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Cosmic Michael / After A While
One of the strangest albums you will ever hear. In 1969 and 1970, Cosmic Michael released two bizzare albums of unknown origin. Late-'60s New York-based flower child Cosmic Michael is one of the scads of ultra-obscure recording artists from the original psychedelic era whose records were swept under the rug of time completely. Copies left from the astonishingly small initial pressings have been trading hands among collectors for obscene amounts of money, ranking Cosmic Michael's crude, handmade…
Romantic Suite
** 2021 Stock ** Partly improvisations by Luciano Margorani (electric guitar, noises), Federico Zenoni (drums and objects), recorded together in Italy, then sent to Dave Newhouse (saxes, clarinets, and keyboards) in the USA for his input, this 2nd release by the trio is an expansion of the debut (under their full names, and then titled ‘Beauty Is In The Distance‘ – 2016) which only had one long composition. This new one has three pieces that have an even more florid array of aromas, catching sha…
Nine Hundred Fifty Seven
Francesco Ziello is a multi-instrumentalist musician and electroacoustic composer, born in 1984 and based in Rome. From the beginning his contact with music is dominated by strong contrasts: on the one hand the classical aspect with the study of piano and on the other the influence of the roots of popular music and improvisation with the self-taught approach to other instruments, such as percussion and guitar. In 2012 he graduated from the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, where for a period he st…
Wound Response
Another piece of the puzzle to his 4-part ‘Pedlar’ boxset, this one was thrown down in 2011 at Newcastle’s legendary Morden Tower, a C.13th, grade-listed turret on the West Walls of the city’s ancient defences against curious Mackems and Durham scunners, that was also previously and notably site of seminal recordings by The New Blockaders, a.o. In that vein, Davies gets raw to the bone in ‘Wound Response’, using Lap harp fed thru transducer, read by contact microphone, and pushed to seething lim…
An Air Swept Clean Of All Distance
Making up 1 part of 4 to his ‘Pedlar’ boxset, ‘An Air Swept Clean of All Distance’ was recorded in 2014 at Blank Studios, Newcastle, and exec produced by folk chief Richard Dawson, and adorned by a continuing series of artwork by Anna Peaker. It skips back along the timeline to what sounds like happy times, where Davies’ playing fizzes with typically inventive, optimistic, and timeless beauty, which, if you shut your eyes and try a little, could almost hail from any point in the past half millen…
Madre
Alma de Nieto presents Madre by Fonemi. All tracks by Vito Santoro. Tracklist: Madre, Pietra Bianca, Cobalto, Attesa , Crepuscolo, Lungo i Binari, Uter.
A Tutti gli Uragani che ci Passarono Accanto
An introspective journey into darkness through an oblique and fascinating song form. This, and much more, in Enten Hitti's beautiful new album. There is something particularly transcendental about 'A Tutti gli Uragani che ci Passarono Accanto', the new Enten Hitti album released on 25 May 2020 by Lizard and ADN Records. It is a work that welcomes the song form, but dished out with the classic researched and experimental approach that has distinguished the band's work in recent years.
An album of…
Autonomous and dynamical systems
This CD features four new compositions, all for electronic sound makers of one sort or another, and all four reveal his innate musicality. These are works that live between the arts and the sciences, coming from his lifelong involvement with interdisciplinary ideas.
Underwater Princess Waltz
A Collection of One-page Pieces by Karl Berger, Earle Brown, Alvin Curran, Nick Didkovsky, Joel Ford, Daniel Goode, Clinton McCallum, Larry Polansky and Christian Wolff. Joel Ford, 'Gauss Cannon' (2006). Alvin Curran, 'Underwater Princess Waltz' (1972), 'Her Waltzing with Her' (1972). Nick Didkovsky, 'Mayhem (the hammer)' (2012), 'Mayhem (the arrow)' (2012), 'Mayhem (the blade)' (2012). Christian Wolff, 'Burdocks, Part VII' (1970Ð71). Larry Polansky, 'tween (k-tood #2)' (2002). Clinton McCallum,…
Seven Deserts
Wrestling with the notion of balancing both formal construction and creative spontaneity has allowed Scott Fields (b 1952) to compose a powerful body of work with ties to extramusical concerns from the realms of literature, philosophy, and science. Seven Deserts (2019), rather than operating from a fixed narrative structure with predetermined events, lays out the ground rules for a manifestation that is absolutely identical in every performance in its operations and sonic vocabulary, but with ea…
On Procedural Grounds
n his compositions, composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann seeks to integrate rigor and internal logic with raw immediacy while fully engaging his fellow performers as not simply dutiful interpreters, but creatively invested collaborators. Aesthetically, the results evoke much from European modernism, but realized via idiosyncratic modular forms and process-oriented strategies equally indebted to the New York School and the jazz avant-garde. On Procedural Grounds (2010) is a half-hour work conc…
'Waves breaking on rocks
Peter Garland (b. 1952) studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney at Cal Arts and had long student-mentor friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles and Dane Rudhyar. Like Harrison, Garland has forged his own musical vocabulary as a kind of new indigenous music, celebrating pan-cultural experience and vision, and unafraid to suggest that music can still give us a glimpse of that which is sacred. Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us) (2003) is a suite of elegies that was…
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 …
Dreamers of Pearl
Joseph Kubera, piano. Michael Byron (b. 1953) was a pupil of James Tenney, and later, of Richard Teitelbaum. The body of music he has composed over the past thirty years has been harmonically rich, rhythmically detailed, and increasingly virtuosic. Dreamers of Pearl (2004-05) evinces a sensitivity for the sound of the piano, a sensibility of extended playing-listening, and an interest in repetition and change through gradual and seemingly clandestine processes that transform and extend what we h…
Lejaren Hiller: A Total Matrix of Possibilities
Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) was a musically eclectic composer, often combining several different types of techniques in the same piece. In the mid-sixties, he asserted that his "objective in composing music by means of computer programming is not the immediate realization of an aesthetic unity, but the providing and evaluating of techniques whereby this goal can eventually be realized." In this sense Hiller was a forward-looking composer, in that each piece was an experiment that lead towa…
Chamber And Gamelan Works
Lou Harrison believed fervently in music’s power to create cultural bridges. To this end he applied his prodigious skills and creative energies to creating syncretic works that link diverse musical languages. Faulted at times for his eclecticism, Harrison responded with a vibrant defense of hybridity, cultivating a musical multiculturalism long before that term—or even the concept—held the currency it now enjoys. Harrison’s major contributions to twentieth-century American music lie in three mai…
First Thus
**2021 Stock** First Thus is a phrase used by book sellers, publishers, collectors, etc. to describe a book which may be considered a first edition and/or first printing, but which has been available previously in a slightly different form. A true first edition is the original, first printing of a given book, while a first thus is the first printing of a new version of that book. This classification can come about for any number of reasons, though often times it has to do with a new translation …
Mercurial Horizon
**Packaged in a six-panel digipak, released in an edition of 200 copies.** Previously unheard brilliance from the late Matt Shoemaker. Work on "Mercurial Horizon" was largely completed during an incredibly fruitful period from 2008-2012, during which Shoemaker produced albums for The Helen Scarsdale Agency, Ferns Recordings, Mystery Sea, and Elevator Bath. He went on to finalize the material which would become "Mercurial Horizon" in 2015. Though unreleased until some five years after completion,…
Exploded View
**Minimax CD in full-color digipak. Edition of 200.** Exploded View is a stand-alone piece exploring the intricacies of manipulated micro-samples by two veterans in the art of sound collage. Colin Andrew Sheffield & James Eck Rippie work with turntables and samplers (both vintage and modern) in their ongoing experiments with the re-contextualization of found sounds. "Exploded View" showcases the duo's focus on fragments of audio - the shards of samples broken apart and re-shuffled, like the cut-…
Soundtrack For Dislocation
**Released in a six-panel Digipak. Edition of 509 copies.** Matt Shoemaker's first full-length album for Elevator Bath is Soundtrack for Dislocation, an entirely self-contained account of a fantastically abstract and intensely personal vision. As with much of Shoemaker's work, this is an album permeated with a very potent sense of unease. And despite the fact that the use of field recordings is very minimal here, there is a no less organically tangible quality which only contributes to the feeli…