'Slow Roads' is an album of eight pieces written by Hague-based Serbian composer Ivan Vukosavljević between 2019 and 2022, for solo 1/4 comma meantone organ. All eight pieces were recorded in 2022 on five different historic organs, dating from the early 16th to mid-17th centuries, located in medieval churches scattered throughout the countryside of the northern Netherlands. Each piece was adapted for a specific organ, as they vary considerably in their disposition. All eight pieces are written i…
'Les signes passagers' is an album of seven pieces for solo fortepiano written by Jürg Frey in 2021, commissioned by the Amsterdam-based pianist Keiko Shichijo. It was premiered by Shichijo on February 5, 2022 at the Concertgebouw Brugge during the Slow Festival. In the same year, Shichijo performed the piece again at the November Music 2022 and later recorded it for this album in April 2023 at the Concertgebouw Brugge in the presence of the composer.
“As a listener, I have experienced with musi…
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming melodies.Frey wrote two compositions for two pianos in 2017-2019: Entre les deux l'instant (2017/20…
Swiss composer Jürg Frey and Dutch pianist/composer Reinier van Houdt are reunited on this triple CD, 'lieues d'ombres', after their successful collaboration on 'l'air, l'instant - deux pianos' (elsewhere 014), during which the two built a close rapport.
'lieues d'ombres' contains seven of Frey’s solo piano works, written from 1984 – 2018, including one previously unreleased work, ‘Three Piano Pieces’. All seven pieces were recorded by Micha de Kanter at The Muziekcentrum van de Omroep (MCO) in …
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…
Ensemble 0 presents L'Étrange Femme des Neiges, a fresh addition to their exploratory discography and the official soundtrack to a new film featuring Blanche Gardin and Philippe Katerine. This release demonstrates Ensemble 0's knack for understated textures and melodic invention, crafting a sonic atmosphere that seamlessly blends cinematic intimacy with expressive minimalism.
Chamber works by Irish composer Gerald Barry for solo piano, violin and piano, piano trio and piano quartet, played by the Fidelio Trio with Rose Redgrave and the composer. All but In the Asylum are first recordings.
Bruce Brubaker is one of the most exciting pianists in the contemporary American classical scene, according to Pitchfork. He is back with a follow-up to his 11th album Glass Piano an audacious reprise of compositions by his contemporary Philip Glass. Brubaker’s new album, Eno Piano, is a stunning reinterpretation of selected tracks from Brian Eno’s ambient masterpiece, Music for Airports, as well as three original tracks. Brubaker carefully dissects, rearranges and reconstructs the iconic compos…
Belt of Orion by Stockholm-based Isak Edberg is the composer’s second solo release on XKatedral, and his first to focus solely on instrumental music in the form of two pieces of extended duration for solo piano.
Swiss composer Jürg Frey's six hour long electronic tape piece L'àme Est Sans Retenue I was recorded and assembled in 1997/98 and is now being released for the first time. It is the longest piece Frey has ever composed in his over 40 year career.In this piece, Frey utilized the sounds of field recordings he made in Berlin in 1997 as the source materials, alternately inserted between long stretches of silence. Frey was particularly focusing around that time on how the dynamic relation between sou…
Romanian composer, conductor, and musicologist Iancu Dumitrescu is often described as one of the leading figures of spectral music, yet he has produced a body of powerful works resonating with explosive sound and friction that places him very much in his own universe. Dumitrescu studied under his compatriot, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who rarely left behind concert recordings. From him Dumitrescu absorbed phenomenology and conducting techniques, incorporating them into his own composition…
Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. That concern led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those that he had used before. Music for 88 is the result of these researches. It contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.
The works of Mary Jane Leach explore the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. Space is also an important concern: how sound changes when it is moved around a room. Celestial Fires features the New York Treble Singers, (Virginia Davidson, conductor) performing four 8-part pieces for a capella women's voices; Shannon Peet performing Feu de Joie for 7 bassoons; and Barbara Held and Ms. Leach performin…
Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's Baobab and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the…
Manara is a trio that emerged from a love of poetry, a shared interest in the musical traditions of the Middle East and poetry as political resistance. The musicians had worked together before separately – Alya and Khabat performed together in Suleimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan as part of the Space 21 Festival, and Alya and Pat have improvised together in several ensembles over the past decade.
Alya had arrived at a time where she was desperate to explore the performance of more poetry in her mother …
2024 Stock. Wild Up’s Anthology engages with the complex history of Julius Eastman’s legacy and ideas, including the titles of his work. Each person involved in making this Anthology negotiates their position and relationship to the n-word; thus, the word appears in several permutations throughout. We chose to use Eastman’s given titles in the track listing to honor the composer’s intentions. With this seven-volume project, Wild Up aims to be part of the ongoing social, political, and artistic d…
*2025 stock* A landmark new recording brings together two of Frederic Rzewski’s most powerful and socially engaged works, interpreted with striking intensity by pianist Takuya Otaki. At the heart of the release is The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), a monumental set of 36 variations on the Chilean resistance song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!”, composed as an ode to solidarity and resilience in times of political struggle. Widely considered one of the pinnacles of late 20th…
Vanessa Wagner breathes new life into Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes, revealing the powerful lyricism and subtle turbulence of Glass’s minimalist language. Her interpretation brings emotional intensity and poetic nuance across all 20 etudes, reflecting over a decade spent exploring the repertoire and making for an immersive listening experience.
Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016's On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology. Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as laye…
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…
"In September 2019 I was asked by cellist Leo Svensson Sander and harpist Stina Hellberg Agback if I would be interested participating in a project together with them, violinist Eva Lindal and a couple of visual artists, a poet and a scenographer, which would deal with questions concerning how to make art in times of crisis, something I gladly and curiously accepted. The project would take Messiaen's ’Quatuor pour la fin de temps’ and its genesis, creation and historical context as a point of de…
Hot on the heels of his wonderful piece on the Early to Late CD released earlier this year, a new hour-long work for an ensemble of six musicians by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg. The piece borrows material from a song by Schubert, but transforms it into Granberg's typically taut and focused soundworld: "The expressiveness of the song has been subdued or silenced, and has become something which takes place somewhere beneath the surface of the music.
Your work with the larger group Skogen is now relatively well-known, and indeed successful. Why the change of group formation for this release? And in particular why the absence of electronics, which was such a feature of your two Another Timbre discs with Skogen?Well, partly because of some quite trivial, practical and arbitrary reasons, actually. Firstly, I had some sort of desire to be part of an ensemble performing my music playing the clarinet instead of the piano, as I normally have done t…
Three beautiful works for Jurg Frey's clarinet by the Amsterdam-based Wandelweiser composer Dante Boon, with the composer accompanying Jurg on piano on two of the pieces. Amsterdam-based composer and pianist Dante Boon (1973) has been composing since he was 11 years old, playing new music since he was thirteen. He joined a well-known Dutch rock band when he was 24. After its break-up, he worked extensively over the years with composers such as Tom Johnson, Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger and Sam…
This CD offers the first recording of Frank Denyer's extraordinary hour-long piece for large ensemble The Fish That Became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed), composed between 1991 and 1996. The ensemble includes a huge number of home-made percussion instruments made from discarded materials, as well as obscure instruments such as eunuch flutes, ocarinas and crumhorns. The album comes with a booklet with notes by Frank Denyer and an essay by Michael Turnbull.Musicians include:Octandre Ensemble …
Sarah Saviet [violin] and Joseph Houston [piano] formed their duo in 2019 through a mutual devotion to an intimate, powerful, and transcendental sound language created by the violin and piano. In this album, the Saviet/Houston Duo trace a path through a shifting landscape of melodic contour, with duos by Michael Finnissy, Rebecca Saunders/Enno Poppe, Lawrence Dunn, Iannis Xenakis, and their own collaborative composition. Each work reflects in different ways the intricate contradictions and the p…
Girolamo De Simone (Naples, 1964)—composer, pianist, music historian, proponent of "new music," and publisher of "new discourses" on music (through the magazine *KonSequenz*, established in 1994)—has recently released the CD *Liturgie*. The live recording of the six tracks featured on the CD took place in April 2024 during a piano performance at the Fondazione Morra in Naples, held in conjunction with an exhibition dedicated to the French intermedial poet Henri Chopin (Paris, June 18, 1922 – Lon…
Two works by the Romanian composer Octavian Nemescu, Passages (1981) and À travers le temps (1983), written during the communist years: spectral music built on harmonics and on the perception of time.
"Composer-performer & visual artist Charlotte Hug: Shaman of contemporary music. Reflections on her solo-album «In Resonance with Elsewhere». This fourth solo album by Charlotte Hug presents the distilled version of a composition commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale in 2022. On that occasion, Hug performed in a huge former machine hall and created various acoustic-imaginary spaces with Son-Icons (expansive Visual-Music on semi-transparent paper, usually painted on both sides with both hands and lon…
Tip! "A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, …
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "This is pure intuitive music, full of improvisation and spontaneity. here we have amazing musicians that interact between them in an amazing way creating pasages that despite using heavily experimentation and improvisation are really coherent and also they explore without falling into chaotic musical pieces. I am really amazed by this musicians that are constantly exploring new sounds with their instruments yet retaining a "group spirit" that allows them to …
**300 copies** Portland composer and pianist Derek Hunter Wilson returns with his second album, entitled Steel, Wood, & Air. Ten lush, expressive pieces featuring piano, bass clarinet, and strings, this collection reflects the efforts of a young musician challenging himself and discovering his voice in the process. Inspired equally by the contemporary neoclassical scene and early recordings on the ECM label, Steel, Wood, & Air stands, timeless and buoyant, on its own.After releasing his debut al…
Limbo, by Viktoriia Vitrenko, is a vocal journey exploring liminality through music, inspired by Maria Kalesnikava and composed amid pandemic and war. It blends diverse vocal styles, bridging personal and universal experiences of waiting and uncertainty.
300 numbered and signed copies. 180 gr. Clear Vinyl. 'The Snow Is Dancing' is the new album by musician Arturo Stàlteri. A true homage to snow, its lightness and purity. Inspired by Claude Debussy's composition of the same name, the Roman pianist within this work guides listeners on a diaphanous and enchanted sound journey, in which the piano becomes a diary capturing subtle emotions and moments of wonder: “I have always loved snow. An impalpable white blanket that seems to erase every imperfect…
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and…
Close to five years since the future-fwd dancefloor classic Workaround, Seven Reorganisations sees Beatrice Dillon return to the long-player format a long way removed from the club she helped reimagine. In some ways, the immediacy of that previous record positions it as somewhat of an outlier in Dillon's impressive catalogue of modern experimentation, and this latest collection, derived from a commission made by Mark Fell, represents a continuation of what now looks like a long established inter…
Adding to their already singular catalog of releases, Three:Four Records returns with Carnaval 2, a stunning new work by the composer Alessandro Bosetti, performed by pianist Reinier van Houdt. A vividly conceptual and post-modern hybrid, reinterpreting Robert Schumann's Carnaval as a radically reconsidered series of piano and electro-acoustic interludes - forcing the sensibilities and aesthetics of 19th Century chamber music to coexist with those of avant-garde - it's easily one of the singular…
*300 copies limited release* With Empyrean Traces, De La Catessen Records focuses on another aspect of Adelaide composer David Kotlowy’s career – his works for trio. It follows the 2021 release of Final Fragments: Piano Music of David Kotlowy, where Kotlowy’s solo piano compositions were performed by composer and scholar Stephen Whittington. The three compositions on Empyrean Traces are brought to life by the Benaud Trio, whose ability to carry the gentle poetics of such work allows for bravura …