South from Here
Winter Family is a duo made up of Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine. They met in Jaffa, Israel in 2004. Their self-titled debut (Sub Rosa, 2007) offered minimal music played by Xavier on pipe organ, harmoniums and piano backing strict spoken-word texts chanted by Ruth. Their second album, Red Sugar (Sub Rosa, 2011) was highly praised by critics (The Village Voice, Liberation, Haaretz, Pitchfork). Winter Family then composed soundtracks for dance shows, films and advertising (Chanel, EU). They col…
Mutual Aid Music
* Limited edition double CD + 12-Page Booklet. Six panel gatefold CD package beautifully designed by Lasse Marhaug and featuring an exclusive essay on the social and artistic philosophy behind Mutual Aid Music by the composer (including notated examples) * A Double-CD of of Eight Ensemble Concertos by Wooley Performed by Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, Violinist Joshua Modney, Cellist Mariel Roberts, Pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, Percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and N…
Dissection Lente d’un Piano Rouillé
Rubbed/tickled strings, drone-based undercurrents, leviathanic apparitions, squeals of insects, molluscs & intriguing shells, underwater singing moans, the work of the Belgian musician and performer Anaïs Tuerlinckx plunges entangles us into a captivating constellation
FRKWYS Vol. 16: In a Word
**CD edition** In a Word, the sixteenth installment of the intergenerational collaboration series FRKWYS, brings together postminimalist composer Daniel Lentz with vocalist and sound artist Ian William Craig for an album that embraces erosion and the fertility of the loam left behind. A document of shared transformation, Lentz’s elegant piano figures and Craig’s trembling tenor are wilted, warbled, and looped through manipulated tape machines in a real time composition that evokes a strange warm…
Oh Temple!
*300 copies limited edtion* University Challenged are Ajay Saggar ("Bhajan Bhoy"), Oli Heffernan ("Ivan The Tolerable"), and Kohhei Matsuda ("Bo Ningen"). The trio began in 2019, playing shows in Holland, where they gained a reputation for delivering highly dynamic sense-rattling shows, ranging from gentle melodic orchestral spinouts to epic power jams, all backed by beautiful self-made films in the background. The plan had always been to record an album, and get the collective musical force and…
Best that You Do This for Me
A 50-minute composition for string trio by the Japan-based musical pioneer and experimentalist. Commissioned by Anton Lukoszevieze of Apartment House, who perform it beautifully.
Brief interview with Anton Lukoszevieze
Why did you choose to commission a piece from Jim O'Rourke for Apartment House, and how did you know his work?
I have known of Jim for a long time, mainly through his work with Merce Cunningham’s dance company, who I also performed with at the very end of their time. But I had n…
Single Track
An extraordinary 7-part canon, which starts fast and gradually slows down across its 45 minute duration. Composed by the Berlin-based US composer Michael Winter, and performed by the leading Mexican new music ensemble Liminar.
Interview with Michael Winter
Single track is a really arresting piece that appealed to me immediately. At one level it’s obvious what’s happening – a 7-part canon that starts out fast and gradually slows down. But what else can you tell me about it?
In a way, the gradual …
Glowing Sounds
Harry Bertoia's Glowing Sounds LP contains three versions of the same composition, each transferred at different tape speeds in accordance with the artist's instructions. This is the third LP to be released from Bertoia's extensive tape archive and it's the first, of many, to be released using instructions left behind by the artist himself.
Bertoia wrote the concept for this Glowing Sounds LP on a note in 1975 and slipped it into the master tape case where it sat unread for 45 years. The idea wa…
All English Music is Greensleeves
Five pieces by the radical young Belgian composer, Maya Verlaak, impeccably performed by Apartment House, and the soloists Sarah Saviet (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano)"Subversion has destructive connotations. However, subversion can also mean reversing a current standard: being subversive can be anything that challenges an existing system. My approach to subversion doesn’t destroy current standards, but it uses the standards to create, while developing solutions to its own characteristics and p…
Noise In The Library
* 2020 Stock * Bob Rutman's life could be compared to the life of Odysseus, although we're not here to write his biography. Putojefe is happy to present his phenomenal Noise In The Library, recorded with the U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble, an all-steel string quartet established by himself in Boston in 1976.
The Ensemble consists of one Steel Cello and three Bow Chimes, played by Rutman and a rotating cast of guest musicians: in this instance, Daniel Orlansky –one of Rutman’s closest collaborators an…
The Reinvention of Romance
“The Reinvention of Romance,” a new work for percussion and cello that examines the care and empathy that emerge when two lives share space. Over the course of 90 minutes, a series of repeating patterns creates a peculiar kind of harmony in which two musicians are rarely “playing together” but are nonetheless intimately bonded. The Knoxville-based duo Two-Way Street (Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion) commissioned Hennies to compose “a very long piece;” for this recording they step into its two intertw…
BOW
Brussels-based string quintet BOW celebrates musical freedom. Juggling between their own written music and pure improvisation, the ensemble has worked since its creation on a personal and modern approach, digging into their instruments' capabilities and blending a large scope of influences.
Its debut eponym LP, due to be released on Sub Rosa, gathers five instantly-composed pieces that were recorded live by Christine Verschorren in the Echo Collective studio in Brussels. During the day, BOW repe…
The Lightest Words
The "The Lightest Words" by Kirsten Reese is now available at World Edition. Kirsten Reese studied flute, electronic music and composition and lives in Berlin, where she teaches electroacoustic composition at the University of the Arts. In her works Reese often focuses on performative and narrative aspects, as is the case in the three pieces on this CD.
The first track "the lightest words had the weight of oracles" features the historical and specific tone colour of the Fairlight CMI Synthesize…
Cantus, Descant
The new double album from artist Sarah Davachi is an 80 minute, 17 track meditation on impermanence and endings, framed by minimalistic organ études and careful harmonic layering, with two tracks featuring the artist’s own vocals for the first time.I spent a lot of time while working on this album thinking about impermanence and endings, which led me to change my understanding of “vanitas” and “memento mori.” These concepts arise allegorically across classical antiquity and Buddhist thought, amo…
Anadyomene
The eclectic sensitivity of the composer Roberto Laneri (Prima Materia) looks unparalleled in the Italian avant-garde context. Anadyomene, published for the first time in 1987, shows the myth of Venus in a dystopian and dreamlike world. Laneri conceives a sound poem that opens up to the archetypal dimension of the water creation, through the symbol of bivalve conch, the myth of the feminine power is narrated thanks to the verses of the renaissance poet Angelo Poliziano. Creating a daring connect…
Negoum
The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Frances-Marie Uitti and Ayman Fanous spent ten minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. eastern, improvised vs. through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says: “Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphase…
Earth Leaps Up
The Giving Shapes is a collaborative project between harpist/vocalist Elisa Thorn and pianist/vocalist Robyn Jacob that formed in fall 2017 at the Banff Centre for the Arts. This is the duo’s first release. This project triangulates aspects of new music, creative music, and song-writing, combining their classical training and their involvement with the Canadian creative and indie music scenes. Though they originally met while both pursuing degrees in classical music at UBC in 2007, they share an…
Gratitude
Martina Verhoeven has been working on the development of her own photographic style for about 20 years, almost parallel to this process Martina took up the electric fretless bass when recording the two criticaly-acclaimed 3 Seconds Of Air albums (with Dirk Serries). As her photography continues to grow, expand and develop, slowly mutating into collages on canvas, so does her approach to music. Switching from electric bass to double bass to piano, she slowly mastered a technique that's exceptiona…
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 …
Classical Works II
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* In the 1990s David Shea was a regular on the downtown scene working with Anthony Coleman, John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Shelly Hirsch and many others. Since 1998 he has been living and working in Brussels collaborating with some of Belgium's finest classical musicians, and performing his exciting solo concerts. Classical Works II, his third release on Tzadik, is the definitive document of Shea's new musical direction, bold integrating sampling technology into th…