1954) is an early and influential example of Earle Brown’s open-form approach to composition. Written as a graphic score, the work replaces traditional notation with visual elements that suggest relationships of pitch, duration, dynamics, and rhythm rather than prescribing exact sounds.
Four Systems may be performed by any number of musicians using any instruments, and its duration is equally open: the piece may last as long as desired, provided the time frame is agreed upon in adv…
Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest
Dream Sequence of an Ancient Forest gathers pieces composed between 2017 and 2023 into a continuous arc that feels less like a compilation and more like a slow, lucid dream. Across the album, Madli Marje Gildemann listens with almost scientific care to the smallest workings of the natural world – the secret exchanges of plants, the nocturnal trajectories of birds, the micro‑rhythms of an old‑growth forest – then lets imagination bloom around those observations. Her sound world is atmospheric and…
Hermetika IX
Hermetika IX – Vox Angeli II pushes Bernhard Lang’s obsession with loops, fracture and stylistic collision into explicitly metaphysical territory. Centring the female voice, the piece takes its texts from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, a body of early Christian and Gnostic writings in which the tension between spirit and flesh, transcendence and fall, is particularly charged. Across four sharply contrasted movements, Lang treats those texts less as doctrine than as volatile material: sensual biblic…
Across … in Grief and Detail
Across … in grief and detail presents Michael Hersch at his most concentrated and exposed. Composed between two shattering personal crises, these three compact works push his already uncompromising idiom into a realm where every sound feels physically paid for. Writing for soprano, violin and bassoon in shifting combinations, Hersch strips away any sense of orchestral distance; what remains is a chamber theatre of proximity, in which the smallest inflection of the voice, the slightest change in …
Castle Terraces In Barry Lyndon
Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon is a spacious and quietly enigmatic work by composer and writer Zeynep Toraman. Created for instrumental ensemble, electronics and film, and written for Ensemble Contrechamps, the piece brings together clarinet, cello, violin, electric guitar and electronic textures with a subtly unfolding visual layer. What emerges is a world where sound and image lean gently toward one another, opening a listening space that feels both architectural and intimate.
The title recal…
Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet
Bastille Musique presents its thirty-ninth release »Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet« featuring Florence Millet (piano) and the Jack Quartet. The album contains a new studio production of Feldman’s late Piano and String Quartet (1985). The recording, produced by the WDR, is complemented by a 48-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with texts by Michael Struck-Schloen, a conversation with the performers and the recording producer, autograph pages and two concertina-fold inserts with photos of…
Double String Trios
John McGuire’s Double String Trios brings together three substantial works for paired string trios composed between 2012 and 2021 and conducted by Axel Lindner. The project originated when Walter Zimmermann invited Bernd Härpfer of Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln – GIMIK e.V. to arrange a concert premiere marking McGuire’s 80th birthday.
McGuire’s musical language was forged in the electronic studios of postwar Cologne, shaped by studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Krzysztof Penderecki, …
Black Angels
On Black Angels, Kronos Quartet turns George Crumb’s Vietnam-era nightmare into the axis of a stark, haunted program, binding early music, American modernism and Shostakovich’s war-torn melancholy into one of the group’s darkest, most enduring statements.
Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass
On Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet turns four string quartets into a self‑portrait of the composer, charting his path from theatre and film scores to music written directly for the group, all in a language of pulsed clarity and slowly deepening harmony.