Musical Procedure
*2023 stock* This CD documents a series of works that I call "Musical Procedure." In composers' usual works, the sounds to be performed are written in a score; but in these pieces the procedures (which could also be called programs, algorithms or specification sheets) for shaping music, such as performance methods and the general ideas of the works, are written as concisely as possible, and the type of sound to be produced is left largely to the performers. The score is merely an arrangement of …
![Paraphrase on Shichikushoshinshu [1664]](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/2024-10/Tai_ParaphraseOn_CD_01-jpg.jpg.500.jpg)
Paraphrase on Shichikushoshinshu [1664]
*2023 stock* Published in the Edo era (1664), "Shichikushoshinshu" is a beginner’s guide to three musical instruments—the "hitoyogiri" shakuhachi, the koto, and the shamisen—which includes lyrics and fingerings for songs believed to have been popular at the time. Tai decided to create a new musical instrument in order to perform the shamisen music in "Shichikushoshinshu" (Japan’s oldest shamisen “scores”). The result was the self-made electric stringed instrument he calls the coiled cello. In 20…
Nemiesta
Three years after the release of Black Angels Songs, Miroslav Tóth together with Dystopic Requiem Quartet comes up with a rare album inspired by non-places, i.e. buildings and objects that were either unfinished, abandoned, over-multiplied, or were marked by mining and yet had no meaning in the end. Also featured on Non-places is Nénia, a track dedicated to the victims in Ukraine, written three days after the outbreak of war during the album's creation. The recordings were made in the Czech Repu…
Etudes
*300 copies limited edition* In writing about Igor Yalivec’s music it’s important to get the big thing out in the open right away. Igor Yalivec is a Dnipro, Ukraine based artist who at the time of this writing is currently living there, recording music, taking field recordings and generally existing as his country is under a pall of unease punctuated with moments of terror. It is under these circumstances where Etudes seems as vital a document as anything coming out of war-torn Ukraine, but also…
Touch three
*2023 stock* This is Phill Niblock's third release on the Touch label. Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten minimalist. His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V. Vierk, David First, and Gl…
Glass World
“I have become fascinated by the complexity of the single sound.” - Annea Lockwood
Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II
Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II continues Black Truffle’s documentation of the late work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who sadly passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. Like the first volume of the series, the two works recorded here were written for The Ever Present Orchestra, an ensemble founded in Zürich in 2016 to perform Lucier’s work exclusively. At the core of the music Lucier wrote for the ensemble is the electric guitar, an instrument he began to e…
Two Harmonicas in the Jeweler's Court
Tip! *300 copies limited release* Henry Birdsey - best known as one half of the microtonal multi-instrumentalist duo known as Tongue Depressor - is a master of dualities. He writes music that is both fundamental and complex, tranquil and fierce, and conceptual yet familiar all at once. His music often reflects the expansive and isolated regions of his home state of Vermont with its vast natural splendor, both lush and harsh, haunting and entrancing. It is also often about nothing more than the p…
Late Night Show
All my music is night music, says the composer Petr Bakla. Three pieces featured on the new album Late Night Show span almost a decade and provide varied examples of his style, 'so specific and personal, so allergic to fashion or aesthetic trend', as Eric Wubbels puts it in the insightful liner note. The central instrument is the piano, operated by Bakla´s longtime collaborator Miroslav Beinhauer, accompanied by the musicians of Brno Contemporary Orchestra.
Sounds While Waiting
Sounds While Waiting documents the latest organ works by composer and musician Ellen Arkbro – following her phenomenal debut, 2017's For Organ And Brass, and the more recent Chords. Recorded at a centuries-old church in Unnaryd, Sweden in June 2020, these pieces reveal the enchanting qualities of sustained harmonic sound, how patterns of listening dissolve and emerge as textured space. On opening track "Changes," long radiant tones ebb and flow like divine breaths, while "Leaving Dreaming" build…
Cantegral Segment(s) 16.17.18.19. / Transform (Stream) / Transphalba / Volta (Kernel)
Like Hunt’s composition “Lattice,” released on Texas Music in the same year, the four pieces included on Cantegral Segment(s) (IR-0032, 1979) represent a culmination and transformation of Hunt’s investigations from across the decade. The “Cantegral Segments” are a body of scores (or strategies) derived from and developed alongside the evolving compositional procedure Hunt called Haramand Plane, first used in a large-scale performance of that name from 1972 that employed elaborate homemade audio …
Texas Music
Tip! One of the first Irida releases, Texas Music (IRIDA 0026, 1979), collects compositions by Jerry Hunt (hailing from Dallas), Philip Krumm (based in San Antonio), and Jerry Willingham (“in and out” of Austin). The record was produced in two editions: one for mass consumption in a corrugated plain brown sleeve featuring a single fish stamp on the cover by the artist David McManaway, and a small “fundraising edition” sold in the same packaging at a higher price with a numbered print by McManawa…
Hybrid Musics
Larry Austin (1930–2018), thirteen years Hunt’s senior, was a key interlocutor for the composer. The two met during Austin’s term as editorial director of the magazine Source: Music of the Avant Garde and both had studied music at the University of North Texas. Following stints at the University of California, Davis, and the University of South Florida, Austin returned to UNT as professor in 1976 and took over its electronic music studio, the Center for Electronic Music and Intermedia. When Hunt…
Music of Dary John Mizelle
Music of Dary John Mizelle is a recording of three densely layered compositions by the eponymous Oklahoma-born composer. Originally trained in trombone performance, Mizelle was a graduate student in composition at the University of California, Davis, under Larry Austin. The two, alongside Stanley Lunetta, had founded the free improvisation group New Music Ensemble in 1963 on campus with the intention of exploring the outer limits of performance and composition. Mizelle became the youngest member…
Music Of BL Lacerta
Tip! Music of BL Lacerta is an album of spontaneous music featuring two live performances, one at the University of North Texas art gallery and one at the Second National Tuba-Euphonium Symposium-Workshop, and a stray studio recording done at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky. The collective BL Lacerta, whose name is derived from a distant astronomical constellation, formed in 1976 (Lacerta also translates to “lizard,” accounting for the group’s reptilian cartoon logo). They began as classical m…
Cartography
“Mapping” here refers to the interest of composer Larry Austin (1930–2018) in the adaptation of external structures (such as mathematical figures or shapes observed in nature) for the purpose of generating compositional material. This concern was shared by his PhD composition students at the university of North Texas, three of whom—Rodney Washka II, Gene De Lisa, and Robert Michael Keefe— are represented on Cartography. Each experimented with the possibilities of the Synclavier digital music sys…
James Fulkerson
James Fulkerson’s release on Irida, Works (IRIDA 0017, 1980), is the first collection of the trombonist’s own compositions, all of which he had written and developed in the mid-’70s. Just as Jerry Hunt had done with Cantegral Segment(s), Fulkerson problematized the presentation of his work as a record in the liner notes, where he noted the complex and intense relationship he had developed with the pieces over countless concerts and rehearsals: “I was overwhelmed with the sense of disparity betwe…
Journal de mes sons (Book)
*Bilingual English-French* ‘Journal de mes sons’ is an essential text for defining Pierre Henry’s thought.It is a musical biography in the sense of a diary and an autobiography in forty-two sequences that accompanied him in various forms between 1977 and 2005. In the first person singular or plural. At one and the same time a manifesto, a historical record, notes to himself, a stock-taking, points of view or a declaration of love for his nearest and dearest — it took shape at the pinnacle of a l…
Boston Tenor Index
** Edition limited to 450 copies only. Comes with a printed insert ** Alga Marghen returns with what might just be their most historically significant release to date, “Boston Tenor Index”, comprising three, never before released compositions - “Index”, from 1969; and “Tenor” and “Boston III”, both from 1972 - by Phill Niblock, that represent some the earliest works in his catalogue to have ever appeared. Truly stunning in audio terms, and an absolute revelation toward understanding how Niblock…
cubes
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "cubes (2020) commissioned, interpreted and recorded by Erik Carlson and Greg Stuart, is a set of instructions for constructing sound and recording events. The score consists of 24 “cubes,” rectangular figures containing various graphics, which are the building blocks of sound for the piece. Throughout the process of realization, Erik and Greg devised and structured these building blocks depending on variou…