Music from Switzerland

"Voice and Sky provides both a look at a previous work, On the Breeze – a series of public space interventions and text / sound installation – and an extension of that work in the form of a book and CD publication. My view is that an installation or any kind of work dealing with the idea of space – be it a public space or a designated art space – can only be fully experienced by being in that space first hand. In the case of On the Breeze, using material gathered hiking extensively through the S…

Guitarist, composer and improviser Taku Sugimoto frequently performs overseas as well as in Japan. He's also a member of the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, which consists of five Japanese musicians. Stefan Thut is a Swiss cellist and composer. Both Sugimoto and Thut are known as unique performers and composers, and both have close ties with the contemporary classical Wandelweiser group. The two have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Jap…

Jason Kahn, Günter Müller and Norbert Möslang, all from Switzerland, comprise MKM trio, spontaneously founded in 2006 in Tokyo during their Japanese tour. They immediately achieved very fine results and collaborate since then. Their sound hovers between the at times harsh rhythmic noise of Norbert Möslang’s cracked everyday electronics and the rich sonorities of Günter Müller’s percussion-based samples and electronics. Jason Kahn’s work on analog synthesizer bridges these two worlds, adding high…

Early to Late presents an inspired commission for Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey, inviting each to compose for Ensemble Grizzana using the same brief: build a new work from Renaissance fragments. Granberg’s “How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights?” draws on William Byrd’s choral music, transforming melodic kernels into shimmering, spectral textures. Ensemble voices - celesta, glass harp, dulcimer, violin, winds - float through cycles of open-form improvisation and carefully weighted silence. The res…

Edition of 300. A really great setting for drummer Gerry Hemmingway – an album that has him improvising live with trombonist Samuel Blaser – a fantastic musician who's one of the freshest trombone talents we've heard in years! In previous comments, we've liked Blaser to a modern day heir to the genius of 60s trombonists like Roswell Rudd and Grachan Moncur – and those words definitely hold true here, as Blaser delivers a wondrous balance between new sounds and tuneful moments, fresh ideas …

Collection Gustave Roud is a double album presenting five quietly radiant works by Swiss composer Jürg Frey, each created in dialogue with the poet and photographer Gustave Roud. The pieces - realized by a remarkable ensemble including Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh, Regula Konrad, and others - parse the space between nature and imagination, fragment and wholeness. Frey’s music is intimately bound to Roud’s texts, which trace the passing of seasons, the mystery of the Haut-Jorat landsc…

Swiss composer Jürg Frey's six hour long electronic tape piece L'àme Est Sans Retenue I was recorded and assembled in 1997/98 and is now being released for the first time. It is the longest piece Frey has ever composed in his over 40 year career.In this piece, Frey utilized the sounds of field recordings he made in Berlin in 1997 as the source materials, alternately inserted between long stretches of silence. Frey was particularly focusing around that time on how the dynamic relation between sou…

University of South Carolina experimental music workshop, Greg Stuart (director). Kallam Ashmore (objects), Brian Bethea (saxophone), Erik Carlson (violin), Eric Dennis (objects), James Easteppe (guitar), Jürg Frey (clarinet), Michael Halbrook (objects), Timothy Hall (guitar), John Kammerer (horn), Aj Karp (objects), Logan Mclean (voice), Lauren Phillips (objects), Brooke Rosenberg (objects), Chris Ruggiero (objects), Jessica Russell (objects), Nikil Sairam (violin), Bailey Seabury (percussion),…

Score for indeterminate ensemble by Swiss composer Stefan Thut (2012), here realised by Cristián Alvear, Cyril Bondi and D'Incise. The piece is governed by three categories of sonic material - 0 for faintly coloured noise, 1 for amalgam of noise and pitch, 2 for pure pitch - circulated across six pages and as many rounds in an ever-shifting structure of repetition and turn. A rigorous taxonomy of sound material in the lineage of Wandelweiser and post-Cage indeterminacy.

Space Text Sound documents text material used in three of my recent installations: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Hong Kong (After Perec) (2016), Drifting (2016) and Other Ghosts (2015). All three of these works investigate the nexus points between the production of space through sound and how text can be used to reflect on this process. I’m interested in how words can convey the sense of place sounds can and, beyond this, how these words impart a feeling for inner spaces, often more common…

New Jason Kahn double LP for analog electronics, voice, percussion, environmental recordings. "In the field of philosophy monads are often referred to as the elementary particles which combine to create a substance. In the context of this double LP, the title refers to the constituent facets of my musical activity: namely, percussion, electronics, environmental recording and voice. What ties these different pursuits together is my particular approach to composition. No matter what sound material…

"..to shape a new consciousness, one in which cooperation triumphs over domination, and humility before nature's complexity challenges technological hubris. to move on and leave the religious, materialist and supremacist phases behind us. most dimensions are yet to be explored. the real human potential has yet to be revealed. the process of liberation has only just begun. rise, rise, rise.." (final section of Dave Phillips' liner notes, spread across the four sides of the two inlays)

Raw field recordings. Immersion. Listening beyond sound. Nature speaks languages. we can “hear” them, but do we listen, do we try to understand? floods, tornados, land erosion, global warming, et cetera - these are but the most obvious examples of nature speaking. These discs contain nature’s sounds with this particular intention/communication in mind. The field recordist in the role of a mediator. Aesthetic choices are but departing points. The quality of attention defines the quality of experi…

An hour long piece consisting of classical instrumentation and orchestral arrangements using cello, violin and piano, plus recordings of wind, broken urban creatures, intimate situations, insect and amphibian sounds and mutations thereof, transmogrified balloons, unconscious voices and more. Selective perception is the tendency to not notice and more quickly forget stimuli that cause emotional discomfort and contradict our prior beliefs. Selective perception is the process by which individuals p…

Clarinet (and Piano) brings together Amsterdam composer Dante Boon and Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey for three works at the porous boundary of composition and improvisation. In the long opening duo “O’Hare,” Boon’s gentle piano arpeggios glow beside Frey’s quietly expressive clarinet, combining spiraling lyricism with stately stillness across nearly twenty-five minutes. The piece unfolds in a gradual arc, eschewing conventional development for the slow revelation of timbre and intervallic resonanc…

Jurg Frey - guitarist, alone played by Cristian Alvear. A double CD featuring all of Jurg Frey's music for solo guitar, beautifully interpreted by the Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, including a new piece written specially for Cristian. “Not one for the impatient listener, this softly entrancing double-disc set contains all the solo guitar music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey – and that means an awful lot of silence and not a huge number of notes. The first piece, Abendlied, contains exactl…

Hans Koch: Bassclarinet, Soprano Sax. Thomas Peter: Amplified Objects, Live Electronics. Recorded March 2014 in Biel / Bienne, Switzerland. “Music by bass clarinet and soprano saxophone player Hans Koch has been reviewed before and I particularly enjoyed his solo release Erfolg (see Vital Weekly 964). For Thomas Peter it has been a long time ago since I reviewed Medir (Vital Weekly 682). That one was entirely made with digital means, but on the disc he recorded with Koch he plays 'amplified obje…

Kahn (American, living in Zurich) and Olive (Canadian, living in Japan) recorded these pieces while on tour in Japan in May 2014. This release features two unhurried explorations for radio, synthesizer, and mixing board (Kahn) and magnetic pickups (Olive). “Fukuoka,” presents a series of gradual unfurlings; pockets of pockmarked, dented and torn glass clusters, tumbling upon and over each other, perhaps briefly interlocking by way of some fragile barb, only to instantaneously break loose. “Osaka…

2013 release ** From the early 2000s, Stefan Thut began a series of scores named according to the number of performers, somewhat like Cage's later works. Ranging from one performer to seven, including the more indeterminate "some" and "many," each score is very open, completely undefined, with a few written indications (limited mainly to volume restrictions), plus a kind of guiding thread to follow (composed of letters, lines, etc.) during the performance, without any indication of duration, for…

Since their formation in 1998 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, duo Contour have commissioned and performed over 40 new pieces by composers from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. Their collaborative work has combined the acoustic world of trumpet and percussion with dance, electronics, improvisation, origami, story-telling, theatre and video, as well as and with other musicians in their 'duo Contour plus….' programmes.  The duo has been resident at …