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Der Tod und das Mädchen II
The tale of the Sleeping Beauty set somewhere between science fiction and biting social criticism. In her texts Elfriede Jelinek explores the states of sleep, of apparent death, of semi-consciousness, or of being barely awake – and in doing so investigates Austrian everyday life in all its uniqueness, including all the petty power games and battles of the sexes. Jelinek's grim texts, recited by Anne Bennent, Hanna Schygulla and an artificially generated voice, are combined with Olga Neuwirth's t…
Guitar Album
This enterprising programme of 20th century music, recorded in England by the distinguished Japanese guitarist Azusa Shimizu, contains first recordings of pieces by Højsgaard and Mamiya, as well as offering a rare opportunity to hear the sonata by Antonio José, who was brutally murdered during the Spanish Civil War. An outstanding CD for all guitar music enthusiasts.
s/t
Born in 1934. Boeswillwald took an eclectic engineer training (electronics, sound recording) of fine arts (decorative arts) and theatre, and at the Sorbonne antique theatre. In 1953, he discovered the Sorbonne maison des lettres studio founded by Roland Barthes and from that point commits himself into sound creation. He frequented regularly the radio Club d'essais where he met P. Schaeffer. 'Le piano joue, la caravane passe' (2000). 'Au fond, la mer est belle' (1999). 'Pathos ad Libitum' (…
Red Morocco
Someday someone will write a history of modern music that will free us of the false dichotomies such as high vs. low, improviser vs. composer, classical vs. everything else… …The written materials Joe passed out to the musicians for Red Morocco was minimal, sometimes more visual than musical, but always modest. Everyone was seated in the same room, in a circle. The music heard on this recording occurred late in the day, when Joe felt a certain clarity was occurring……The results are an elegant,…
Aether
RESTOCKED! Another remarkable performance from a group that has no peer and belongs to no genre or movement. Minimal in an essential and structural sense, they succeed where more formal attempts founder, in re-forming subjective time in a way that is genuinely gripping and as far from theoretical as great interpreters can get. Applying extraordinary technique in a remarkably discrete way, they here transfigure a single chord over a long duration, imperceptibly arriving far from their st…
Cathédrale
Concert music for solo harp: The harp, whose ancestor belongs to the most ancient musical instruments, is usually associated with impressionistic sound. But Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - the most visionary inventor of sounds among contemporary composers, according to Wilhelm Sinkovicz – has never been satisfied with the status quo. So, while teaching composition and investigating new forms of musical notation, he succeeded in his endeavor to explore new possibilities of musical expression again and…
Piano Pictures
Now, which are the points of contact between these two composing gentlemen? "In both composers, a childlike quality shows in their indifference (or impartiality) towards the utilizable musical material: 'sophisticated' and 'lesser' styles, ragtime and music hall, neo-gothic and bitonality, typing machine and doorbell, jocular or praising quotes – everything is linked with everything, without any previous weighing and selection, without preconditions, following a kind of anarchic play instinct. […
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.
AURORA / THRENOS IV / PIRKEI TEHILLIM / MEMORARE
Titles often occur to Reinhard David Flender only after he has completed a composition. When listening to Aurora, for example, "a visual association is evoked. The piece starts with a long double bass tone. Then a high pitched tone played by oboe and harp comes in, briefly at first, repeated at intervals; as the piece proceeds it is joined by other tones, until a short melody emerges. Thus the title Aurora, the first rays of sun at the crack of dawn, which then give way to a shape: the dome of t…
Konzert für Violine und Orchester / Fasce
Rhapsodic, lyrical, virtuoso, and, in the end, even amusing: all these attributes come to mind as Cerha's violin concerto is finished off with a charming punch line.
And: The feast is in full progress
The second cello concerto, entitled: Y: la fiesta está en pleno apogeo – And: The feast is in full progress (1993), is based on a poem by the Chuvash poet Gennadi Aigi. The vision of a raging mass of people awaiting the last Judgment is transformed into music by the composer with gripping, immediate, expressive force, free of graphic patterns. A moment of glory not for Gubaidulina only, but for David Geringas on cello, too. And as a bonus on this CD: Diez Preludios –Ten Preludes for Cello, in Vl…
For Bunita Marcus
For Bunita Marcus was written in 1985. "This work, which I have dedicated to Bunita Marcus, [...] deals with the death of my mother, and with the notion of a slow death. I simply didn't want the piece to die. So I used this unwillingness compositionally in order to keep the piece alive, like a patient suffering from an terminal disease, for as long as possible." (Feldman) It is not the loud raging, the last furious revolt of a dying human being that Feldman depicts here, but a slow nodding off a…
Sun Awakens
Ben Chasny has busied himself releasing a solid run of outsider folk records for some time now; ‘The Sun Awakens’ is his eighth full-length outing and thankfully it shows no signs of Chasny letting his quality control wane. As he explored on his last Drag City release ‘School of the Flower’, Chasny has again employed a handful of collaborators to fill-out his unique sound with percussion and odd instruments – yet this doesn’t distil the fact that the record is totally his own. "The Sun Awakens" …
The Aforesaid
A professor of neurology at the University of Florence and one of Italy's foremost experimental composers, Diego Minciacchi creates fascinating music from raw scientific data and appends cryptic titles to his pieces that give them something of a whimsical, if not philosophical or mystical, context. The Aforesaid, Minciacchi's 2001 release on Col Legno, is a collection of five chamber works from the early '90s, a time when he found his voice and developed a feasible methodology in his works for v…
Urueña
'Sillón is proud to present what has to be Italy's best kept secret on the improvised music scene. Based in Madrid, Spain, Alessandra Rombolá works in the field of contemporary music and improvisation. Her stunning debut-cd, Urueña, shows her great musicality and sense of form. Her sound is so rich that it fills the whole space of the beautiful Church in the tiny village in central Spain, Urueña. The music is captured in detail by sound-wizard, Pierre-Olivier Boulant. A must for all fans of crea…
Garage
Smalltown Supersound's "Superjazz" offshoot delivers this much-discussed darkcore jazz fusion album led by sometime sonic youth collaborator Mats Gustafsson, here rummaging through improvs and cover versions like a garage band picking up trumpets, double bass and drums for their heavily skewed but massively charming workouts. Sticking a hairy a tongue out at the polished slickness of the Bad Plus, The Thing offer up cover versions of tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and Peter Bro…
Universe Symphony / Second Symphony
The most ambitious and grandest of his projects would of course never see completion. For over forty years, Ives continued to supplement the material for his Universe Symphony, adding both notes and details. At some point, the scenario he envisaged got somewhat out of hand, Henry Cowell reported. “Several orchestras and large parties of singers, male and female, were to be placed in valleys, on mountain slopes and on summits,” and “6 to 10 different orchestras on several mountain tops, each movi…
Chamber Music Vol. 1
It is the eternal questions that Nikolaus Brass mainly concerns himself with in his compositional work: the question of existence, of being, and first and foremost of all possible intermediate stages at the edge of what is conceivable, of what can just be grasped. In VOID (1999) he investigates the feeling left by loss, "structural empty spaces that bear the construction of sound while challenging it at the same time." For a due (2003), Brass has borrowed short captions from Yashushi Inoue's nov…
Concierto n° 1 para piano y orquesta \'Atlántico\' / La Luz del
Canary folklore: the Concierto Atlántico is based on two motifs that have been "united with the almost obsessive rhythm of the tango herréno, an essential element of the oldest folk music of the island." The piano piece Latir Isleño, on the other hand, is based on a well-known Canarian folksong, Arrorò. But traditional Canarian music is merely the starting point for these works, not their destination; their structure, like that of La Luz del Aire (The light of air), is determined by exact mathem…
Intimate rituals
This Romanian-born composer is noted for having developed the technique of 'spectral composition' during the 1960s. According to the man himself, this is defined as a "variable distribution of the spectral energy, synthesis of the global sound sources, micro- and macro-form as sound-process, four simultaneous layers of perception and of speed, and spectral scordaturae, i.e. rows of unequal intervals corresponding to harmonic scales." If you're any the wiser as to what he's on about do drop us a …