The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors
A fascinating immersion in the heart of a funeral ceremony live recorded in Bali, where gongs, cymbals, and drums give rhythm to the bewitching atmosphere of this mortuary procession.The international audience’s interest into Balinese music and its gamelan orchestras dates back to the edition of large ethnographic series in the 1950s, 60s and 70s which largely encouraged the discovery of this music beyond Indonesia’s borders. Taking advantage of a more advanced technology compared to the vinyl g…
Chimerization (English)
English edition-Editions Mego is happy to announce the release of Chimerization, three vinyl editions of a text-sound piece Florian Hecker produced on the occasion of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. For Chimerization, Hecker invited the Iranian writer and philosopher Reza Negarestani to contribute an experimental libretto, "The Snake, the Goat and the Ladder (A board game for playing chimera)," a script that has been recited by a group of speakers and recorded by Hecker in anechoic and sound-…
Panopticon Specularities
A native of Istanbul, Turgut Erçetin (1983) studied composition and completed his doctorate studies at Stanford University. In 2016, Erçetin was awarded with DAAD Artists-In-Berlin program for a year-long residency in Berlin, and since then he has been based in Berlin. Erçetin's works engage with issues of sound, not as colors but as sonic entities that interface with time and space. Most of his works, therefore, are involved with acoustics and psychoacoustics as well as computer aided compositi…
Fremde Zeit Addendum 5 · Solo V Für Klavier
Jakob Ullman's 5th solo work for piano is atypical for a piano performance, using electronic playback and requiring three assistants sustaining a soundscape to realize a concept of "gravity".
Beissel
A collaboration between Austrian composer Klaus Lang and the ensemble Golden Fur (James Rushford, Judith Hamann & Samuel Dunscombe). Together they developed a piece in the abbey at Sankt Lambrecht in Austria, using music by the eighteenth century religious composer Johann Beissel, who developed a compositional system which he claimed to have received from angels, and which has been described as a very early precursor of serialism. The result is an extraordinary piece of music: fragility blown th…
Nun, Es Wird Nicht Weit Mehr Gehn
A really beautiful new release from Skogen, taking a song from Winterreise as its starting point, but transformed in Magnus Granberg’s usual magical way into a shifting, shimmering ocean of sounds.
Fallen Trees
Cascades of notes, canyons and rivers of sound: there’s something about his music that channels the natural world at its most awe-inspiring. In ‘Fallen Trees’ the connection with the environment continues, taking its cue from a long rail journey Lubomyr Melnyk made through Europe. Glancing out of the window as the train passed through a dark forest, he was struck by the sight of trees that had recently been felled. “They were glorious,”he says. “Even though they’d been killed, they weren’t dead.…
Linien II
The title gives an indication as to what this cycle is about: “Lines” as a catch-all phrase for melodic relationships: differently formed – from a unison melody for two instruments to counterpoints of independent voices; composed in different ways – from “calculated” proportioning to spontaneous writing; expressive in different ways – from lament to competition. If nothing else, these pieces are also a journey through all registers of the clarinet family, from Eb- and Bb clarinet through basset …
Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music
Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others, assault us with his obsessions. Eastman tested …
Viola Torros
4 compositions from violist/composers Catherine Lamb & Johnny Chang, the 1st focusing on the mysterious compositions of Vedic-era composer Viola Torros, exploring monady, melody and harmony; the second, one composition each from Chang performed with the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, and from Lamb using the secondary rainbow synthesizer she developed with Bryan Eubanks..The summer I arrived in Berlin, I began meeting with Johnny around music-related things and he started mentioning a composer he w…
Ricochet Lady
The recently composed "Ricochet Lady" (2016) is the only work for solo acoustic glockenspiel by the American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Following in the manner of his pieces "I Am Sitting In A Room" and "Vespers", "Ricochet Lady" embodies Lucier's approach toward sound's individual function and mobility within space. This CD defines this approach through four realizations recorded in four dissimilar spaces, ranging from the standard to extraordinary: a university rehearsal hall with wal…
Pianisme
Intimate, minimalist, classic piano album. Sylvain Chauveau on Pianisme: "Piano always had a central
role in my discography and this selection of short pieces showcases what
might be my musical signature: quietness, slow pace, long resonances, a
close as possible to silence. Music to be played at night."Pianisme
is a collection of unreleased and out-of-print piano works composed and
recorded since 2004. Most of them are part of soundtracks for feature
films by French director Sébastien Bet…
Mystic Beings
My first listen to these four extraordinary pieces by Chris Corsano, Bill Nace, and Steve Baczkowski was over a very rough ferry crossing from Cairnryan to Belfast. It's hard not to think of the ghosts of impossible crossings, victories, loses, harbors in such rough waters. Why would anyone venture out here? Finding something new or an overdue visit? Ending all of the wars? For me, for my first listen to Mystic Beings instantly cured all motion sickness. It was probably just the very welcome adr…
Teyas
Limited edition blue vinyl LP, 250 copies. Christoph de Babalon places his revered sound design skills at the service of dread-filled dramaturgy in ‘Teyas’, an abstract opera written in collaboration with Warsaw sisters Antonina Nowacka and Bogumila Piotrowska, a.k.a. Widt. Reframing De Babalon’s patented palette of diaphanous atmospheres and blood-dripping jungle breaks with a more theatrical purpose, ‘Teyas’ is a logical extension of his interests in macabre and gothic themes. Working in the s…
So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice)
So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour-long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her. So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) was originally commissioned by Documenta 14 and first performed as part of Documenta in Athens in 2017. Two key, and for…
Without
Clara de Asís composed the piece 'Without' for the duo of Erik Carlson (violin) and Greg Stuart (percussion) in 2018. In this 43-minute piece, de Asís gave a precise framework for the position and the duration of each sound section and each silence, as well as a rough outline for the texture and the volume of each sound, the use of tone or noise (or tone-noise), and the materials for the percussion, but a large part of the score was open for the two performers' freedom.In the realization of this…
120 Pieces of Sound
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots. 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 the musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming me…
About
Swiss composer and cellist Stefan Thut composed ‘about’ in 2017 for the sextet of Ryoko Akama (electronics), Stephen Chase (guitar), Eleanor Cully (piano), Patrick Farmer (metal percussion), lo wie (tingsha), and Thut (cello). The six musicians have diverse backgrounds in music, poetry, and literature, as well as comprising a multilingual group. Thut integrated both musical elements and non-musical elements in his piece. His score instructs three performers to make percussive, ringing, and elect…
(F)lute Songs
Four pieces for flute and voice composed between 1985-2018 by Mary Jane Leach, a pivotal part of NYC’s pioneering avant-garde community since the 1970s and an active member of the legendary DownTown Ensemble, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman’s legacy since his death in 1990. Mary Jane's vinyl debut 'Pipe Dreams' arrived last year via the Blume imprint a…
Kosmogonia
Cold Spring Records present a reissue of Krzysztof Penderecki's Kosmogonia, originally released in 1974. Unnerving, intense, bloodcurdling, sinister, dramatic -- the music of Kosmogonia features Penderecki's famous, unorthodox instrumental techniques, and some of the darkest music ever composed. Hailed by The Guardian as "Poland's greatest living composer," Krzysztof Penderecki is the maestro behind the unforgettable, disturbing music on 1980's The Shining (including "De Natura Sonoris II," feat…