The Goldennn Meeenn + Sheeenn
CD Edition. Venerable composer and pianist Charlemagne Palestine revisits his seminal 1976 work ‘The Golden Mean’ in duo with enigmatic artist Rrose, reprising a dialogue started 10 years ago when Rrose was studying at Mills College and looking for a score to Charlemagne’s amazing ‘Strumming Music’…“In 2018 the Festival Variations in Nantes commissions Palestine to perform The Golden Mean, reworking the piece for two pianists. Palestine chose Rrose to join him in this new rendition of the work. …
The Shunned Country
A collection of 52 very short songs on uncanny themes, illustrated in the exquisite 24p full-colour booklet with a set of 20 commissioned paintings by Ray O'Bannon. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob Drake plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable tempo synchrony, packing more ideas and material into 50 seconds than many manage on an ent…
Thou Shalt Boogie!
Formed in 2003, the Oslo-based trio Bushman's Revenge (named after a type of mouth-searing hot sauce) are upfront about their love for the progressive rock of Cream and Jimi Hendrix, the galactic jazz of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Sharrock and Alice Coltrane, plus the raw power of Black Sabbath and The Pixies. Thou Shalt Boogie! is their sixth album for Rune Grammofon, a relationship that began with 2009's You Lost Me at Hello (RCD 2083CD/(RLP 3083LP). Its velvety, warm sound was captured a…
Piano I
“The Piano has been an instrument that has woven its way in and out of my life since I was a child. I grew up listening to great classical and jazz players, prepared piano and electronic experiments, extended techniques and later the incredible works of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Ligeti, Ferrari, Feldman, Xenakis and Scelsi. I had written for and worked with many great pianists and created ensemble works with piano and electronics where I was given the freedom to write complex pieces for gifted …
Stop Time
Robin Hayward plays microtonal tuba in Catherine Christer Hennix's ensemble and Stop Time is his first composition to be released on Important Records. Stop Time was commissioned for a festival of the same name taking place in Leuven in 2013. It is the first piece to use a subset of the three-dimensional physical version of the Hayward Tuning Vine, invented in 2012, as a musical score. The harmonic space implied within the four cubes contained within the subset, based on prime numbers two (octav…
musik fur orgel und eine(n) tonsetzer(in)
2013 release **
"what do you do, if you work with just intonation and wish to write a piece for organ? you have to deal with the relation between equally tempered and over- or undertonal (just) intonation. 2001 i had several opportunities to make a study of some wonderful instruments. this eventually put me on the path towards this composition.in this piece only those frequencies of the organ sound that have close to whole-numbered ratios (+/- 6 cents) to a fundamental (in this case C’ at about …
Angelica Music
The music of Christian Wolff has long occupied the fertile borderland between composition and improvisation, as both are usually understood. More a set of suggestions than a writ of prescriptions, his scores can take the form of graphic symbols floating freely against a white background—as in 1968’s Edges—or of pitches notated and other parameters left unspecified, as in the Exercises. He is on record as having said that a score is only a means to an end, the latter consisting of the performance…
West coast soundings
2014 release **
New compilation of works by emerging west coast composers who somehow belong within a John Cage lineage. Music by James Tenney, Michael Pisaro and their students, Mark So, Michael Winter, Chris Kallmyer, Tashi Wada, Liam Mooney, Scott Cazan, Laura Steenberge, Cat Lamb, Quentin Tolimieri and Casey Anderson. "A compilation of work by twelve composers, ten of whom studied with James Tenney and/or Michael Pisaro (who are also represented by pieces here) at Cal Arts, performed by a qu…
Benandare
Performed and recorded by Enrico Malatesta, August 2013. Skin instruments and metal objects. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Enrico Malatesta (1985) is a percussionist active in the field of contemporary music and his personal research is aimed to extend the sonic and multi material possibilities of percussion instruments through simple gestural techniques, able to realize complex polyrhythmic thicknesses and multiple information that exist between performer, space and instrument. Regularly works a…
Inventionen VII: 30 jahre inventionen 1982 - 2012
* Five hours of electroacoustical compositions, recorded during the first thirty years of the Berlin festival “Inventionen”. Box set with two audio CDs and a multichannel (surroundsound) DVD * Mindblowing two re-releases of Edition RZ LPs that are now available in this double CD box with additional tracks, as well as a mainly acousmatic DVD that features electronic tracks by a variety of electroacoustic composers. The present DVD contains mainly acousmatic music. This is when a pure "tape piece"…
Mutanza
This CD presents compositions for piano using the instrument in an unorthodox way. The strings are bowed with nylon strings, stimulated by E-Bows, rubbed with metal, the keys' sound is examined as a corrugated surface and staccato rhythms are repeated in a narrow register. On the one hand, the pieces introduced here explore new ways of playing the piano. In this sense they are enlarged playing techniques, as they have been developed for most instruments in the second half of the twentieth …
Hearing Metal 1
2009 release **
"The first Stockhausen I ever heard, back in college, was Microphonie and I've always remained partial to the general family of sounds elicited therein. So it's not surprising, all else aside, that I'm drawn to the music here, derived from the excitation, via bows and strokes of a 60" tam-tam much like that used by Stockhausen, sensitively played by Greg Stuart. The added flavor, as is Pisaro's wont, is the integration of sine tones pitched very close to the range of the tam-tam …
The Busy Drone
1996 release ** "Reedist Willem Breuker has a fascination with the mechanical organ, particularly instruments like the European street organ. The mechanical organ works like a player piano, and on these recordings is controlled by either Ben Uijtiens or Chris Weeda. His previous Bvhaast album, Lunchconcert for three Amsterdam streetorgans recorded from 1967-1969 is an unusual album of organ work that takes the instrument is lesser known territories, and included a tribute piece to John Coltrane.…
Middle of the Moment
Continuing the definitive Fred Frith edition, this is the CD based on Fred’s music for the second film he made with Humbert and Penzel – following nomads – that features, along with Fred’s compositions and re-workings, a restless and gripping unfolding of atmospheric locations, tuareg and other musics, ethongraphic material and times captured. A collage or a soundwork rather than a straightforwardly musical composition, this is a serious and unfairly marginalised piece (because it falls between …
Cistern
2005 release ** "Cistern was made in a two million gallon underground reservoir at Fort Worden, a de-commissioned military base overlooking the entrance to the Puget Sound. The space's resonance extended the instruments in a way similar to electronic processing. The acoustic properties of the cistern created new sonic relationships to which the group applied their musical concept. Cistern captures Doublends Vert's first experiences in the sound-world of the cistern. Doublends Vert formed in 2003…
Earle Brown Chamber Music
Matchless Recordings presents a collection of early works by Brown, written 1952-64.
The album includes eight tracks performed by Dal Niente projects: Simon Allen - vibraphone, marimba, percussion harmonicas, various sound-producing media; Peter Bevan - trombone; Bridget Carey - viola; Tania Chen - piano; Robert Coleridge - piano; Francesca Hanley - flute; Nicolas Hodges - piano; Mieko Kanno - violin; Lore Lixenburg - voice; Zoe Martlew - cello; Mannon Morris - harp; Fiona Ritchie - vibraphonem…
Percussionist songs
2004 release ** Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Christian Wolff and Robin Schulkowsky recorded at Poggiolo fram, Pozzuolo, Umbria, Italy on April 22-24 2003. The album includes fifteen tracks performed by Christian Wolff - composition, melodica, Robin Schulkowsky - percussion. "Rooms talk to me. I send out a sound, the space answers. The first message I picked up from the old barn in Umbria was 'yes'.Christian Wolff and I had been thinking, speaking about, even planning a CD with…