Chorales
*300 copies limited edition* Meditative solo piano excursions by Albert Alan Owen. The first widely available new work for many decades sees the British composer return to his principle instrument for a series of beautifully unadorned piano miniatures. The minimalist approach and effortless serenity put me in mind of the recent return of another veteran, Laraaji, who's Sun Piano LP from 2020 shared a similarly emotional weight. Strange how it's minimal music that often possesses the most affecti…
Scarlatti
zeitkratzer director Reinhold and his ensemble present new compositions, grounded on Domenico Scarlatti's piano sonata F-minor K.466. Commissioned by the dance company Rubato and dedicated to Mario Bertoncini (1932-2019).
Was ficht dich an?
impakt Records presents the new record by Huhn | Schönegg | Mahnig "Was ficht dich an?" with Leonhard Huhn (alto saxophone), Stefan Schönegg (double bass) and Dominik Mahnig (drums).
plays Herzog | Muche | Nillesen
impakt Records presents the new record by T.ON "plays Herzog | Muche | Nillesen" with Constantin Herzog (double bass), Matthias Muche (trombone) and Etienne Nillesen (extended snare drum).
2 compositions by Frank Gratkowski
Fo[u]r Alto is the quadrupling of the alto saxophone as a unified body of sound. Since the ensemble was founded in 2008, the four Berlin saxophonists Frank Gratkowski, Christian Weidner, Leonhard Huhn (until 2018 Benjamin Weidekamp) and Florian Bergmann have found an unmistakable sound language characterised by artistic uncompromisingness and continuous musical research. In autumn 2012, they released their first CD "4 compositions by Frank Gratkowski" on the English label Leo Records. Now follow…
Trust
*300 copies limited edition* Students of Decay presents "Kaivajaiset" by Finnish composer Niko-Matti Ahti. Best known for his work alongside his partner Marja as Ahti & Ahti, Niko-Matti has been an active participant in the Finnish underground since the late 1990s. "Kaivajaiset" is his first solo recording and was originally conceived of as an installation. Part horspiel, part musique concrete, it is a piece of music that draws comparisons to the work of pioneering avant-garde composers such as …
Brian Baumbusch: Chemistry for Gamelan and String Quartet
Chemistry for Gamelan and String Quartet is the culmination of a long-term collaboration between the JACK Quartet and composer and instrument builder Brian Baumbusch (b. 1987). Over the past ten years, Baumbusch has designed and built two separate sets of “American gamelan” instruments. Based on various instruments from the Balinese gamelan tradition, these instruments depart in innovative ways from Indonesian traditions based on their unique tuning, inspired in part by the tuning theories publi…
Battleship Potemkin
*300 copies limited edition* Nearly a century has passed since the release of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (Russian: Бронено́сец «Потёмкин», Bronenosets Potyomkin). We must speak out, now. Time has come. When the meat is rotten and maggots run across your plate, what's left to do? Remnant memories of times almost forgotten, or of traditions from back home, linger in the body military depleted. Our daily bread served as a timely reminder of shared humanity: a first step in an uprising …
Quaderno Di Strada
"Sciarrino is an important, and distinctive, figure in the Italian avant-garde. The present work is a setting of thirteen brief texts (its subtitle is ’12 canti e un proverbio’, twelve songs and a proverb) for baritone and 14 instrumentalists – the booklet notes say fifteen, but only fourteen are named. It puts before its hearer fragmentary, skittering sounds, sudden changes of dynamics, as sounds loom out of silence and disappear just as quickly. There are fluttery, fugitive sounds, repetitive …
Annunciation Triptych
"All is alive in Liza Lim's music, permeated by unstressed urgency. It's hard to think of anything less Kafkaesque than her Annunciation Triptych, in which she shatters the Romantic trope to pieces, rebuilds it in other ways, and uses the orchestra as a historical and cultural prism wherein the women - Sappho, Mary, and Fatimah - are portrayed as sources of transhistorical light in every movement. Each 'prism-orchestra' is, moreover, an assemblage itself, filtering its figure's radiance in unpre…
Tuscany
*2023 Repress* Los Angeles based pianist, producer, and songwriter John Carroll Kirby traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy in the summer of 2018 on a self-imposed writing trip. During his stay he composed Tuscany, a two side-long solo piano exploration of this particular geographical envelope, a place where nature is shaped into form.Kirby would cycle 12 kilometers each day to Cascata di Malbacco, a waterfall with jade pools and silver stone, and the inspiration for Side A of Tuscany. His own Cascata …
Sketches For Francis
"Atmospheric music that envelops you and transports you to wide linear horizons, distant, desert and strange lands. I particularly liked the organic sounds of the introduction of Sketch I." - Christine Ott
Theodore Wild Ride
Theodore Wild Ride started from the collaboration between French keyboardists Christine Ott (regular collaborator of Yann Tiersen, Tindersticks, Oiseaux-Tempête...), Mathieu Gabry (Snowdrops) and Oed player Ophir Levy. Theodore Wild Ride celebrates musical freedom and redefines the relationship between space and time with a special, unexpected orchestration.
The Further We Ventured
In recent years, pianist and producer Mirek Coutigny has worked on his own world of sound with electronic and acoustic instruments. He improvised on sketches that he wrote over the last 10 years and reworked them for piano, strings, percussion and electronics.The common thread running through “The Further We Ventured” is a fascination for the “suburbs”, more specific, the contrast between the often similar facades and the diversity of stories behind those facades.This is also reflected in the co…
Natural World
A haunting 55-minute work for voice, piano and electronics by one of the world's leading experimental composers. Natural World is in three sections - Field Guide, Chorus and Seascape. It starts playfully, with Juliet Fraser singing encyclopedia-style facts about birds and animals against Mark Knoop's stop-start piano motif. But, following the introduction of field recordings and then electronics, the music gradually - almost imperceptibly - becomes darker until, without ever explicitly addressin…
Evening Star, Vesper Bell
Beautiful 54-minute work by Magnus Granberg, written for and wonderfully played by Apartment House. As with almost all of Granberg's compositions, a strong ability in improvisation is essential as the score presents musicians with pools of musical material from which they have to select sounds according to what they are hearing in the moment from the other musicians. Sumptuously gorgeous music.
Neha
Two orchestral works by Adrián Demoč, the highly-acclaimed Slovak composer currently based in Spain. The title track 'Neha' (2018) creates a shimmering tension by overlaying 'well-tempered' chords with the same chords using natural harmonics outside of the tempered tuning system. This doubling creates a gentle trembling of interferences. The second piece, 'Popínavá hudba', evolves from a single melodic line, which is repeated with slight variations such that it curves and is bent into fascinatin…
Sound Pieces
Apartment House realise seven works by the pioneering US experimental composer. The first six pieces are text scores for open instrumentation, while 'Peace/Tree' is a seven movement work for violin, cello and piano that specifies pitches, while still leaving a lot of freedom of interpretation. The download also includes an alternative realisation of 'Quintessential' that didn't fit on the CD
The Nigger Series
Last copies...Over the last decade and a half, it’s been incredible to witness the ascending star of the composer Julius Eastman. A celebrated figure within the New York experimental music scene during the 1970s and '80s, over the years following his untimely death in 1990 he and his work drifted into sinful neglect. Largely thanks to a series of archival releases attending to his work - New World Records' “Unjust Malaise” and “The Zürich Concert”, Frozen Reeds' “Femenine”, and Week-End Records’…
s/t
In 2019, at the age of 85, reductionist composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler began an improvising duo, himself on piano, with cellist Tilman Kanitz.
What at first glance seems an uncommon move turns out to be a logical continuation of his minimalist compositional style that has been covered extensively on Edition Telemark and other labels. Kanitz, who was trained in classical western music but gathered musical experiences around the world and especially in India, considers his music-making and perfor…