Cold Blue
Back by popular demand (and available for the first time as a CD), this essential collection of West Coast new music—an anthology known simply as Cold Blue—is a classic. Originally issued on vinyl in 1984, shortly before the demise of the old Cold Blue label, the disc quickly became the company’s most popular release. When Cold Blue was started up again in 2000, the company received numerous letters encouraging it to re-release the anthology as a CD.Although bound together by a common concern wi…
Aluminum Overcast
Chas Smith's six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener’s sense of time—the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place—as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense.The first five sections/variations are built from shared/recurrent phrases—melodic phrases (for bowed and struck metal), rhythmic phrases derived from geometric and Fibonacci structures, and phrases of “harmonic noise” that vary in density. The sixth mov…
Maria Falling Away
This CD brings together six of Rick Cox’s elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Cox’s subtle, idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques, which sometimes employ preparations placed amid the strings (similar to those utilized in prepared piano works) and the use of such objects as sponges and brushes and glass lab slides to s…
Dancing On Water
All the music on this album, with the exception of Song(s) of the Sirens, was written specifically for remarkable clarinetist/bass clarinetist Marty Walker. As Is Thought/Aurora, a casually dramatic work for bass clarinet, harp, and vibraphone, is like a miniature concerto in its structure, contrasting solo bass clarinet phrases with tutti lines.Song(s) of the Sirens, a lush work for clarinet, piano, and woman’s voice, gradually and systematically builds in texture, harmonic richness, and melodi…
I Hear It In The Rain
Five Pieces for Piano (1997), Two Preludes for Piano (1996-97), and For Celesta (1985)—the latter for an instrument that is very seldom featured in a solo setting—display Michael Jon Fink’s command of crystalline forms that are Debussyian in beauty (and occasionally in gesture) yet hold a distinctly contemporary artistic distance from their musical materials. These fragile and primarily extremely quiet pieces are performed with great aplomb by Bryan Pezzone.Living to be Hunted by the Moon (1987)…
Nikkowolverine
Nikko Wolverine (1999) is a three-movement piece scored for various bowed and struck metal instruments in non-tempered tunings. These instruments, which were designed and built by the composer, emit tones that are rich in complex harmonics and often sound more electronic than acoustic. All three movements of this work share motivic materials, but each successive movement adds more harmonic complexity and textural density to the movement that preceded it.Tons Tons Macoutes (1999) is a texturally …
Last Things
Last Things, for bass clarinet, pedal steel guitar, piano, and electronic keyboards, was written for clarinetist Marty Walker in 1987, and has been subsequently performed (as a piece for bass clarinet and tape) by Walker at concerts across the U.S. Somewhat a rhapsodic call and response between bass clarinet and pedal steel guitar, it is constructed of seven connected sections (or songs) that over the length of the piece slowly build in intensity. As the piece progresses, each section expands in…
Organ Dirges 2016-2017
Small repress available. Unique, engrossing room recordings of Kaliff pipe organ dirges played by composer, sound technician, and multi-instrumentalist Kali Malone, released in early 2018 on a super limited tape run and now finally pressed up on vinyl for wider public consumption. Very little in 2018 is as elusive or magical as this record. In four pieces recorded at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, it's the characteristics of the room itself that add a crucial dimension to these pieces,…
I'd Rather Be Lucky Than Good
I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Good is a new recording collaboration of Sam Ashley and Werner Durand. Sam Ashley’s mystic parables imbued with benevolent humor are drawn from a lifelong pursuit of a present-day shamanism. Werner Durand’s wind work on invented and traditional instruments stems from the minimalist tradition, routed through his unique study of obscure world musics. The two artists first met in Berlin in 1984 while Sam was touring Atalanta with Robert Ashley’s opera company, with whom he …
J. Jasmine: My New Music (Songbook)
Original printing of the 1978 J. Jasmine Songbook, which has scores, lyrics and images for all the songs on the "J. Jasmine: My New Music" LP. Printed but never distributed because of the book distribution house going out of business, this is a must-have item for fans of Humber and Rosenboom
Puls-Plus-Puls
Jan Jelinek and legendary jazz percussionist Sven-Åke Johansson probe ideas about the “anthropology of drumming” with entrancing results for Luxembourg’s Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu label. A sterling addition to Jelinek’s catalogue of solo releases and experimental collaborations, ‘puls-plus-puls’ finds the German artist properly indulging a formative passion for jazz music alongside one of free-jazz music’s most respected percussionists. Of course, this being Jelinek, the results are craftily complex but un…
Grau-Grün-Welk-Satt
solo set recorded at SÅJ Studio in Berlin in 2017 that reconnects with Sven-Åke Johansson’s 1972 seminal first solo record Schlingerland originally released on Fmp, presenting just the man and his drum set, and it's a fascinating listen. "You can hit beats so that they betray an intention – through accentuation or emphasis. Or you can hit them so that they seem mechanical, devoid of intention, a pure pulse, as in much minimalist music. Both possibilities abound in different genres. But there is …
Hamdelaneh
CD edition. Another greeat release from Dark Companion Records. "Chance doesn’t exist. I met Markus Stockhausen after inviting him and his wife to “Musiche Nuove In Piacenza” festival in autumn 2018. Immediately I felt a strong empathy towards him. That doesn’t happen very often. I knew his work and had always admired it, especially the spontaneous compositions he performs and the way his unique talent blossoms in these situations.We talked at lunch and I dared propose to him to record an album …
The Cave
We were first made aware of this Brooklyn band by Gary Panter. When we asked Gary about some specific projectors for light shows, he said we'd be best off conferring with his colleague, Curtis Godino. And oh yeah, Curtis also helmed a dastardly psychedelic music unit called Worthless. Checking out some of Worthless's previous recordings for Beyond Is Beyond, Stupid Head, and Greenway, we were struck by the weirdness and seamlessness of their psych stretching; if ever there was music made for lig…
Known Quantity
Newly remastered reissue of Willie Lane's 2009 solo guitar LP, Known Quantity, originally released on his own Cord Art label. Over the last few years, this album has been requested at the store more often than just about any other, but it sold out not long after it was issued and has risen in price consistently since that time. Listening to Known Quantity, it's not hard to understand why it has such a strong rep. Lane came out the Hampshire College scene that aligned itself with the Apostasy Rec…
Knobby Knoll
Edition of 200. Lauri McNamara is one of the crazies who make the New England sub-underground such a richly interesting universe to inhabit. She worked off and on with the late, lamented Egg, Eggs, but her main focus has always been on solo performance, accompanying herself on ukelele. A few other people make their presence felt on her debut LP, Knobby Knoll, but let's not get bogged down in their details. 'Cause really, this is Lauri's show, no matter who else might be sitting in. Unlike the ma…
Silk
2019 repress, gold vinyl! "Silk is the fantastic third LP by Maxine Funke, a New Zealand musician whose first recordings were with the legendary $100 Band (Funke, Alastair Galbraith, and Mike Dooley!), whose music was drifting experimental dust of a very high order. Maxine's first two solo albums, Lace (2008) and Felt
(2012) (originally released as CDR on Galbraith's Next Best Way and a
lathe on Epic Sweep, respectively), were reissued by Time-Lag to great
acclaim in 2016, securing her place …
Femenine (Apartment House)
Apartment House give new life to Julius Eastman’s irrepressible ensemble piece from 1974. Unbounded energy and clarity of sound. Unmissable. Read the following interview with the Apartment House's director, cellist cellist Anton LukoszeviezeWhen did you first play Julius Eastman's music, and when had you become aware of it?I first performed Eastman's music in 2016, which was a revelation for me, as the extant scores are rather fragmentary and incomplete, some are even just transcriptions from ar…
Dethick
Another church, another country, and another unique collaboration. Angharad Davies combines with Japanese sound artist Rie Nakajima and the virtuoso cellist from Distractfold ensemble, Alice Purton, in a series of explorations in the small church in the Derbyshire village of Dethick. The trio improvised, then developed and refined ten short pieces across two days, producing music which is as good as improvisation gets.
Contortionist
Brecht Ameel’s (Razen) solo project with the aid of one acid drenched phantom quartet in which he mixes tapes and baroque lute into a sloow hallucinatory eerie whole. Ideal for night listening in the woods 70 copies.