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Scenes from Cavafy: Music for Gamelan
Lou Harrison’s (1917–2003) long-term love affair with the Indonesian gamelan had its roots in a course he took from Henry Cowell in the spring of 1935. As Harrison refined his understanding of traditional gamelan procedures during the 1980s, he began to transfer these compositional ideas to works for Western instruments. At the same time, Harrison continued to compose for the Indonesian ensemble itself, indulging a fascination for Asia that had been part of his life since his youth while …
Opposites Attract
It is with great satisfaction that we write these notes as the final part of a compositional saga, the evolution of which we could never have foreseen at its inception. This project was unusual for us in many ways, most notably in the length of time (4 1/2 years) during which we worked and reworked the material, and in the number of incarnations that resulted from these efforts. The development of the music was closely linked to a parallel evolution in music technology, particularly in digital s…
Long Night Big Day
When it came time to prepare for this recording, I was intrigued by the possibilities of a quintet consisting of three winds, bass, and drums. My earlier projects had been either in the trio, quartet, or traditional jazz quintet format－now I wanted to write for a group that could play expressive chamber music, swing hard, and improvise on a high level.
As envisioned, the compositions would combine inspiration from numerous sources to create something relevant to the present, reflecting today's c…
H'un (Lacerations) And Other Works
The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. This is music, to paraphrase William Blake, of innocence and of experience. The innocence and experience are not simply those of a boy growing up amid the terrors of China's Cultural Revolution—they are also components of a well-trained composer's creative equipment: the beloved folk music of a land left behind and…
Works By John Harbison And Ezra Laderman
Eclectic but distinctively original, John Harbison's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra reflects an artist of deep sensibility and training. Harbison (b 1938) is a recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and has received commissions from numerous ensembles and foundations. The brittleness sometimes found in Harbison's harmonic language bears the imprint of Roger Sessions, with whom he studied at Princeton; yet the lyricism of Harbison's melodic line is very much his own, a quality strikingly apparent…
Whispers Out Of Time / Transfigured Wind II
If composers born in the 1920s deconstructed the classical tradition and destroyed the foundations of "normal" musical practice, it was left to the '30s generation to build a new universe amid the rubble. No one has participated more assiduously in that venture than Roger Reynolds (b. 1934). He has infused into avant-garde music a perspective cognizant of the extra-musical world. It seemed surprising, yet fitting, that in 1989, Reynolds nabbed the usually sedate Pulitzer Prize for music; he was …
Nomos Apache Alpha
2004 release ** "Most RPI and jazz fusion fans will remember Italy's Dedalus for their acclaimed 1973 self-titled debut featuring the people with "clock faces" on the cover. They would record some lesser-acclaimed works before a return in 2004 by the slightly altered moniker of Bonansone Dedalus, perhaps letting us know that the vision of the group was now that of multi-instrumentalist Fiorenzo Bonansone first and foremost, while still maintaining the fiercely independent and experimental nature…
Spiral Right / Spiral Left
2010 release ** "In the planning (and many faxes, emails and discussions in person) for 20 years, finally this stunning collaborative release for Cold Spring from Japanese Noise king Merzbow and legendary elemental sound artist Z'EV is here. The tracks were created in London and Tokyo, with each artist remixing the other's original sounds. Two tracks weighing in at 22 minutes and 28 minutes respectively! Dark Ambient Noise."
Il Gesto Del Suono 2.0
2009 release ** Featuring: Amy Denio, Cristina Zavalloni, Joan La Barbara, Demetrio Stratos, Sainkho Namchylak, Meredith Monk, Luigi Nono, Cathy Berberian, David Moss, Fátima Miranda, Greetje Bijma, Sabina Meyer, Marcello Abbado, Sidsel Endresen.
Towers of Silence
2018 release ** “Towers of Silence features Malaysian master saxophonist Yong Yandsen and Singapore-based Australian drum virtuoso Darren Moore. Recorded at Tokyo's legendary GOK Sound studio in October 2017, Towers of Silence is a distillation of Yong and Moore's approach to acoustic improvisation. The amalgam of their sounds at times creates ghost tones where apparitions of unknown origins create rarefied space.”
Liberation Music (Spiritual Jazz And The Art Of Protest On Flying Dutchman Records 1969-1974)
2013 release ** "UK collection that focuses on Flying Dutchman Records, a Jazz label started by Bob Thiele. Liberation Music looks at the label's first five years, through it's Jazz and spoken word releases. This exciting and revolutionary label was launched in 1969 by producer Thiele, after he left the Impulse label where he produced John Coltrane. Featuring: Angela Davis, Gil Scott-Heron, Lonnie Liston Smith, The Esoteric Circle, Black And Blues, Louis Armstrong, Bob Thiele Emergency, Carl B S…
O Despertar Do Funâmbulo
2000 release ** "We are not dealing with examples of crushed language; he does not need to start from language, he does not need to. In this sense, we can say that he amplifies some intuitions already had by Hugo Ball or Raoul Hausmann, at the beginning of the century: the potential is oral. And, in fact, Américo Rodrigues shows the muscles of the mouth, all the noises that the oral apparatus can make. It is the body itself that speaks its primitive language, in a pre-Babelian situation, where e…
Trees
2014 release ** "Trees brings together an unusual quintet of string trio—viola (Ernesto Rodrigues), cello (Guilherme Rodrigues) and double bass (Gianna de Toni)—with soprano saxophone (Christophe Berthet) and electric bass/objects (Raphael Ortis). The five tracks contain a deep range of sounds from all of the instruments: Sparse textures evoking creaking wood and the rustling of dry leaves (Ancient Trees); long bowed tones from the cello and double bass and suspended harmonics (Whistling Trees);…
A Worm's Eye View From a Bird's Beak (Book)
A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon's scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. The publication features newly commissioned texts including three long-form essays by Aruna D'Souza, Anthony Huberman, and Dylan Robinson/Patrick Nickleson; experimental short-form writing by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Eric-Paul Riege, Ánde Somby, a…
Real Time Two
** Edition of 250 copies, remastered from the original master tapes ** Recorded live in concert. Rome, Italy December 12-13, 1977 by Nicola Bernardini and at Teatro Comunale, Pistoia, Italy December 14, 1977 by Carla Lugli. "It was a magic evening. Not only did the trio burst with a creative energy that was homogeneous and interactive, but the acoustics, usually inadequate, of the half-empty sports pavilion with a capacity of 10,000 people, gave the music an ethereal transparency and crystalline…
Requiem for the Snake of Maidan
Holidays Records is on fire! Hot on the heels of their recent incredible vinyl releases of the Italian sound artist and musician Ezio Piermattei’s “Gran trotto” and the duo Acchiappashpirt’s “Ninulla”, they return with one of their most important and captivating releases to date: Hartmut Geerken’s “Requiem for the Snake of Maidan”, a mind-blowing body of archival recordings from the 1970s, made on a stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains of Afghanistan, encountering the artist locked in a sprawl…
Songs And Dances Of The Eastern Indians From Medicine Spring & Allegany (Cherokee, Seneca)
Produced and annotated by Charlotte Heth, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma and a noted ethnomusicologist.
This disc offers ritual, ceremonial, and social music of Indians of the eastern United States. It demonstrates remarkable similarities of style in the music of Indians from two distinct regions.
Tracks 1-3 comprise songs and dances from the Cherokee and Creek Indians and probably the now-extinct Natchez as well, who were forcibly removed from their homelands in the southeastern …
The Cloisters
The vocal music on this recording documents three generations of American music, each characterized by its own ideals yet shaped by its relationship to the past. Heard together on one disc, this music provides a glimpse of the rapid and often radical aesthetic upheavals that American music has undergone during the twentieth century. The three settings by Arthur Shepherd (1880-1958) - Golden Stockings, To a Trout, and Virgil - were composed shortly before World War II and exhibit a sensitive …
Nyc 1960-1963
Recordings of works by Joseph Byrd, student of Morton Feldman and John Cage and frontman for The United States Of America, are finally available by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble via New World Records.Byrd collaborated with a number of Fluxus artists in the 1960s, and also formed Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies, recording psych-rock album The American Metaphysical Circus in 1969. This release, Joseph Byrd NYC 1960–1963, recorded by contemporary music ensemble ACME, includes new recordin…
Unjust Malaise
This three-disc set marks the first appearance on disc of the music of the African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990), who died sixteen years ago under unexplained circumstances and whose musical legacy was thought lost. This comprehensive and definitive document, which comprises almost all of Eastman’s signature works, will undoubtedly be a revelation for those who have thus far been unable to hear his work. Eastman was an energizing underground figure, one whose forms are clear, whos…