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Étant Donnés
A six-track album based almost entirely on samples (from Curtis Mayfield to John Carpenter). "The really striking thing, though, is the kinship between Pisaro’s approach here and his other music. Many of his previous compositions have taken simple, granular sounds as raw materials, building blocks to be arranged into larger constructions through a combination of the composer’s parameters and the performer’s choices. On this album’s sister work, Shades of Eternal Night, piano chords played by Rei…
Closed categories in cartesian worlds
We are very happy to announce the release of GW 010, a 72-minute CD version of Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds, for crotales and sine tones (composed by Michael Pisaro, performed by Greg Stuart, mastered by Michael Pisaro and Joe Panzner). Those interested in more info and sound examples can look below. The disc also comes with extensive notes and a reproduction of a page of the score. From the notes: 'This record consists of four crotales, each bowed for 16 minutes. Against each crotale I…
The punishment of the tribe by its elders'
Pisaro's fascinating composition created with guitar, bass, percussion, radio, electronics, and field recordings, using long gaps of silence resolved through a dynamic set of rich audio sections."The most convincing way to avoid reality is to lose yourself in the prickle of the field recording, as if it were bubble wrap. Here, technology chafes against a world of waves, pulses, and impacts, leaving to the ear and the imagination the task of estimating reality from scratch (at 12:35, a storm defi…
Fields Have Ears (6)
A 56-minute piece for guitar and electronics. It has had a long composition history, starting from a solo for classical guitar and sine tones (premiered in Munich in July of 2010). It was subsequently performed in Seattle (August, 2010), A Coruña, Galicia (May, 2011) and New York (September, 2011). For each performance a new version was created, incorporating recordings from the previous locations (including parts of previous performances), and other sounds that I began to associate with the his…
Hearing metal 3'
In contrast to the melange of its ‘successor,’ Hearing Metal 3 has moments of separation wherein Stuart and Pisaro can be discretely heard. For this piece, Stuart revisits the textures of ricefall (2), delicately and not-so-delicately pouring grains onto surfaces. When combined with Pisaro’s tones, the resonances explore a full territory uncharted by ricefall (2). However, there are still moments of Pisaro/Stuart mixing, like when Stuart’s “sixteen suspended cymbals” bow against Pisaro’s s…
Asleep, street, pipes, tones (2009)
“Asleep, street, pipes, tones (2009) is an investigation of the sounding properties of pipes and streets interspersed with a duo for bass clarinet and electric guitar. The investigations form ten three-minute episodes, assembled in studio by Pisaro from samples—mostly organ, but also tiny snippets of vocal music and a single piano chord—and field recordings. The instrumental parts, arranged in nine sections, also three minutes each, develop over the course of the 63’40” duration of the pi…
Close constellations and a drum on the ground (2010)
“Close constellations and a drum on the ground (2010) began as scored work with electronics but then developed a life of its own in the studio. It consists of the alternation of sedimentary layers of low percussion samples (mixed with guitar and many noise sources) in slow rotation, and clusters of slowly modulating high sine waves pierced by bowed crotales. Greg Stuart, percussion. Barry Chabala, guitar.” label info
Ricefall
Gravity Wave, a new CD label, curated by composer Michael Pisaro, designed by Yuko Zama. Icefall (2), a 72-minute piece for 64 separate tracks of rice falling on objects. This recording is the second part of a trilogy of the first disc length works by Stuart and Pisaro (an unrhymed chord is the first part, and A wave and waves is the third). The dynamic range of the recording is extremely wide. In the second of the four sections, there is a storm of falling rice that is certainly the loudest mus…
Infinite Ascent
This is French composer/pianist Melaine Dalibert’s fifth solo album since 2015, all featuring his own compositions. This time, the album consists of melodically structured song pieces, an area that Dalibert has been exploring in the last couple of years as a new compositional approach outside his signature algorithmic method of composition. This series of eight short pieces appeal in a new way from his previous music, and shows his maturity as a composer. Dalibert wrote all eight pieces in 2019 …
Earth Leaps Up
The Giving Shapes is a collaborative project between harpist/vocalist Elisa Thorn and pianist/vocalist Robyn Jacob that formed in fall 2017 at the Banff Centre for the Arts. This is the duo’s first release. This project triangulates aspects of new music, creative music, and song-writing, combining their classical training and their involvement with the Canadian creative and indie music scenes. Though they originally met while both pursuing degrees in classical music at UBC in 2007, they share an…
Cheminant
**500 copies** This is French composer / pianist Melaine Dalibert's third solo piano album, following his well-received 2018 album Musique pour le lever du jour and 2017 album Ressac. Cheminant contains a diverse array of Dalibert's unique compositions for solo piano, ranging from the up-tempo rhythmic Percolations performed masterfully by Dalibert's right hand, to the slow, prolonged meditative Music in an octave and Cheminant, to the kaleidoscopic Étude II with the repetitive hammered chords, …
Works on Paper
Venezuelan-based composer/artist Gil Sansón and Canadian-based composer/painter Lance Austin Olsen began to work closely together via long distance in 2014. Their collaboration initially began when Olsen painted the CD cover of Sansón's release 'Immanence, A Life' (Makam 003) in 2015. Sharing a similar aesthetic in art and music with deep respect and understanding of each other's work, the two soon started to make music in collaboration through realizations of each other's graphic scores or pain…
Without
Clara de Asís composed the piece 'Without' for the duo of Erik Carlson (violin) and Greg Stuart (percussion) in 2018. In this 43-minute piece, de Asís gave a precise framework for the position and the duration of each sound section and each silence, as well as a rough outline for the texture and the volume of each sound, the use of tone or noise (or tone-noise), and the materials for the percussion, but a large part of the score was open for the two performers' freedom.In the realization of this…
13 Thirteen
Keith Rowe and Michael Pisaro: 13 Thirteen | On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one’s perception of time itself. On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one’s perception of time itself."On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and…
Where Are We Going, Today
Christian Wolff, piano, objects, charango, flute. Antoine Beuger, voice, whistles, EWR recordings (1995) of Christian Wolff’s “Stones”.Antoine Beuger started composing music in 1990 and has released on his own label, Edition Wandelweiser Records, as well as Erstwhile Records. Beuger’s work is best exemplified by two releases, his first, Calme Étendue (Spinoza) and A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger. Calme Étendue (Spinoza) is an album that attempts to take the 17th century philosopher Spin…
Mosquitoes and Crabs
Chulki Hong, turntables, guitar, electronics. Will Guthrie, drums, percussion, electronics. Recorded by Taku Unami, Mullae Arts Village, Seoul, South Korea, 20-22 October 2016. Mixed and edited by Taku Unami.Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer/percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics. Born in 1976, Hong Chulki …
The Whistler
A year ago, Graham Lambkin continued the ErstSolo series with "Community" (in conjunction with Keith Rowe's quadruple "testament"), while the even more prolific Taku Unami appeared in duo with Devin DiSanto on the live performance recorded at the Fridman Gallery in New York in 2015. The material reworked for "The Whistler" comes from two days of field recordings in gardens, streets and parks adjacent to St. Peter's Cemetery in Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as some recordings made by Lambkin at…
Busman's holiday
This album is a meditation on the inner mental environments that one encounters and endures during times of work-related travel. The music contained herein should be well suited for headphone distraction in airports, bus stations, train stations, subway terminals, and in the confines of the seats related to these methods of mass transportation.Recorded, edited and mixed by Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet in 2015.
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"Busman's Holiday opens with audio taken from an iconic scene in John Boorman's…
II
The label doesn't want to do notes anymore about his new releases. So we have to write some with our very good English. With these two names you can imagine that for sure the music will be closer to silence than to wall of noise. First we must say that no credit is written on the CD, like it was not important to know who is playing what and first what is played. CD1 is an instrumental piece signed by Radu Malfatti. CD2 by Jürg Frey where instruments are mixed with field recordings. It was r…
Making a
Graham Lambkin first heard Keith Rowe's sixties work in AMM as a teenager growing up in Folkestone, a small town in Kent, England, and for him it was very influential. That same year, Lambkin formed his now legendary band The Shadow Ring and Lambkin says, For Darren (Harris) and I, AMM was one of the groups that gave us licence to just do what we wanted, regardless of whether it fitted with convention or employed 'accepted' techniques, and did so from a very English standpoint which held g…