★Cold Blue Music
An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Chas Smith's An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Mur…
Awakening At The Inn Of The Birds
Continents of City and Love and Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and double bass. They both feature expanding piano lines that intersect and compliment individually expanding…
Four Voice Canons
Over the past 25 years, Larry Polansky has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run a sonic gamut from wildly boisterous (#6) to serenely introverted (#17, Guitar Canon). Thi…
The Light That Fills The World
These three works exist amid an undeniable esthetic spirit of the times—the embracing of pre-compositional principles and structural processes in the service of a highly personal artistic statement. However, John Luther Adams’s recent work tends to t…
Adams / Cox / Fink / Fox
This album presents four noted West Coast composers—three from Southern California and one from Fairbanks, Alaska—writing haunting, generally quiet, sometimes lyric, occasionally pensive music for clarinet and bass clarinet accompanied by either stri…
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 Bl…
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 …
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 Co…
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 li…
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 (…
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 …
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. S…
Point Conception
Point Conception is Daniel Lentz’s wild nine-piano tribute to the octave. It amasses and bubbles over with incessant streams of octaves (harmonic and melodic) that run the length of the keyboard. Through a “cascading echo system,” long-time Lentz Ens…