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Resonant Spaces
****THE WIRE 2008 TOP 50 RECORDS OF THE YEAR WINNER****"A couple of years ago the promoters Arika invited John Butcher to tour a number of out-of-the-way spaces in Scotland. The venues, selected for their extreme acoustic properties, included a mausoleum, a wartime fuel-storage tank and a cave. This album grows out of Butcher’s evident interest in escaping the acoustic confines of conventional venues (work with resonant spaces is documented on the earlier Geometry of Sentiment and Cavern with Ni…
Fluxus
Collected here are three radioplays from three Fluxus affiliates, Philip Corner, Alison Knowles, and George Brecht. Each piece is built from a simple element and features a text recited by the author and sometimes others. Corner's piece is an homage to Erik Satie, built from a sparce two chord piano figure and a recitation that teeters along the stereo field. Knowles' piece, which she delivers along with Brecht, Hanna Higgins, and Jessica Higgins, is built from a long list of bean names on top o…
Works for Piano and Cembalo
The pieces for piano/cembalo on this CD include the first two Capriccios by the 24-year-old Ligeti, the Musica ricercata, and the first volume of the legendary Études, in brilliant interpretations by the German pianist Erika Haase. Ligeti was a master in how to make tricky compositional systems appear as more than just that by inspiring them with sensual substance: that's what distinguishes the artist from the artisan. Throughout his life Ligeti kept his ears pricked up and his senses sharpened …
The Bird And The Giant
restocked: Swedish percussionist Erik Carlsson in a solo work using multi-tracking to create a set of composition ranging from ominous environments to quirky abstractions, an excellent collection of modern percussion pieces. "This is a fine album of carefully constructed, but also somehow partly unconsidered works by a finely talented musician. The six pieces each make clear musical statements, separate to one another and yet they form a well rounded, nicely balanced suite when brought tog…
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra / Sixty-Eight
For each of his compositions for prepared piano Cage created a specific piano preparation chart, setting out in meticulous detail the strings to be prepared, and the materials and manipulations to be used for preparing them. For the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), 53 tones of the keyboard must be prepared; and in this case Cage himself was astonished at the complexity of these preparations. The range of sounds is further expanded by an extra bridge installed in the pian…
Aerial # 3
This release is the third and last in the three-part Aerial series. Tod Dockstader is one of the all-time great figures in the world of musique concréte composition, with his "organized sound" works from the 1960s being amongst the most radical ever conceived -- in league with Schaeffer, Henry, Stockhausen, and Varese. Aerial is a rare new work in the realm of shortwave radio, from one of America's most experimental composers. Volume 1 was released in March 2005 inside a slipcase. Volume …
Vertical Time Study I / Sen V / In die Tiefe der Zeit / Melodia
In his series Vertical Time Study, Hosokawa seeks to „integrate Noh’s vertical structure of time into my own music. It is about how temporal elements, like wedges, disrupt the vertical, horizontal timeline at irregular intervals. These disruptions produce elements of tension … creating visible fissures in the structure of time and visible cracks in space. My aim is to examine the complexity and the depth of these sounds hidden in the moment.” In his piece Sen V, Hosokawa tries to combine the “ea…
Ktl
KTL is a collaboration between Stephen O'Malley (SunnO))), Khanate, etc.) and Peter Rehberg (Pita, etc.). This is a six-part collision amongst the increasingly fading presences between the light and the dark, with some pieces recorded in a resistance fortress in southern France during a thunderstorm -- while others were recorded in a winter garden drenched in sunlight. The collaboration came about as the two were working on a theatre production by Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper, entitled Kinder…
Die Sephiroth
Buwen is both composer and organist, accompanying saxophonist Priesner on this rather academic program of duets. An earnest but dull remnant of late high modernism, the title piece inadvertently points up the limitations of classical sax technique, ignoring the expressive possibilities of the instrument almost completely. Buwen is self-effacing in the extreme, content to provide ground figures for Preisner to bounce off. Strange to think that one could write music this bland about a subject so c…
Enviromental Meditations
The fact that Maurizio Bianchi is back is something that is known. I think the new age muzak he created right after his return should be seen as a false start, as since quite some time now, he returned to the world of noise and that is a territory that we can safely call his territory. Bianchi here teams up with one Maor Appelbaum, who is a member of various Israeli project such Poochlatz, Vultures, IWR and who has various solo projects Screening , Vectorscope and Plated Steel – not that I heard…
Piano Music
Music as a message without words from far away – from our inner selves. Piano music as metaphor for the thrilling adventures of human existence.
Chamber Music
Against spontaneity and con-sistency: Poppe manages the feat of being both a systematic and a revolutionary composer, one who plays by the rules and beats them at the same time.
Pre-zoic cellways
Jaap Blonk: voice, powerbook, effects. Cor Fuhler: EMS synthi-AKS, turntable. Nice meeting in the electronic series of Kontrans.
Qvaris
Their first label release in many years & represents their most polished work to date. One of the most enigmatic, mysterious, & defiantly anti-commercial groups to emerge from the NYC loft scene during the '90s. Incorporating elements of folk, drone, psychedelia, free jazz, noise, & just about everything else, NNCK has nevertheless carved out a distinctive sound despite the seemingly random component elements.
Music For Percussion Quartet
As early as in 1942, in Credo in Us, Cage employed not only a percussion ensemble but also sounds from the radio and records. Therefore, quite in accordance with what the composer would have wished, the materials used by the Percussion Ensemble Mainz in this recording range from Beethoven's fifth symphony (vinyl record, including the rustling) to ABBA, Tina Turner and advertising slogans. It goes without saying that rhythms play an important part in music for percussion. Cage, though, was also i…
Titles Of The Greatness Of Been
Floating of directly direction improvisation this record have almost no overdubs. Coming close to the abortion of sounds genuinely overlooked by contemporary artist, they succeed to use 'noise' as a base to build quite direct tracks. At times very soft and gently showing of a romantic side of things, followed by a psychiatric attempt to slaughter all neighbours. The general feel after listening to the album is gasping for breath. It took them 4 years to do this album of top guitar improvisation …
Allegro Sostenuto / Pression / Dal Niente / Intérieur I
Both Sostenuto and Dal niente were composed for the clarinetist Eduard Brunner. “As in the earlier Ausklang for piano and orchestra, the musical material is determined by the interplay of the experiences of resonance on the one hand and motion on the other. Both aspects of sound encounter one another in the conception of structure as a multiply ambivalent ‘arpeggio’, i.e. as a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction – experienced in temporal succession – which is conveyed both…
Ray Night 1991-1992 Live
First ever CD by this legendary and ultra-obscure Japanese psychedelic rock group. Kousokuya are from Tokyo, have donated some spectacular tracks to the first two volumes of the Tokyo Flashback compilation series on the PSF label, and self-released an extremely ltd. LP in 1991. The band has been around for quite some time; I originally was under the impression they formed around 1984, but was recently informed that an edition featuring Nanjo and Narita from High Rise existed going back to the l…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
In the early 1970s Feldman increasingly turned his attention to works for orchestra, in most cases combined with a solo instrument, like Piano and Orchestra (1975). One aspect that was important to him in all of these works was a research into sound, an "unceasing effort to create, by way of exclusion and integration, by operating with colored projection surfaces and various spatial levels, a kind of self-supporting structure elastic enough to take up the exactly fixed initial impulse and contin…
Quilisma
The succinctness of his work will first become fully apparent when it becomes possible to view the second half of the twentieth century from something more like a bird’s-eye view.