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Music for a Summer Evening / A Little Suite for Christmas / Five
Music for a Summer Evening (1974) is the third part of the "cosmic drama" Macrocosmos, which investigates the relations between the innermost human soul and the vastness of the cosmos; relations that also determine the temporal, dynamic and tonal dimensions of the composition. Its immense material extravagance is reflected by a range of some 70 percussion instruments; in addition, the two pianists are required to perform a variety of different techniques, such as pizzicatos, flageolets, etc. A s…
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…
Nachtgesänge / Konzert für Violoncello und Orchester / Intrada /
Young Müller (b. 1964, Switzerland) writes in a consistently romantic style — unexpected col legno fare! Perhaps Sterling should have released this. The warm Hesse settings, Nachtgesänge, could be mistaken for Szymanowski or Zemlinsky; indeed, Ernman sounds as though she’d be ideal in a Strauss opera. Darkly emotional, the single-movement cello concerto taps Shostakovich and Lutoslawski’s pathos; the idée fixe’s colorful unfolding reminds the listener of Dutilleux. Müller maintains his anachroni…
Metamorphose
“Once you focus your will and mind on a particular thought or sentiment, and screen out the external world, you’re being transported into a state of contemplation, which fully takes effect in solitude: relaxation in a unity of subjective and objective experience which has come to rest.” (Robert M. Helmschrott) In the best case scenario, this basic, contemplative frame of mind helps sharpen consciousness, which, in turn, further deepens the understanding of music,” “reaching deep into the all-enc…
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…
Whitstable solo
Eight soprano saxophone solos. The 2008 solo concert in Whitstable began as an invitation from artist Polly Read and film-maker Neil Henderson to collaborate on a joint work that included a concert in St.Peter's. These recordings are taken mostly from the concert but, as with LINES BURNT IN LIGHT, one piece was recorded before the audience arrived. These are the first recordings in what has become a series of visits to the church, which has perfect acoustics and is just around the corner from wh…
Arabbox
recorded in 1993 following the first Gulf War. 10 years later, following the second Gulf War, Soleilmoon is pleased to finally release this important Muslimgauze album. On April 15, 2003, we issued it in an expensive limited edition of 500 copies, packed in a hand-made metal box. This second edition, in an edition of 1000 copies, is released without the box but has a friendly price. It's commonly known that Bryn Jones, the late musician behind Muslimgauze, was driven by the passion of th…
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
Music and the freedom of art: Wolfgang Rihm's aim is not to produce empty sound structures but to hit the bull's eye with direct and unexpected force.
Z
“Z is about infinity and the double dimension we all live in yet don't fully understand. Z is the sound of that feeling you get when you think you're being watched or followed by the omnipotent one. Z is for believers and followers of the "Ecstatic Truth" that fuels this mysterious universe. Z has always existed and here is is as remembered and transfered solid by the people under the sun, the Sunburned..” – John Moloney, Sunburned
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.
Sound Track From Film \"Mabuta No Ura\"
From the one sheet "Sound track collections of BORIS that continues activity. This album puts, listens to the novella from the sound source, & there is a concept where the image flows to the other side of the eyelid of the person who read. Chaos in the silence that can be heard w/the feedback noise & fuzz sounds & the rhythm, drone, spacey & chill out, etc. That do the sequence minimal stimulate this album listener's imagination." Umm, yeah. No real interpretation here. If you don't know BORIS, …
Jättiläisrotta
The burgeoning Finnish free-folk movement has been garnering much praise & attention over the past year. First CD release by Avarus who play a left-field blend of noise, folk & free jazz. From the same circle of psychos who bring us Kemialliset Ystavat, Maniac's Dream, Pylon & the Anaksimandros. Backward, dirt-eating freak folk that makes the Animal Collective sound like Judy Collins.
Happy days
Back in stock. Released: 1997.Jim O'Rourke is a rarity: a genuine bridge between the avant-garde and the underground. From his production work (Smog, Wilco, Faust) to his own freewheeling excursions as a solo performer and member of outfits like Gastr del Sol and Sonic Youth, his work continues to bring the out there in here. Happy Days pits a lone guitar against a phalanx of hurdy-gurdies, a decided shift away from the composer's electronic-based work. A roiling hornet's next of activity that F…
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…
Santi
In Śānti, Jan Beran unites meditative-expressive means of articulation with avant-garde techniques, and Western attitudes with those of the Far East. This multicultural approach is founded not least on Beran's extraordinary personal and musical background and development, which took the mathematician and composer from his native town Prague to Switzerland, the USA, and as far as India. This explains, among other things, his efforts to reconcile the time patterns of Indian music with Western seri…
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.
An Experimental Recital
Some 150 years apart, both composers developed minute nuclei into an ever expanding cosmos of sound, each against the background of his own era. Prick up your ears – Schubert's Fantasy in F minor and Sonata in B flat major D 617 crossed with Ligeti's Three pieces for two pianos: rich in contrasts, upsetting, and in a simply stunning interpretation by Andreas Grau & Götz Schumacher. In the beginning there was simply the idea of playing Schubert and Ligeti together in one program: "During the perf…
Airforms
Airforms was first presented at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [Scottsdale, Arizona] in April of 2004. The work was inspired by a group of experimental houses designed by Wallace Neff in the 1940s using a process he called airform construction. The houses were built by spraying concrete over an inflated balloon structure. Inspired by the nautilus sea shell, the houses were an investigation into the aesthetic possibilities of structures formed by air, and the psychological effects of l…
Piano Duet
Before the epigones take over the stage we are given a chance to hear out Bach himself: the unfinished four-voice Contrapunctus XIV from the Art of the Fugue marks the starting point of Andreas Grau's and Götz Schumacher's remarkable exploration of the Bach cosmos. In the Berlin autograph of the Contrapunctus XIV the place where the score breaks off is marked by an inscription: "At the point where the name BACH is introduced in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died." Even though fr…
Way Out
The Books have a terrific sense of humor-- and it makes The Way Out, an album built on eccentric vocal samples, a good-natured discovery instead of a cheap piece of mockery. Imagine if a blog had posted these clips of goofball hypnotherapist and meditation consultants, or found a tape of a boy and a girl swapping violent threats with each other: You'd chuckle and move on. But when the Books use these samples, they give them integrity. You find yourself engrossed with people …