A Practice In Taking Up Space
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR* "All of the following are improvisations and workings-outs, captured at the time by whatever recording device I had at hand. I don’t know what they are: does the act of recording change the nature of a thing?" - Lottie Sadd
Limited Edition CDR in Cardboard String Sleeve with Liner Notes and album art.
Vessels: Spellbook in the House of Hearts
Songs from Vessels: Spellbook in the House of Hearts is a collection of songs from my VR micro-opera cycle Vessels. Each song is a kind of evocative painting, intertwining technology with the sensual, the poetic, and the eerie. Spells 37 and 25, depict a gramophone with a spider at its base and a snake as the speaker.
Sidiroun Parapetasma
“Sidiroun Parapetasma” is MMMΔ’s 14th release to date. The band is leaving -temporarily- behind the slow hypnotic beat experimentation of Nomenklatura and releases a powerful, majestic album of four tracks, a “clin d'œil” at the bootlegging practices of copying music to analogue tape and discarded X-rays in the Soviet era.
The music is heavy, monolithic and massive, filled with rhythmic explosions, repetitive motifs, ethereal synths and harsh atmospheric vocals or hidden screams that harmonize…
Borderland Melodies
Borderland Melodies, composed by Jürg Frey and interpreted by Apartment House, features three chamber works that exemplify Frey's subtle balance of melody, structure, and quiet innovation. The music explores gradual transformation, intertwining voices, and the shading of tone and silence, creating a meditative sound world where every phrase and rest feels considered and essential.
L'art de toucher
L’art de toucher by Evan Johnson features five chamber works that probe the outer limits of sound and silence. With a triptych for piccolo, violin, and percussion at its core, the album also presents finely wrought solo and trio pieces. Johnson’s sensitivity to musical detail shapes an experience full of ambiguity, microscopic interactions, and delicate intensity.
From The Machine: Volume 1
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 200 copies.* The first volume in an ongoing collaboration between composers Kenneth Kirschner and Joseph Branciforte, From the Machine explores the application of software-based compositional techniques — including algorithmic processes, generative systems, and indeterminacy — to the creation of new music for acoustic instruments. Featuring members of Flux Quartet and International Contemporary Ensemble. Although digital approaches to music-making are …
Arch of Motion
In recent years Swedish musician Linnéa Talp has grown interested in liminal spaces of sound, increasingly searching for her breath deep within passages of a song when instruments gently and patiently bridge the verses. In 2020 she released Cochlea, a brooding pop-rock record made under the name Deerest. “I’ve been trying to work with my body, my breath and my listening,” she says of her work since finishing that release. “I wanted to integrate a sense of slow and simple movement into the music—…
…et après (2Lp)
After an already productive year, Alga Marghen, in the guise of their sub-imprint, Planam, delivers, “…et après”, an astounding double LP of archival material documenting the collaboration between Luc Ferrari and Ensemble Laborintus. Issued in a limited edition of 250 copies on vinyl, and bristling with tense electroacoustic sonorities at the forefront of electronic and experimental chamber music, it's among the most challenging, exciting, and engaging albums we’ve heard all year.
The Live One
XI Records is very pleased to announce the release of Tom Chiu’s new double-CD The Live One, a diverse and thoroughly engrossing album that showcases the multiple facets of Chiu’s visions. Chiu is a polymath who is as comfortable with lyricism and the beauty of tonality as he is with process-based works and challenging conventions of composition. Chiu specializes in creating spatial experiences and altered states of mind with his music, with a singular, questing path. He is a gifted improviser a…
A More Attractive Way
** Edition of 500 + 20 pages booklet ** A More Attractive Way is a comprehensive study of live performances made by IST between 1996 and 2000. This set begins at the very outset of the group's career and features their debut concert at Club Orange in London and charts its way through further gigs in London, Billericay, Norwich and Cambridge. “A completely different intensity, but an intensity nonetheless,” Jo Fell reflects in notes accompanying A More Attractive Way. Her husband Simon, to whose …
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 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…
Sculthorpe Studies
Sculthorpe Studies marks a thoughtful and searching entry from Josten Myburgh, situating contemporary ensemble practice within a deep engagement with Australia’s sonic environment and historical legacy. Drawing direct inspiration from the harmonic language of Peter Sculthorpe, himself known for invoking landscape and indigeneity in his music, Myburgh constructs a work for sextet and field recordings that is at once interrogation and homage. The piece unfolds in a sequence of episodes, each pairi…
Femenine (Apartment House)
Femenine, composed by Julius Eastman in 1974, stands as a landmark for American experimentalism - bringing minimalist structure together with exuberant, open-form collaboration. In their intensely engaged rendering, Apartment House conjures music that listens as much as it declares. Simon Limbrick’s insistent vibraphone motif and a persistent field of sleigh bells anchor the performance, as piano, strings, winds, and keyboard join, layering intricate phrases, timbral color, and nuance. The music…
H
H documents the intersection of Japanese composer Taku Sugimoto and Chilean guitarist Cristián Alvear, realized in an unassuming but luminous live performance. Originally written for Sugimoto’s duo project ‘Songs’ with Minami Saeki, the piece was rearranged for two guitars when Sugimoto and Alvear came together in Tokyo. The composition’s title signals its creator’s ongoing departure from elaborate naming conventions - only single letters, roman numerals, or numbers. For H, this stripped-down fo…
A mist is a collection of points
Michael Pisaro (b. 1961) is a member of the Wandelweiser collective, an international organization of musicians which he has defined as 'a particular group of people who have been committed, over the long term, to sharing their work and working together.' Its members have shared an interest in John Cage and experimental music, and extended durations, indeterminacy, and silence have featured in many works they have made; but Michael Pisaro is quick to point out that the members of the colle…
Caroline
2014 release. More solo percussion from Weighter Recordings, this time from Tim Feeney, whose work I had been unfamiliar with up to this point. The long, drawn-out drum rolls from which the album's two tracks are formed invite immediate comparison with the work of Weighter director-in-chief Nick Hennies, with whom Feeney performs in the trio Meridian. However, much as artists of the Sixties and Seventies explored the shared format of monochrome painting with very different concepts in mind…
Grizzana And Other Pieces 2009-2014
Grizzana features Swiss composer Jürg Frey at his most introspective, realized by Ensemble Grizzana - Frey (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Richard Craig (flute), Emma Richards (viola), Philip Thomas (piano), Seth Woods (cello), and Ryoko Akama (organ & electronics). The work, together with companion pieces on the double CD Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014(Another Timbre), marks a deep engagement with sonic transparency, tension, and the delicate equilibrium found in Morandi’s painting. Ea…
The Watchers
The Watchers is a historic collaboration between Lubomyr Melnyk and James Blackshaw. These new pieces are being released as a CD/LP with material exclusive to each format. LP is pressed in an edition of 500.
"I first met Lubomyr Melnyk at a festival called Hea Uus Heli in October 2008. We were both scheduled to play that day and I was very excited to see him perform. Before the show I bought several LPs from him and mentioned as much. Lubomyr (more than modest and courteous, as he always is) as…