Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stage 4
2019 Small Repress. Fourth in a series of six albums from The Caretaker cataloguing the effects of early-onset dementia. Featuring four extended, smudged and hallucinatory side-long pieces - the darkest and most immersive music from The Caretaker to date.The Caretaker slips into the first “post awareness” stage of Everywhere At The End of Time. The ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror; the beginning of a process where all memories begin to become more fluid thro…
Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stage 3
2019 Small Repress. The third of a six album cycle cataloguing The Caretaker's fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia, presenting some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists fade away. In this crepuscular, autumnal phase, recollections phosphoresce, and wilt in advancing stages of entropic decay, steadily approaching a winter of no return. Continuing to mirror the progression of dementia, using nostalgia for ballroom as an alleg…
Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stage 2
2019 Small Repress. The second of six LPs issued under the title Everywhere At The End of Time, cataloguing The Caretaker’s fictional first person account of life with early onset dementia. This second stage takes a more wistful tack as our protagonist gradually realises that all is not well and begins to rummage deeper into the recesses of his mind, masking emotions of grief, loss, fear and uncertainty. As The Caretaker’s short term memory functions begin to more rapidly erode, the loop-based …
Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stage 1
2019 small repress. Everywhere At The End of Time is the first in a series of six albums by The Caretaker, aka James Leyland Kirby, slowly cataloguing the stages of early onset dementia. Each album will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration, progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness. Viewing dementia as a series of stages can be a useful way to understand the illness, but it is important to realize that this only prov…
Fabric for String Noise
Michael Byron's Fabric for String Noise, Parts 1 and 2 (2018), composed for New York’s notable violin duo String Noise, is wildly virtuosic music that is unlike just about anything else ever written for two violins. This two-movement work, a tremendous (and relentless) river of complex lines, may be said to resemble a sort of universal folk music of madly driven ecstasy, a sonic canvas wherein intense continuous activity shares space with an overarching sense of motionlessness.The composer chara…
Celesta
Michael Jon Fink's Celesta is a suite of a dozen quietly transcendent, gem-like celesta solos—a slowly unfolding ribbon of short pensive pieces composed over the past year and performed by the composer. The individual pieces, ranging in length from under two minutes to just over six minutes, are notable for the beautifully simple ways in which they reveal themselves through repetition and elegantly fashioned variation. The composer notes that these works “project a lyrical world of quiet intensi…
Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1)
Peter Garland's Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1) is a quiet, sparse, introspective six-movement work for three large gongs and a large tam-tam. Performed by celebrated new-music percussionist William Winant, it unfolds with a muted sensuality and a glacial inevitability—as if bent on suspending time. Each of the movements (or individual “pieces,” as the composer sometimes refers to them) has a distinct character, developing in its own fashion—utilizing such traditional means…
Everything That Rises
John Luther Adams's Everything That Rises, commissioned by SFJAZZ and the JACK Quartet, is an ever-in-motion virtuosic just-intonation work built of a series of 16 ascending musical “clouds.” Its pitches are derived from the harmonics of the piece’s subsonic fundamental tone (C0).The composer writes: “Everything That Rises, my fourth string quartet, grew out of Sila: The Breath of the World—a concert-length choral/orchestral work I composed on a rising series of 16 harmonic clouds. This music tr…
River of 1,000 Streams
Daniel Lentz's River of 1,000 Streams is a complex, slowly growing, densely textural piece for solo piano and up to 11 layers of “cascading echoes” (which are created in a live performance via a computer running a MAX patch). Each of the piece’s hundreds of “echoes” is a short moment (generally one to a few bars in length) of the piano solo that may reappear anywhere from a half-second to 25 minutes after the pianist first plays it. Floating sparsely amid the piece’s rich primary texture of trem…
Passage
**Restocked, reduce price** A true lost rarity of American ambient/cosmic music: Chris Spheeris and Paul Voudouris' 1982 album Passage. Living and recording in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chris and Paul composed and released several albums of folk-rock and album-oriented synthpop before their attentions turned towards sound healing music in the early 1980s. The duo was approached by a company doing Biofeedback therapy and asked to create an aural component for patients looking to regain control of ner…
Deconstruction
Finally, Hospital Productions unveil the long awaited vinyl debut from the elusive Salford Electronics, backed with killer remixes by Ancient Methods and Vatican Shadow. Tipped if you're into Burial, Regis, Silent Servant...!Plucked from right under our noses, Salford Electronics appears to be a handle for David Padbury, whose credits for industrial units such as Death Pact International and The Grey Wolves stretch back to the ‘80s. Under the SE mantle however, Padbury pursues a stealthy, menaci…
Agora
Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remix and Bécs. Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story. I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even ha…
Dj-Kicks
The 68th edition of the DJ-Kicks mix series is another landmark one,
with experimental producer Laurel Halo taking the reins. The American’s
adventurous 29 track trip features seven exclusives, including two of
her own plus those from Rrose, Machinewoman, FIT Siegel, Nick León and
Ikonika.
An electronic outlier, Halo hails from Ann Arbor, Michigan, but has been
based in Berlin for a number of years. Landing on labels like Hyperdub,
Honest Jon’s and Latency, Halo has released a body of wor…
freeHorn
The form of both freeHorn and ii-v-i consists of a continuous modulation between three different harmonic series. freeHorn weaves together the live interaction of acoustic instruments and computer software written by Larry Polansky and Phil Burk. ii-v-i, a reverberant cloud of moving intonation, gradually drifts from one natural harmonic series to another. Only open strings, 2nd, 3rd and 4th harmonics, and notes stopped at the 7th and 12th frets are used, and the guitars are audibly re-tuned fro…
Windmill
Stephen Whittington writes:“…from a thatched hut draws upon a particular strand of Chinese culture: the Chinese scholar who withdraws, temporarily or permanently, from society. The thatched hut was the place where the great Tang dynasty poets Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Li Bai (Li Po) withdrew from the world. Their example was followed by many others, including the poet Bai Juyi (Po Chu-I), author of Record of the Thatched Hut on Mount Lu, and Xia Gui, the Song dynasty painter of Twelve Views from a Thatc…
Ecstatic Descent
Erik Griswold's Ecstatic Descent is a prepared-piano work that melds composed and improvisational elements to create an intensely animated, one-of-a-kind textural sound world. Performed here by the composer, at times it may call to mind an enormous out-of-control music box or mechanical toy. It also readily lends itself to comparisons to various ever-changing (yet ever the same) natural sound phenomena, and has been likened by composer Annea Lockwood to the bubbling frequencies of a river.The co…
Bhajan
Nicholas Chase's Bhajan, described by one critic as “a pas de deux between violin and electronics,” is in four joined/continuous sections. Influenced by many musics from around the globe, the work tantalizes and bewitches the ear with a breadth of sounds that ebb and flow as if guided by an elusive but inherent sense of logic. The composer performs its electronics/computer part while noted violinist Robin Lorentz (who has appeared on four previous Cold Blue CDs) propels the music compellingly, i…
Twilight Of The Dreamboats
Chas Smith's Twilight of the Dreamboats, one of his quintessential electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures (instruments with such names as Bertoia 718, Que Lastas, lockheed, Mantis, Sceptre, DADO) and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars (Clinesmith, Emmons, Guitarzilla, Cadillac bass), performed by the composer. “Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and market…
After the Wars
Peter Garland's After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is quintessentially Garlandesque. In some ways it marks a slight shift of focus from his more overtly melodic and rhythmically driven material of the past 30 years. Garland writes about the piece:“After the Wars was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as part of her A Sweeter Music project. The idea (I believe) was to focus on the idea of…
In the Village of Hope
Michael Byron's In the Village of Hope is a restless (and in some ways relentless) virtuosic harp solo performed by Tasha Smith Godínez, who commissioned the work. This ever-changing, ever-churning, ever-developing music is unlike anything else in the solo harp repertoire, though not unlike some of Byron’s other recent work, such as his Book of Horizons for pianist Joseph Kubera.Byron writes about the music:“In the Village of Hope,” a purely sentimental title, was composed at the invitation of h…