Rome Open Music Experience
*2024 stock* "Rome: not only the capital city of Italy, but also an acronym standing for Roman Aleatoric Music Experience. The three musicians of the Rib Trio, featured in this Da Vinci Classics album are all among the leading experts in the field, and they decided to explore a quintessentially Roman phenomenon, i.e. the fertile ground found by aleatoric music in the Roman area, from the post-World-War II years until present-day. Aleatoric music is music whose notational parameters (such as pitc…
Mapping the Valleys of the Uncanny
Daniel M Karlssons Mapping the valleys of the uncanny is an investigation into a process and method, colliding with questions relating to what can be known to be real, within the field of algorithmic composition. This music and text-based work examines the roles and signifiers of instrumentation and timbre as they unwittingly conspire to designate access, power, status, work and ultimately class. Paradoxically, Karlsson uses this critical-analytical standpoint as a means to build a large-scale i…
3 Works for Strings, Giusto Chamber Orchestra
"Each composition arises from a clear idea that the listener can grasp. That is their beauty, I’d argue – there’s no need for, or possibility of, any process of beautification. They are conceptual art in the broadest sense, but vividly concrete in their sonorous properties. So they are a paradigm of musical art – for music is an art that is abstract in form, concrete in utterance." - Andy Hamilton
Near Blue-A Taste of Melancholy
"Near Blue – A Taste of Melancholy is a soundtrack for being unstuck in time, if just for an hour. It is a glide through a rich past and present, with glimpses of a future worth reaching." - Bill Shoemaker
Franz Koglmann - flugelhornGert Schubert - violinKurt Franz Schmid - clarinetSandro Miori - tenor & soprano saxophones & alto fluteRudolf Ruschel - tromboneRaoul Herget - tubaRobert Michael Weiss - piano
Insula Dulcamara
Paul Klee’s Naturstudium (1923) recalibrated the dialogue between art-making and the natural world. By peering closely at nature, Klee’s project was one of a magical de-mystification, seemingly a contradiction in terms until you realize that by looking clearly and dispassionately (the studium part of Naturstudium), he brought us full circle to wonder and awe. Spanish percussionist Luis Tabuenca also peers inward at his world—here the universe of percussion sounds—inviting us to a microscopic lis…
Passage
Jason Eckardt’s composition Passage is a profound exploration of the unsettling history surrounding the CIA’s interest in sensory deprivation and its impact on human psychology. Divided into three movements – Subject, Ascension, and Testify – Eckardt delves into the dark legacy of interrogation techniques, shedding light on the use of sound and light as weapons in various global conflicts. In a separate work, pulse-echo, Eckardt transforms the piano into a resonant body, drawing inspiration from…
Colliding Bubbles
Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release) is a composition for string quartet and harmonica quartet, meaning that Quatuor Bozzini is playing string instruments while playing harmonicas. "The title refers to different kinds of bubbly matter which are set to collide within the composition, leading to different ruptures and possible release of surface tension. The collision of bubbles unfolds partly in relation to sound, where small fluctuations appear in the encounters between harmonicas and…
Girl
"a glorious, shifting collage of sound" -BBC Music Magazine
Infinita Domenica
Tip! For José Manuel López López it is essential to approach the works on this album with an open mind and to explore other forms of instrumental expressivity and sonic emotionality. He draws significant conclusions from these seemingly fragile figures, gestures and minimal elements, which evolve and multiply to achieve a great expressive and formal perspective. All this affirms a hallmark that reveals a great continuity and coherence among the works included on this album.
Extended II - For Strings & Piano
Temporary Super Offer! "Extended II seems to me to illustrate the same point as its predecessor. These are men at work. The work is sound, as projected in three dimensions and across time. The composition is the realization of that process of work. Old philosophers used to refer to reality – the solid bricks-and-mortar and fellow-beings that surrounded us – as “the extended world” or as “extensions”, and that applies to the music you are holding. It extends because it exists in space and time, a…
All the Wonders of Six Little Spoons
The ensemble consists of 10 musicians from different parts of the world, coming from various musical backgrounds: Thea Soti (voice), Ferdinand Schwarz (trumpet), Jonas Engel (alto sax, clarinet), Victor Fox (bass clarinet), Emilia Gołos (piano), Zoe Argiriou (vibraphone, bass drum, timpani), Magdalena Lorenz (violin), Jonas Gerigk (double bass), Anthony Greminger (drums) and Wojcik himself on electric guitar. The album is an attempt to escape and find an alternative to the hierarchical composer-…
Difference Engines
*2023 stock* "This, the first CD dedicated entirely to work by composer Dario Palermo, features three substantial electroacoustic works written between 2009 and 2012. Palermo (b. 1970) has been involved with the use of new technologies in music since the early 1990s. His background includes studies with Giorgio Colombo Taccani and Giovanni Verrando and others, including Gerard Grisey, as well as in orchestral and chamber performance. His work, as typified in the three pieces presented here, is b…
Of Shadow and Substance
Acclaimed NYC composer, producer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion Of Shadow and Substance.
Empyrean Traces
*300 copies limited release* With Empyrean Traces, De La Catessen Records focuses on another aspect of Adelaide composer David Kotlowy’s career – his works for trio. It follows the 2021 release of Final Fragments: Piano Music of David Kotlowy, where Kotlowy’s solo piano compositions were performed by composer and scholar Stephen Whittington. The three compositions on Empyrean Traces are brought to life by the Benaud Trio, whose ability to carry the gentle poetics of such work allows for bravura …
Octet
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* On this album, works composed in 2018 and '19 by Tokyo-based composer/guitarist Taku Sugimoto are performed by musicians based in Berlin. Sugimoto has in recent years been working on a series in which pieces written as scores for solo performance can also be played as ensembles, with each musician using their respective solo score. For example, a score for guitar solo and a score for cello solo can be played as a duo performance by a guitarist and a celli…
And / In
*2023 stock. 300 copies limited release* And / In is the Amsterdam/Berlin-based duo of Heather Frasch and Koen Nutters creating music with objects, text, and vibrations. Shadows and light, audible and inaudible movement, air, liquids, and solids. They conduct musical investigations of objects, bodies, agents, sounds, actions, text and silence. Objects and/in silence. Text and/in sound. Reading and/in actions. A spatio-vibrational theater workshop approaching the meaning and the life of objects a…
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
Tip! "Feldman's last composition, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, was completed in 1987; although its instrumentation largely corresponds to that of Piano and String Quartet, with one instead of two violins, it differs in almost every other respect from the composition written only two years earlier, for here, in contrast to Piano and String Quartet, Feldman makes every effort to integrate the piano into the string section, and the basic formal components of the composition are no longer staves, as…
A History of Musical Pitch
This album contains three works by Seamus Cater, including his creative response to the work of Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), who presented a paper 'The History of Musical Pitch' to the Royal Society in 1880. Ellis was a mathematician, collector, philologist and musical enthusiast, who spent a lot of time measuring the exact frequencies of contemporary and ancient musical instruments, and so is remembered as one of the founders of comparative musicology. Two of the pieces on the disc are 're…
parallaxis forma
Three vocal works recorded between 2014 and 2020 reveal the Berlin-based American composer's singular approach to voice as spectral instrument. Lotte Betts-Dean, Explore Ensemble, and Exaudi navigate Lamb's radiant harmonic language where phonemes replace text, vowel sounds emphasize overtone clusters, and the human voice blends seamlessly with bowed strings shifting between pure tone and noise.
color residua opens with four sections where composite melodies emerge through slow hocket between si…
Translucent Harmonies
New York-based duo andPlay – violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson – present two extended works exploring the sonic possibilities of just intonation tuning systems. Both pieces were commissioned for andPlay's concert series Translucent Harmonies and premiered in 2018.
Catherine Lamb's Prisma Interius VIII (Melodic Duo) (22 minutes) strips her Prisma Interius series down to its bare essence, removing the electronic spectral resonance of earlier versions. Here, violin and viola plot …