Composition / All styles

Elusive and illusory, Age Veeroos’ music captures a unique tension between focus and ambiguity. The album "Outlines of the Night" presents compositions in which, for example, violin and electronics, as in Schattenseele, evoke corresponding sensations of a “shadow soul” through obsessive, circling motifs. In Keha for bass clarinet, physical and biological processes are musically embodied, oscillating between registers. Fantasia “A Threadbare Chant” and Ma olen suur kuu su silmapiiril further demo…

Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere points of interest. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contempor…

Rory Cowal is a distinctive pianist, one who draws liberally on classical chops, ample experience with improvisation, and a predilection for the new and uncharted. This makes him especially attractive to composers who wish to blur the boundaries between traditional styles and genres. A musical adventurer at heart, Cowal seems drawn to challenging and unusual projects. The eight pieces on this CD reflect this willingness to experiment, to not just play the same old (now canonic) warhorses of the …

"All his life, my father played the trombone and sang; just before he died, he became a music critic. He said "Chords, yes Alvin, but it needs more melody." SCHTYX was the answer. It opens with a dotted quarter at 50. From the start, implications appear and never cease. They remain open for business like a river. The melody, first thought terminal, is recycled on a child's buzz saw, but then reappears as a mensch. Ten minutes later, it turns up a 5/4 Waltz scrutinized by a group of unemployed ha…

With "Distant Fragments", Camilo Mendez presents an album of solos and duos that showcase his most intimate and reflective works, creating a rich sound tapestry. While Mechanical Resonance I: Iridescent Resonance explores cloud luminescence through prepared violin and viola, Five Fragments deals with the themes of variation and polyphony. Cancion de la Distancia, on the other hand, reflects the fleeting nature of memory and time, inspired by Arturo’s poetry. Recorded by Roberto Alonso, Linus Fun…

In the heart of 21st-century Japan, Yu Kuwabara emerges as a composer of remarkable versatility and resilience. Inspired by Japanese mythology, Buddhist chants, and Edo songs, Kuwabara explores the energy of the Japanese language through her compositions. Her works, such as Bai and Dharani and Toward the Brink of Water Or the Verge of Dusk, blend Western classical influences with traditional Japanese elements. Kuwabara’s research in traditional arts fuels her innovative approach, capturing the f…

Near Distant by Michelle Lou explores the intricate interplay of stasis, time and perception. Lou’s compositions challenge conventional interpretations, presenting music as a constantly evolving landscape. Through “static” or “stasis-variation” she reveals the complexity within seemingly unchanging sounds, inviting listeners to explore subtle transformations in pitch, timbre and dynamics. This album embodies Lou’s unique approach, emphasizing our active role in perceiving and transforming the in…

"Zensolence" embodies the auditory canvas of Osmo Tapio Räihälä, a synaesthetic composer who transforms the visual into the musical. For Räihälä, art forms transcend their mediums and speak a universal language through diverse expressions. His experience of colours, shapes and textures in music is reflected in this eclectic album, where the traditional meets the innovative. Räihälä draws inspiration from the abstract and translates it into a musical lexicon that is as diverse as it is distinctiv…

The album is inspired by the poetry of William Butler Yeats, in particular his work Sailing to Byzantium. The main composition, which features five recorder sizes from tenor to garklein, explores themes of time and transcendence, depicting a journey to an imaginary Byzantium where the poet is transformed into a golden bird. The four movements correspond to stanzas in Yeats’ poem, with recurring elements such as a lyrical refrain and a gyre reflecting the poet’s themes. The trajectory of the piec…

Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the composer Ben Vida’s “Vocal Trio”. An intoxicatingly beautiful, groundbreaking work of compositional conceptualism - combining the ideas of systems based synthesis with real-time vocal collaboration - the album represents a striking step forward for one of the most ambitious and outstanding sonic artists working in the United States today. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.

After three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of…

Pianist Eunmi Ko’s latest double album, 12 Views on Life, offers a profound musical reflection on the tumultuous years of 2020 and 2021. Through two major projects, SPAM! for solo piano (and other objects she could find around her house) and Project GŪT for ensemble, Ko, alongside the Contemporary Art Music Project [CAMP], delve deep into the existential questions posed by the global pandemic and personal struggles with identity and creativity. Conceived for livestreaming from home, SPAM!, embra…

Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl release to attend to the seminal American composer James Tenney’s “Postal Pieces”, among the most important suites of 20th Century avant-garde composition.

Other Minds is pleased to present …we return to ground…, a new recording by Irish composer Karen Power and Quiet Music Ensemble. This double CD features three of Power’s large-scale pieces pairing natural sounds with musical instruments, written for and with Quiet Music Ensemble over an 8-year period. Beginning with instruments of ice in 2015, Power's experience of pairing natural sounds with musical instruments has evolved into a transformative body of work. Her approach to composition, creatin…

Samuel Andreyev’s music is incredibly varied, from the sparse resonance of the Sonata da Camera, the ‘cartoon music’ – as the composer puts it -of Vérifications, characterised by primary colours and strong instrumental timbres; the Sextet in Two Parts which in contrast focuses on minute timbral shadings; and of course the cantata for solo voice and ensemble which is the title track of the album. Performed by Ensemble Proton Bern, conducted by Luigi Gaggero with the magical soprano voice of Peyee…

Tip! "Three harpsichords in various states of disrepair were kindly offered to me by Leeds Conservatoire. I accepted, and a memorandum of understanding was swiftly drawn up. The offer was made under the condition that I might make some music from them, given my penchant for infirm instruments, and their conventional worthlessness to anyone wishing to use them for their intended purpose. There seemed to be an auspiciousness surrounding these harpsichords, the stories they might reveal, and more i…

Georgia Denham (b.1997) draws on anecdotal experience to create her music. She studied with Andrew Hamilton at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and now with Richard Causton at the University of Cambridge for her PhD. She lives with her husband, a theoretical computer scientist, and their many beloved plants. “This collection of chamber music from 2018–2022 wakes scores I thought were long since sleeping, where I first learned to write the delicate sounds I loved. With music written during my studi…

Griffin works in Toronto on rational intonation and on process as a way of making form. One critic described the result as putting the listener in a kind of sonic microgravity, which is a fair account of what happens when the tuning stops beating.

Eden Lonsdale is a composer of acoustic music living and working between London and Berlin. His music focuses on exploring the various ways that movement and stasis can co- exist, as well as the inter-connectedness of harmony, timbre, melody and rhythm. Often using very limited materials, his dense and immersive sound-worlds attempt to draw the ear into the smallest details and hope to inspire the listener’s self-guided exploration into the music’s manifold layers. The three pieces from this alb…

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Gran…

*2024 stock* Arne Nordheim might not be the best known early electronic music composer, but with this fabulously presented double disc of work it should help his music achieve at least a little wider recognition. He might be best known (at least outside his native Norway) for the discs on Rune Grammofon, but here we get some of his earliest tape work from the 1960s, possibly his most interesting period, at least to me. As a die hard Radiophonic Workshop enthusiast this collection seems to come f…

Dystophilia: A fascination with the rate of societal decline. An unravelling of order as it careens into a dystopian AI future where melodies pile helter-skelter over phrases, genres melt seamlessly into one another, metal textures crash into chamber-like enclaves, forms teeter on the edge of collapse, violent rhythms transform into ghostly voices, and spiralling polyphonies end in jazz riffs or pop songs. The music of this album from MC Maguire’s apocalyptic aural imagination, is poured into tw…

In 2021, the Galan Trio – an epic classical piano trio hailing from Athens – built a bridge from Greece to the USA in the form of ten new works for piano, violin, and cello from composers based in the Southeast and Northeast. The project, aptly named Kinesis, met with such acclaim that their odyssey now continues with another phase: twelve commissioned works covering the Midwest and South Central states. Praised by Fanfare magazine for the “open ears and flexibility they display in so many idiom…

Violinist, Hanna Hurwitz, is a musician who champions the very latest contemporary classical works – she is a member of Chicago’s cutting-edge Grossman Ensemble and Ensemble Dal Niente after all – but she is equally at home among solo and chamber works from past eras. For this album, she goes back one hundred years into neglected jewels of the repertoire from that time, bringing her fresh perspective to current ears. She writes, “I wanted to highlight my orientation toward collaboration through …

Robert Carl is no stranger to space. Standing on the shoulders of such visionaries as Charles Ives, Carl’s early compositions ranged far and wide through musical history, the “ultramoderns,” and beyond. Recently, however, his works have forged a new direction: a personal take on the ever-expanding spiral structures of the overtone series. Infinity Avenue offers six of these monumental sound experiences, taut in their simplicity yet expansive in consciousness. A state of being “close to nature” i…

It is often said that the cello seems like an extension of the human body; the intimate, resonant pairing melds the two into a larger instrument. It is said too that the cello ‘sings’ when played well. In this album, however, it becomes an even larger whole and enters the realm of speech and language, melody and narrative. In the hands (and vocal cords) of Bryan Hayslett, the cello-human bond takes on new dimensions. Cello Unlocked is a foray into the synthesis of language and melody, blurring t…

Catherine Lamb works at the boundary between perception and illusion. In Curva Triangulus (2018/21), the American composer takes Bridget Riley's geometric forms as starting point for "warping" Renaissance materials through geometric musical figures. The result is a 41-minute composition for eight instruments where the distinction between melody and harmony dissolves: one generates the other, rather than existing as separate entities. The score demands an exceptional ensemble. Bern's Ensemble Pro…

Ian Antonio discovered Jürg Frey via algorithm. About 15 years ago, SoundCloud kept leading him to the same piece, maybe Circular Music No. 2. "I wouldn't notice the piece starting but then realize I was in fact listening to it closely," he recalls. "The stillness and closeness and warmth were somewhat new to me." At the time, Antonio played "a lot of very loud and often very fast music" with groups like Wet Ink, Talujon, Zs, and Yarn/Wire. Frey's music was "very much the opposite." This double …

If music grows out of a sense of place, then it follows that related places might have related musics. That idea is the springboard for this album that nods at 400 years of links between two vibrant cities. When the Dutch founded Nieuw Amsterdam in the 17th century, they provided the impetus for the growth of a city that shared many values of its model. The multitude of languages, ethnicities and nationalities, as well as an atmosphere of religious tolerance, made for an astounding uniqueness of…

During the Covid doldrums of 2020, the wind faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, like so many of us, experienced acute loneliness and isolation. As musicians accustomed to the musical and social connections that come from the intimate art of chamber music, they longed to channel their creative loss into something meaningful. Bandwidth – a mission as much as a group – emerged to champion chamber repertoire for wind instruments, foster connections between faculty, and provide a mode…

To the bemusement of the rest of us, mathematicians often describe certain equations, processes, and proofs as “elegant,” “beautiful,” or even “sensuous.” Artworks based on algorithms, conversely, might seem less predisposed to such descriptions. But what if those complex calculations actually produced perceptibly emotional qualities? Take, for example, the work of Spanish composer-mathematician Juan J.G. Escudero. His cult classic, Shapes of Inner Timespaces (Neuma 134, 2021), evoked such respo…

The journey of River of January began in early 1969, when as a freshly arrived 14-year-old from Los Angeles, standing by the ocean in Rio de Janeiro [transl., River of January], Rick Baitz heard a crescendo of rhythmic chanting, followed by a parade of women sashaying down the sidewalk, joyfully singing and swaying to the beat of their own samba. He didn’t know at the time that one day he would write a piece honoring the name of that city, but In 1991 he was commissioned by The Juilliard School …

Plucked & Struck is a collection of works for Celtic (lever) harp and small percussion. Many feature the Orff xylophone, a miniature didactic instrument developed by the German composer Carl Orff in the 1920s as part of his early childhood music education system. This album might be the first to explore the classical compositional potential of this particular combo. The music is deeply rooted in New York City. All three performers—and most of the composers—are from “the world’s borough” of Queen…

Original 1991 LP edition! Stepping into the territory of Gavin Bryars is like coming home, so familiar are the morphemes with which he composes his musical language. One of the most significant recordings in the Bryars catalogue, this disc offers a fine condensation of his spirited and nostalgic sensibilities. After the Requiem dates from 1990 and follows his Cadman Requiem of the previous year. After completing the latter, which was written for the Hilliard Ensemble in memory of Bryars’s friend…

The ECM New Series debut of Evgueni Galperine is one of the most strikingly original and evocative albums of the year. A composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, living in Paris since 1990, Galperine is working with sound, texture and dynamics in new and powerfully expressive ways.  As he explains, the sound world of Theory of Becoming represents an “augmented reality of acoustic instruments, created from recordings made with real and virtual instruments. The numerous transformations the inst…

*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-fifth release »Saunders, Boucourechliev, Clarke, Riehm: Archipels« featuring world premiere recordings by Nicolas Hodges (piano). The album combines new works for piano by Rebecca Saunders, James Clarke and Rolf Riehm with three different interpretations of André Boucourechliev’s open form composition Archipel 5d from 1970. In addition to the recordings produced by the SWR, it also contains a 48-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with articles by Ni…

*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-fourth release »Gérard Grisey: Dérives« featuring recordings by the WDR Sinfonieorchester, Katrien Baerts (soprano), Kora Pavelić (mezzo-soprano), Sylvain Cambreling and Emilio Pomàrico (conductors). The album includes Gérard Grisey’s key works Dérives (1973-1974) and L’icône paradoxale (1992-1994) as well as the world premiere recording of Mégalithes (1969). In addition to the recordings produced by the WDR, it also contains a 64-page trilingual…

*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-third release »Iannis Xenakis: Eonta« featuring recordings by Ensemble Schwerpunkt, Lorenzo Soulès (piano), Edicson Ruiz (double bass), Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) und Peter Rundel (conductor). The album includes Iannis Xenakis’s music for brass from four decades, from Eonta (1963-1964) to Linaia-Agon (1972), Khal Perr (1983) and Mnamas Xapin Witoldowi Lutosławskiemu (1994), amongst others. In addition to the recordings produced by the WDR, it al…

*2024 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-second release »Brigitta Muntendorf: Trilogie« featuring world premiere recordings by the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo. The album includes both the Trilogie für zwei Flügel, produced by the WDR, and the respective films of Theater des Nachhalls, a concert installation for multichannel video and audio. In addition to the recordings and the films, the set also contains a 52-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with articles by Dirk Wieschollek and an interv…

bastille musique presents its twenty-seventh release »Hugues Dufourt: Surgir« featuring world premiere recordings by ensemble recherche, WDR Sinfonieorchester, Ensemble Nikel, Remix Ensemble, Yaron Deutsch (electric guitar) and Nicolas Hodges (piano). Produced by the WDR, the recordings comprise Dufourt’s complete Tiepolo cycle (2004-2016), selected works for orchestra and piano (1980-2012) as well as all compositions for and with electric guitar (1986-2022). Additionally, the box set includes a…