Music from United States

If Fat Albert Rotunda sounds like the most fun Herbie Hancock had in his early years as a band leader, it should. He composed the music for the pilot of the children's television show Fat Albert, redirecting the post-bop jazz he honed in a five-year stint with the Miles Davis Quintet towards the R&B and funk styles with which he was becoming enamored. The result was a playful, joyous album in which Hancock clearly had a great time.The same goes for the rest of his Sextet, which by the time…

Orpheus Variations is a new composition by Alvin Lucier for solo cello and seven wind instruments. It is based on a particular sonority from the first movement of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score, Orpheus; a sonority that has haunted Lucier for decades. Orpheus Variations is one of eight large-scale compositions made expressly for Charles Curtis by Alvin Lucier in the last 15 years. This performance was conducted by Petr Kotik, with Charles Curtis playing solo cello alongside members of the SEM En…

Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present a collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, "August Moon" and "Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba" are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier. A selection from Alvin Lucier's liner notes: "For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that's at the onset of every pi…

May 1, 1979 – G.X. Jupitter-Larsen introduced The Haters by way of a performance called Alluring at a small gallery in New York City, where Jupitter-Larsen lived at the time. In that performance, “Jupitter-Larsen smashed up several video cassettes by hitting them repeatedly with a video camera. The fractured videos still radiated images. Not by television, but by entropy.” Forty years later, The Haters remains active—the recurring emanation of Jupitter-Larsen’s polymathic mind. The Haters is…

With percussionist extraordinaire Steven Hess now a full-fledged member, Mark Nelson and Pan American deliver their first new album since White Bird Release in 2009. This collection of new sounds began with the duo rehearsing for a series of shows in southern Europe in late 2011 and early 2012, the songs written together as a group to be played live. Bobby Donne (Labradford, Cristal) plays bass on multiple tracks, further emphasizing the live band feel. Mark Nelson's deft production touches abo…

The initial vinyl edition comes with a CD. The debut album from this Norwegian-American trio consists of two long tracks that move between intimate lyricism and hardcore expressionism, shaping one of the strongest free jazz offerings we have heard for quite some time. Filipino-American Jon Irabagon has topped both the Rising Star Alto Saxophone and the Rising Star Tenor Saxophone categories in Down Beat´s critics polls and been named one of Time Out New York´s 25 New York City Jazz Icons. Among …

"Breaking Day is the second full-length album from Cleared, the Chicago-based duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera. While their self-titled debut album found the duo exploring themes of stasis and texture, Breaking Day represents a huge development in the scope and overall style of the project. Where previous material had been slowly assembled from dozens of individual recordings and experiments, this new collection of songs was born from the raw documentation of Cleared's live performance in …

* Restocked, reduced price * The never-before-seen in its entirety, visual documentation proving this avant-garde collaboration of mythic proportions did indeed occur. Recorded at Sideshows by the Seashore along the Coney Island boardwalk on June 8th, 1986 as documented on VHS by John Polizzi under the commission of event producers Rick Russo and Bronwyn Rucker. It was long believed that John Cage and Sun Ra never performed together but as you'll see,these two shared the stage the entire time. T…

2016 Edition. This long awaited full length album is a solo release by prolific experimental & harsh noise artist Richard Ramirez, who works under many aliases like Werewolf Jerusalem and Black Leather Jesus (just to name a few), and is one of the earliest purveyors of the Houston experimental noise scene. This album contains 2 tracks which start off quite abrasively and immerses you straight into a sonic environment consisting of heavy distortion of varying noise frequencies. Subtle elements of…

My relationship with Steve Lacy’s music is not occasional. It was for me the “door”. Since 2009, titled So Long!, I have presented several times a program with his compositions on bass clarinet. In the summer of 2013, on the mountains, I recorded the solo using the Bb clarinet, finding a bare, naked and raw dimension that marks an important point in my personal process with the music of Steve. “I try to be empty and to see what sounds” (Tom Raworth) Giancarlo nino LocatelliLacy’s tunes are devis…

I think it's important and proper to play Steve Lacy's music today and that we have to take the risk. Keeping his example alive means to me every time to question the results achieved. My relationship with his music is not occasional. Steve is present in three tracks of my first album "trochus". Later I played his music alone and in various groups. I would like to remember at least the Fish Horn Quartet, with Fabio Martini, Jean Jaques Avenel and John Betsch, the sextet 5or6 Bones with Sebi Tram…

2017 Edition. The Nightmares continue on with Richard Ramirez’s trademark tradition of Giallo influenced static noise terror. The contextual direction of this album puts the senses through a state of disturbing ‘calm’ by taking on its own story of a ‘horror movie’. The frequent and sudden shifts of sound variations, samples of female shrieks, movie dialogues, static walls, pulsating buzzes, low frequency drones and textural noise layers of tightly spaced crackles sounding almost like one complet…

John Luther Adams's Everything That Rises, commissioned by SFJAZZ and the JACK Quartet, is an ever-in-motion virtuosic just-intonation work built of a series of 16 ascending musical “clouds.” Its pitches are derived from the harmonics of the piece’s subsonic fundamental tone (C0).The composer writes: “Everything That Rises, my fourth string quartet, grew out of Sila: The Breath of the World—a concert-length choral/orchestral work I composed on a rising series of 16 harmonic clouds. This music tr…

The 68th edition of the DJ-Kicks mix series is another landmark one, with experimental producer Laurel Halo taking the reins. The American’s adventurous 29 track trip features seven exclusives, including two of her own plus those from Rrose, Machinewoman, FIT Siegel, Nick León and Ikonika. An electronic outlier, Halo hails from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but has been based in Berlin for a number of years. Landing on labels like Hyperdub, Honest Jon’s and Latency, Halo has released a body of wor…

The Wind in High Places is an elegant, haunting collection album containing three of John Luther Adams’s serenely powerful recent string works: (1) The Wind in High Places (2011), a three-movement string quartet commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Theodore Front Musical Literature, performed by JACK Quartet; (2) Canticles of the Sky, a four-movement piece for four cello choirs, performed by the 48-member Northwestern University Cello Ensemble, directed and conducted by Hans Jørgen …

Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements presen…

The Lion’s Throne bears witness to the performances that the legendary composer Terry Riley and Italian singer Amelia Cuni did together in the United Kingdom and Italy between 1999 and 2006. Riley, whose remarkable body of work seamlessly integrates a lifetime of devotion to Indian classical music into the western classical tradition, collaborates with Cuni, a singer trained in Dhrupad who, like Riley, experiments with Indian singing in a variety of ways.In these recordings, Riley plays piano or…

Four Thousand Holes is a sometimes lush, sometimes fragile, rhythmically complex and technically demanding work for piano and mallet percussion (performed by the extraordinary pianist Stephen Drury and percussionist Scott Deal) and ghostly electronic “auras”—electronic sounds created by processing the acoustic instruments’ sonorities.Unlike John Luther Adams’s other works, the pitch material used in Four Thousand Holes is drawn exclusively from Western music’s most basic elements: major and mino…

John Luther Adams's The Place We Began contains four mysteriously evocative electro-acoustic works that the composer built from short recorded moments—audio fragments—of his early music (circa the early 1970s). This is not a trip down Memory Lane: in The Place We Began, Adams has reappropriated and transformed these sonic fragments into completely new works that speak to his current musical interests and directions, especially his recent installation pieces, and refer to his past only in ways th…

The four pieces that make up this CD—Dark Waves, Among Red Mountains, Qilyuan, and Red Arc/Blue Veil—are for various combinations of one or two pianos, percussion, and electronics. Each piece is built from a complex, polyrhythmic layering of voices that combine to form large, multi-arch musical shapes that explore a rich palette of harmonic and timbral colors, lush textures, and clear, simple compositional forms. This is music of broad strokes and ever-changing ebb and flow. John Luther Adams ha…