Composition / All styles

*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* "His music makes the basic human need for a link between aesthetics, ethics and spirituality clear and perceivable – a need so often subordinated to politics and economics in our society." Thus the words with which Arvo Pärt was awarded the International Bridge Prize of the twin cities Görlitz and Zgorzelec in 2007. His new CD, ‘In Principio’, demonstrates the extent to which his more recent music manifests this very link. Twenty-five years ago ECM launched its New…

*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Premiere recordings of Arvo Pärt’s music belong on ECM New Series. This recording of the 4th Symphony – Pärt’s first symphonic work in more than 30 years – documents also the premiere concert performance at L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Before Pärt started work on the composition, his thoughts had been circling around texts related to guardian angels. Then he received the commission from Los Angeles, a city whose very name means ‘the angels’. His decision to mak…

*200 copies limited edition* 'No Longer Human' is dedicated to the life and work of Osamu Dazai and his novel No Longer Human First notebook:Antonio Tonietti: chitarra battente preparata, duduktavola armonica, synthClaudio Milano: voceMassimo Amato: piano Second notebook:Antonio Tonietti: basso preparato, basso, synthClaudio Milano: voce Third notebook:Antonio Tonietti: basso, synth, field recordingGiorgio Pinardi: voce Epilogue:Antonio Tonietti: Electric Koto, field recordingSilvia Pegah Scagli…

"Each composition arises from a clear idea that the listener can grasp. That is their beauty, I’d argue – there’s no need for, or possibility of, any process of beautification. They are conceptual art in the broadest sense, but vividly concrete in their sonorous properties. So they are a paradigm of musical art – for music is an art that is abstract in form, concrete in utterance." - Andy Hamilton

"Near Blue – A Taste of Melancholy is a soundtrack for being unstuck in time, if just for an hour. It is a glide through a rich past and present, with glimpses of a future worth reaching." - Bill Shoemaker Franz Koglmann - flugelhornGert Schubert - violinKurt Franz Schmid - clarinetSandro Miori - tenor & soprano saxophones & alto fluteRudolf Ruschel - tromboneRaoul Herget - tubaRobert Michael Weiss - piano

*2024 stock* Original CD and all materials from the original booklet. Music scores of all four compositions of the album. Previously unreleased facsimile of Arvo Pärt’s autographs of “Tabula rasa” and “Cantus”. Introductory essay by Paul Grifftiths. Exclusive photographs from the ECM archive. All texts in English and German. In 1984, ECM brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint. Now, on the occasion …

*2024 stock* Berlin Strings is a string quartet consisting of Lisa Marie Vogel, Johanna Wundling, Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann and Luisa Babarro Fernández. Since meeting in the National Youth Orchestra and founding Berlin Strings 13 years ago, they have developed into explorers of their own sound. A sound that has always been imbued with the discipline of classical music, pure craftsmanship, the sublime rules of composition that make communication wordless. But also experimentation, flirting with dis…

Tractus emphasizes Arvo Pärt compositions that blend the timbres of choir and string orchestra. New versions predominate, with focused performances from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction that invite alert and concentrated listening. From the opening composition Littlemore Tractus, which takes as its starting point consoling reflections from a sermon by John Henry Newman, the idea of change, transfiguration and renewal resona…

*2024 stock* Ovidono is an auditory art project by Markus Popp (aka Oval) and Vlatka Alec, a fascinating scenario for a new kind of musical storytelling. Sensual, dazzling and multi-layered, the project - originally codenamed "ASMR 2.0" - combines a new interpretation of the epic, timeless poetry of Ovid and Ono No Komachi (performed in Japanese by Eriko Toyoda aka SO) with Oval's electro-acoustic compositions, post-digital soundscapes and ambitious vocal processing. The complex, whispered vocal…

*2024 stock* When two worlds collide, you clean up afterwards. That's how the first impression of Dach, the joint work by the Frankfurt sound collective Ensemble Modern and Paul Frick, known from Brandt Brauer Frick, feels. Few people know that Paul studied classical composition and that it is therefore not particularly surprising that, in addition to his work with BBF and Tangerine Dream, where he has been dribbling synthesiser capers with the electronic music legend from Spandau for some time …

Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to which it al…

We commemorate the late Phill Niblock with this release made in close collaboration with the composer just before his passing in January 2024. His life and work have had a profound influence on many contemporary composers, performers and artists, so it is a great honour to be able to present here, together with Echonance Festival, recordings of some of his very last compositions. The two works on this album, “Biliana” (2023) and “Exploratory, Rhine Version, Looking for Daniel” (2019) represent t…

Absolutely brilliant debut by the young pianist Andrea Riccio. "Every record is a text and every text is fabric, and this is a fabric of precious threads. A pianism that has gold in its fingertips, from the timbral calligraphy of the pages of Annette Dieudonne, restored to the present, to the dark abysses of a Kreisleriana that reaches the uncanny through beauty, passing through the intimism of Brian Eno, between Brahmsian suggestions, minimal and echoes of Sehnsucht and Lied. Made unique by the…

Six first recordings for solo percussion by Luis Tabuenca, each named after a work by Paul Klee, played acoustically with no electronics beyond amplification, with liner notes by Steven Schick.

Jason Eckardt’s composition Passage is a profound exploration of the unsettling history surrounding the CIA’s interest in sensory deprivation and its impact on human psychology. Divided into three movements – Subject, Ascension, and Testify – Eckardt delves into the dark legacy of interrogation techniques, shedding light on the use of sound and light as weapons in various global conflicts. In a separate work, pulse-echo, Eckardt transforms the piano into a resonant body, drawing inspiration from…

CD Edition. 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 arrived where he did a few short years down the road, it’s…

Other Minds is proud to present The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, a new limited-edition 12” 45 RPM vinyl disc of music by Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, performed by Wolff and Wendy Eisenberg. Side A features two performances of Morton Feldman’s The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, written for Wolff (who professes to be “not really a guitar player”) in 1966 as an experiment on the instrument. On his way to perform The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Gui…

Colliding Bubbles (surface tension and release) is a composition for string quartet and harmonica quartet, meaning that Quatuor Bozzini is playing string instruments while playing harmonicas. "The title refers to different kinds of bubbly matter which are set to collide within the composition, leading to different ruptures and possible release of surface tension. The collision of bubbles unfolds partly in relation to sound, where small fluctuations appear in the encounters between harmonicas and…

Huge Tip! Fame di Vento is Manuel Zurria's latest work. A triple CD to evoke the many suggestions and projects that have taken place in recent years, full of collaborations, of the Sicilian flautist. Fame Di Vento is also an idealized homage to Alighiero Boetti, a nomad by culture and vocation. In his footsteps, Manuel draws on the most diverse cultures, from the Lithuanian mystics to India and Sicily, from just-intonation to European-style minimalism. As he has already done in the past, Zurria …

Temporary Super Offer! "This CD, the third album of my piano works played by Satoko Inoue, presents all the pieces written for piano between 2015 and 2020, along with an introductory miniature piece." – Jo Kondo

Tricatel is proud to present, in a limited edition of 777 hand-numbered copies, the superb double vinyl/book dedicated to 7×7, inspired by Bertrand Burgalat.

Music performed and shaped collectively by Les Certitudes: Juliette Adam (clarinet), Félicie Bazelaire (cello) and Léo Dupleix (harpsichord). Score composed by Léo Dupleix. The ensemble Les Certitudes was created in 2021 as a means for developing acoustic music focusing on justly tuned tones and harmonies, taking as a starting point the physicality of the instruments –resonating wood and metal– in a long musical form.

*300 copies limited edition* "Keith was a dear friend firstly. He was a generous, wonderful person and, of couse, a genius, a true artist. We all owe so much to him for we started our label with his critically acclaimed piano solo “Mujician IV - Live in Piacenza”, way back in 2015. We welcome this album as a real blessing for the soul. So long dear Keith: your music shall live forever." - Max Marchini Music for Labyrinths is an open live project for a soundtracks of labyrinths around the world a…

British composer Frank Denyer (born London, 1943) presents an extraordinary collection of five works spanning nearly fifty years of creative activity, performed by the Octandre Ensemble conducted by Jon Hargreaves. This release, recorded at the Menuhin School in Surrey in September 2022, serves as a landmark document of one of the most original voices in contemporary music. The album includes Broken Music (1990) featuring a bewildering array of instruments including flute, piccolo, crow call, me…

Sofa is proud to mark its 100th release with the stunningly beautiful double album Hereafter, a new major work from guitarist/composer Kim Myhr, written for the 15-piece Stavanger-based ensemble Kitchen Orchestra. “Hereafter can be seen as a meditation on mortality and transience”, Myhr explains. “It was written at a time where the prime minister of Norway told the country’s population that ‘you have to be prepared to lose someone dear to you’. It was like taken out of Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice”. T…

*2024 stock* In this 1982 Folkways release, Jon Appleton plays four compositions written for the Synclavier, a digital synthesizer he helped to develop in the late 1970s. “The Sweet Dreams of Miss Pamela Beach” was recorded in a studio using a 24-track recorder to “layer” portions of the music. The remaining three pieces were performed live with “some small sections and accompaniments contained in the digital memory of the instrument at the time of performance.” Liner notes contain brief descrip…

*2024 stock* Elliott Schwartz plays four of his compositions for solo piano and pre-recorded tape, a project that remains "a continuing attempt to enhance, expand, obscure, develop or otherwise modify the piano sonority and the act of piano performance, through electronics." In his improvisatory piece "Grand Concerto" he uses fragments from the Grieg, Tchaikovsky No. 1 and Liszt No. 1 piano concertos; it is as epic in scope as the classical favorites.

*2024 stock* A 1983 Folkways release, Computer Music from the Outside In showcases three composers narrating the ideas and processes behind their computer music compositions, as well as the compositions themselves. The first two pieces are by Barton McLean: “Etunytude” is an etude-like piece made of gradually changing harmonic sounds, and “The Last Ten Minutes” is meant to be an abstract representation of the devastation of “the last nuclear holocaust.” “The Whistling Wind,” by Karl Korte, is ba…

*2024 stock* Computer Music serves as the official musical documentation of the November 1981 International Computer Music Conference, held at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. The album features five compositions with music that ranges from electronic sounds to female vocals, flute and horns, stringed instruments, and percussion. The composers include Larry Austin, whose early works were recorded with the help of Leonard Bernstein; Bruce Pennycook, who now teaches music at the Butl…

*2024 stock* Contrabass (double bass) solo virtuoso Bertram Turetzky performs seven solos on the contrabass in this 1981 release. Using bow, plucking strings, tapping on the instrument’s wood body, and employing a little audio technology, Turetzky demonstrates the full range of musical sounds that can be produced on the contrabass. His repertoire on this recording includes a piece dedicated to him (“The Last Contrabass in Las Vegas”), two of his own compositions, and the Lennon-McCartney ballad …

"a glorious, shifting collage of sound" -BBC Music Magazine

In May 2022, at the age of 88, Christian Wolff performed once again at AngelicA, nine years after the monographic concerts the festival had dedicated to him in 2013 (documented on the cd album Angelica Music, IDA 030). Among the greatest and most singular living composers (in 1950, at a very young age, he was already a member of the legendary New York School along with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and John Cage), for the opening of the thirty-second edition of the festival he presented a world-ex…

Born in 1933, with a career spanning over 65 years, the American composer Philip Corner has explored the most diverse artistic and musical expressions: as a pianist and trombonist, he performed historic and contemporary authors such as Ives, Cage, Cacioppo, Hellerman (in 1963 he also took part in the first integral performance of Vexations by Satie curated by Cage in New York). As a composer and performer, he was a member of Fluxus (defining with his Piano Activities the most iconic performance …

Himorogi is the tenth album by Ironomi. Divining Japanese mythology and its relationship with nature, the new album is an aural pastorale that fosters deeper territory in the realm of spiritual searching through dreamy, drifting piano, 17-string koto (jūshichi-gensō) and new form electronic processing. ironomi’s desire to commune with mother Earth and its season’s colors has always served as a continual inspiration for their music. In himorogi, the duo delves into a more spiritual focus in their…

Tip! For José Manuel López López it is essential to approach the works on this album with an open mind and to explore other forms of instrumental expressivity and sonic emotionality. He draws significant conclusions from these seemingly fragile figures, gestures and minimal elements, which evolve and multiply to achieve a great expressive and formal perspective. All this affirms a hallmark that reveals a great continuity and coherence among the works included on this album.

*Italian language edition* "I guess as contemporary music continues to change in the way I am changing it, what is to be done is to completely liberate sounds more and more from abstract ideas about them and let them with increasing exactitude be themselves physically, and that's it." - John Cage Considered the creator of experimentalism in the 1950s, John Cage was a major inspiration to conceptual artists in the 1960s, and his music was instrumental in the emergence of minimalism in the 1970s a…

*Limited edition numbered in metal box* Georg Graewe piano solo ultimate collection. cd 1 recorded in Köln, Loft 2012 (1) and 2014 and 2017 (2-11)cd 2 recorded in Köln, Loft 2018 and 2019 (12-22)cd 3 recorded in Nickelsdorf, Konfrontationen 2016 (23-27);and in Vienna, RKH 2018 (28-35)

“Not all artists manifest social and political ideals. This is a contradictory fact in itself, since they are committed to improving society,” says Salvatore Sciarrino in his album Paesaggi con macerie, which presents four remarkable recordings for ensemble or voice and ensemble, written between 1986 and 2022 and performed by mezzo soprano Monica Bacelli and Icarus vs Muzak conducted by Marco Angius.

Julia Purgina’s works tell musical stories. Abstract stories, which usually initiate her working process. It is her goal “to write works that are clearly located in the present through their musical language and by speaking of the present, but which both touch people in their innermost being and force them to reflect. In a way that would be ultimately timeless,” said the composer in an interview for the Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung. Through the musical description of mysterious characters, clouds …

“In art, you can have a look at the world as the world wouldn’t see itself. I find that incredibly exciting,” says Charlotte Seither, presenting ten outstanding works for piano written between 1989 and 2022 – over a period of 33 years. All of these works on make use of playing techniques in which the grand piano is not structurally altered. The sounds are therefore only created in the act of playing and make the individual work a risky event. Some pieces were created in closer succession to each…