Pocket Music
James Caldwell’s creative life is the embodiment of the principle, Start at Home. In his case that is not only Macomb, Illinois, but even more precisely, in his pockets. Whereas some might consider music to be a soundtrack to their lives, an add-on, Caldwell reaches deep into the spaces around him for sonic potential and helps it emerge. For more than twenty years I have pursued a sporadic project of making small musique concrète pieces. The original set used sounds I made with things I found in…
Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire
Dramatic moments of enlightenment – when the mask is dropped and truth revealed – are found in tales from the Buddha and Euripides to Scooby Doo and Star Wars. And few artists have been as fascinated by niggling the clueless or deflating the stuck-up as Harry Partch (1901-1974). As a lifelong outsider, the conformist society he experienced and the narrow-minded attitudes (not to mention musical delusions) that permeated it, are themes to which he often returned. In the 1950s, seeing a world that…
Skamielina
** Edition of 50. Cassette With Skeleton Doggo Insert ** Skamielina means fossil and there is an excavated feel about this pretty piece of pastoral horror. Like something has been dug up and now stalks the cloying, humid summer, alive again in the warm rain with the incessant mosquito-buzz of tape, the ever-present tape-buzz of mosquitos. Samutek’s has over 30 releases, none of which have any details apart from titles that are in varied German, Polish and English. The cover photography is murky-…
The Great Learning
** CD housed in a 4-panel digipak. Comes with 12-page booklet ** Tone Glow Records is proud to present a special archival recording of Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 7 from Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning. Conducted and formed by American composer Dean Rosenthal, the Montréal Scratch Orchestra featured 14 or so like-minded experimental music enthusiasts who performed the pieces at Redpath Hall on the McGill University campus in 1996. This release arrives on Cardew's 85th birthday and follows Ro…
Verses
Another Timbre presents Verses, five chamber and solo works by the Canadian composer Barbara Monk Feldman. "I have been thinking about what is inside and what is outside. The everyday life and tragedy of what goes on around you, and the fact that to accomplish anything you need the isolation in the studio - I think about this moral issue. And then on another level, I think about an inside and an outside for art itself, and how ephemeral that is.... What I am looking for is a way to notate the mo…
Ballad
Two pieces for cello and piano by Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, both performed by Anton Lukoszevieze (cello) and Kerry Yong (piano). "In Ballad (45 minutes in duration) I was extending myself into a longer work; I wanted to make a work that could be the entire concert, that could unfold over a longer time. With Through the Low Hills (10 minutes), I was working with a very restricted vocabulary in a process of constrained variation, working and re-working just a few elements. I felt like …
Me Hollywood
Another Timbre presents Me Hollywood by Oliver Leith. 5 chamber works by UK-based composer Oliver Leith, performed by Explore Ensemble. Cover drawing by Susan Te Kahurangi King. ‘Me Hollywood’ sees a hired ensemble soundtrack their patron's evening. He is hoping, or, knows even, that the music will elevate each banal gesture. Films will eventually be made about him, so he’s just making it happen now, his life is filmic, it just needs a score, he drinks, he sings, he plays the piano, he cares for…
Summer
5 chamber works by James Weeks, beautifully performed by Explore Ensemble. An album of interlinked pieces that form a sequence. James Weeks says "I was aware of tying the pieces together as a set, by continuing and extending certain poetic ideas, ways of using and combining instruments, and ways of thinking about material....Things like the use of mixed instrumental duos, which comes from Violet-Violute, the use of a slow-moving or static background harmonic layer, which comes from Summer, the o…
Arachnesound
** Edition of 50 with a 16 page booklet text by Angela Dimitrakaki ** Arachnesound is feminist sonic technology. It stands for the principles of women-weaving-futures, network building, sonic cyberfeminist attempts to retell historical narratives. arachnesound is an audio collection with 36 compositions around Greek language, sound and feminisms. It is centered around women writers, poetesses and mytholgies to interpret women’s lifes and realities with radical composition. Field recordings, elec…
The Fred Records Story Vol. 3 - Stepping Out
Third of a three box collection by one of the most innovative guitarists and composers of his generation, containing eight ReR CDs, a bonus Fred title and a fat historic booklet with artwork, photographs, extensive notes and other comments by Fred, all packed into in a sturdy box -- and at a budget price. Box three contains: Technology of Tears, Propaganda, Allies, Accidental, The Previous Evening, Happy End Problem, Nowhere, Sideshow, Field Days. Plus, bonus CD Inimitable (previously unreleased…
The Fred Records Story Vol. 2 - Crossing Borders
Second of a three-box collection by one of the most innovative guitarists and composers of his generation, containing 8 ReR CDs, a bonus Fred title and a fat historic booklet with artwork, photographs, extensive notes & other comments by Fred, all packed into in a sturdy box -- and at a budget price. Box 2 contains: Live in Japan, Speechless, Prints, Step Across the Border (film score), Impur 2 (large ensemble), Art of Memory II (with John Zorn), Skeleton Crew (double CD with Zeena Parkins and T…
Grünschall
** 2021 Stock ** This is the first solo release by Swiss drummer Peter Conradin Zumthor. "Another good example of the consistently high-quality musical output and the vitality of the scene in the supposedly oldest city in Switzerland. On his solo debut, released on the label of the highly esteemed Swiss percussionist Christian Wolfarth, the self-taught drummer from Chur presents a refreshing musical potpourri of his sound repertoire, developed over the years, in the form of seven interwoven comp…
Ward 24 / Trademark
A one-time pressing of 150 copies only, on thick 180g-vinyl, with two inserts and download-code included. Gad Whip blend avant-garde sensibilities with a contemporary take on the place where D.I.Y. culture meets post-punk, hints of deconstructed garage rock and interstellar voyaging through sweat-drenched waking dreams. Immediate, powerful, confounding and kept in place by wry, sometimes observational, vocals that recall Jason Williamson and Mark E. Smith.
Retusa – Santuario de Mariposas
Santuario de Mariposas aims to explore the audio characteristics of musical instruments of pre-Columbian origin. They are complemented by a variety of instruments of an ethnographic order, associated with indigenous groups throughout Mexico. After more than 40 years of atnomusical research, Itxoneztli recorded this album trying to give life to sleeping instruments and reflect what the music of the Mexicas ancestors was like.
Volta No Vento
** Edition of 250 numbered copies, 180g black vinyl, spot varnish on 350g paper heavy sleeve ** "Volta No Vento" is the result of a dialog between the French photographer Gilles Roudière and the French musician and composer Toàn initiated by IIKKI, between November 2019 and November 2020. Toàn is Anthony Elfort, a French musician and composer from Brittany who has released previously his first release on the label eilean rec. in July 2017. After 3 years, this is his second opus splitted in two a…
Romantic Suite
** 2021 Stock ** Partly improvisations by Luciano Margorani (electric guitar, noises), Federico Zenoni (drums and objects), recorded together in Italy, then sent to Dave Newhouse (saxes, clarinets, and keyboards) in the USA for his input, this 2nd release by the trio is an expansion of the debut (under their full names, and then titled ‘Beauty Is In The Distance‘ – 2016) which only had one long composition. This new one has three pieces that have an even more florid array of aromas, catching sha…
Ballad of the External Life
** 2021 Stock. Clear vinyl LP with gorgeous, full-color, matte-finish jackets and poly-lined inner sleeves. Mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin. ** "Ballad of the External Life", Rrill Bell's debut LP for Elevator Bath, takes its inspiration from the Hugo von Hofmannsthal poem of the same title (“Ballade des äußeren Lebens” in the original German), and features hybrid treatments of tuned percussion source material, swarm-like passages of next-level (cassette) tape manipulation, immersive micro-s…
Habituons Nous à la Pluie
Alma De Nieto presents Habituons Nous à la Pluie by Thomas Barriére. All music composed and played by Thomas Barrière. Mastering: Anthony Laguerre at Shadyn Studio Artwork: Bertrand Monboisset.