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Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut / a lot of tiles (trivial scan)
XI Records is very pleased to announce the release of a 2 CD set of Michael Winter’s music organized by guitarist Elliot Simpson. Each CD features a single composition, demonstrating different sides of Winter’s work. The first, Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut, is a socially-engaged piece written for Simpson and in honor of George Floyd. The second, a lot of tiles (trivial scan), derives music from a set of mathematical tilings (often referred to as tessellations). The album art features r…
The seasons: Vermont
1998 release ** The Seasons: Vermont is a soundscape of Vermont as charted through the changes of its yearly soundings. It is a composition in four parts (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring) for magnetic tape collage with an unspecified live instrumental/vocal ensemble. Though the actual composing of the music was completed between 1980 and 1982, it is the realization of a ten-year composition project. Goldstein listened closely and became attuned to what was the particular sound quality of each sea…
Fingering an idea
Disc 1: Dexter Music for highland bagpipes. Highland bagpipes: David Watson, Matthew Welch, Michael Mahoney, Brendan O'Rourke, Rob Brazius & Richard Baughman. Disc 2: Sinister - Music for acoustic and electric guitars performed by David Watson. " "Fingering an Idea" (a phrase pulled from a Chris Mann piece) resulted from a Phill Niblock invitation to make a double CD for bagpipe and guitar. A bagpipe CD is a particular challenge. A high beam spatial explorer, it is the kind of unstable ph…
Experimenting with household chemicals
Experimenting With Household Chemicals' is a 1995 album by the laregly elusive post-minimalist Downtown experimenter Peter Zummo. Whilst possibly best known for his work on classic Arthur Russell recordings, he's been a mainstay of New York's vaunted experimental scene since the the mid-late '70s, but only released three solo albums proper. This is his 2nd, exploring "a trombone-specific method for generating melodic movement, as well as a collection of related, "spinoff" melodic material for en…
The animation of lists and the Archytan transpositions
There are any number of ways to hear Warren Burt's music for tuning forks; as many ways as there are listeners, probably. The most immediate one is simply to revel in its beauty and enjoy the music as sound. Or, to be more accurate, as clouds of sound; sonic colors that momentarily hover here and there, as they move slowly across the musical horizon. Of course, Warren Burt's music may also be heard as the mature work of a major experimental composer, one secure in his craft, and still filled wi…
Involution
From the liner notes by Dean Rosenthal: XI Records announce the release of Dave Seidel's new double-CD, Involution. The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel's second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel's own compos…
The chord catalogue
I like to think of The Chord Catalogue as a sort of natural phenomenon--something which has always been present in the ordinary musical scale, and which I simply observed, rather than invented. It is not so much a composition as simply a list. I have often tried to explain that my music is a reaction against the romantic and expressionistic musical past, and that I am seeking something more objective, something that doesn't express my emotions, something that doesn't try to manipulate the emoti…
Electroacoustic Works
Electroacoustic Works collects three major pieces from the early 21st century New York-based composer Dan Joseph. This double CD release includes Set Of Four, a group of fixed-media sound collages using the processed hammer dulcimer as the primary sound source, two live performances of Dulcimer Flight for electroacoustic hammer dulcimer, and a 64-minute version of Periodicity Piece #6, a mixed-media work that originated as a multi-channel sound installation. With roots in early minimalism, a…
NuDaf
A 65-minute electroacoustic composition featuring Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon. NuDaf (2020) is the second longest piece in Phill Niblock's repertoire of recorded audio works. NuDaf is a departure from his previous pieces in that he makes extensive use of multiphonics and constructed the work with fewer tracks than usual, creating uniquely transparent and ephemeral textures. The piece is the result of a collaboration between Niblock and the stellar bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval. Her music…
Four Full Flutes
Here is the complete CD catalog of this superior NYC composers collective label (aka Experimental Intermedia); although pretty low-profile, there are some amazing releases on this label in the spirit of long, droned tones and advanced new music composition. Don't let the title to this Niblock thing throw you off -- this is massive trance music and a key work in the unspecified field of "pure sound". "...adjacent tones beat violently against one another while clouds of harmonics hover above the w…
Music by
"Features The Soldier String Quartet performing in 'Five More String Quartets', a piece for five multi-tracked string quartets and in 'Early Winter' for flute, bass flute, string quartet and synthesizer, also featuring Susan Stenger (flute) and Eberhard Blum (bass flute)." This is purely awesome drone work and one of the loudest, most commanding minimal works you could ever dream of basking within, even living up to the following: "Dense, elusive trance music distinguished by its singular method…
Unforeseen Events
Among the most remarkable documents to emerge from the early 1990s convergence of acoustic performance and computer music, David Behrman's Unforeseen Events stands as a testament to the profound possibilities unlocked when human creativity collaborates with artificial intelligence. Originally released in 1991 on XI Records, this stunning album represents the culmination of decades of pioneering work by one of America's most visionary experimental composers - a figure whose influence extends far …
Blasco / Vítková / Anette
On this album Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco explore cyborgness through their relationships with their instruments. Lucie perceives the accordion as an extension of their body - sound, matter, and movement locked in a self-generating cybernetic loop. Merche built Anette, a 3D printer, as her interlocutor and companion in the performance space; in return, Anette printed thimble-microphones Merche wears on her fingers, which render the machine's unique electromagnetic voice audible to human ears.…
Music for 88
Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. That concern led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those that he had used before. Music for 88 is the result of these researches. It contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.
Open secrets
"Aphoristic bursts of music separated by silences played with efficiency and fleeting beauty." - New York Times Open Secrets features Mac Low and Anne Tardos performing works for multi-track voices; and Robert Bethea, Andrew Bolotowsky, Daniel Goode, and Gabriela Klassen performing instrumental pieces. Winds/Instruments for flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, and narrator, could well become a classic of new music, not only being beautiful, but also displaying Mac Low's witty use and …
Drop By Drop, Suddenly
XI Records releases Drop By Drop, Suddenly, a two-CD set of eleven compositions for bassoon composed and performed by Leslie Ross. Ross is not only an internationally renowned instrument builder but is also an uncompromising creative musician. The first disc starts with a series of short seed pieces that play primarily with the timbral and microtonal differences highlighted between tone-holes, forming a layered effect while playing with only one fingering, single note or multiphonic. They range …
The South Shore
XI Records is pleased to announce the debut full-length release from Michael Vincent Waller, The South Shore, featuring chamber works from 2011 through 2014, with album art photography by Phill Niblock. Waller has collaborated with numerous musicians and ensembles to bring this album to life. This kind of listening is for the brain to relax and enjoy, for the soul and emotions together as art for the universal. Reveling in subtext and subtlety, a symbiotic exploration of the history and future o…
Celestial Fires
The works of Mary Jane Leach explore the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. Space is also an important concern: how sound changes when it is moved around a room. Celestial Fires features the New York Treble Singers, (Virginia Davidson, conductor) performing four 8-part pieces for a capella women's voices; Shannon Peet performing Feu de Joie for 7 bassoons; and Barbara Held and Ms. Leach performin…
40 Years And One: Philip Corner Plays The Piano
Still sealed 5xLP box set on Labor from 1981 presenting the monumental work based on Gertrude Stein's text by Czech composer/conductor/flutist Petr Kotik that has long been considered a masterpiece of underground music.
Body music
Body Music is music for Ellen Fullman's unique Long String Instrument, an eighty-foot long instrument with approximately eighty strings. Fullman has been developing this instrument for longitudinally vibrating long strings over the past thirteen years. Having received a BFA in sculpture, her interest in music began with the resonance of materials used in making sculpture. When she started making the Long String Instrument, she saw it as "sculpture as music;" now she has come full circle in conce…