★New Albion
The Book Of Abbeyozzud
If you think of Terry Riley as the composer who restored simple pleasures to contemporary music with works like In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air, you might be perplexed by the angularity and chromaticism of these recent pieces. It’s hard to follow where he’s going when he wanders so freely over the harmonic and stylistic map. Composed over the last six years, each of these 28 pieces has a title that starts with a different letter of the Spanish alphabet, and Riley evokes Spanish guitar music wit…
Altered Realities
Erdem Helvagioglu first broke through to the international audience with his Walk Through the Bazaar...a collection of sounds from the bazaar in Istanbul that he worked to create an emotional tour. On this record the listener is presented with the performer, on live guitar with live electronics and processing. This kind of work is straight up 'new music' and has strong affinities to the downtown, improvised and modern classical currents that are being played throughout the capitals of the …
Dark Waters
Dark Waters, for English horn and tape, was written in 1996 for the oboist Libby Van Cleve. The English horn is amplified and processed through several digital delay devices and mixed live with the tape part. The tape part was created using raw material garnered from sampling fragments of an old 78 rpm recording from the twenties of "The Swan of Tuonela" by Sibelius. The 'low fi' sound and even the surface noise of the old acetate record, clearly heard at the very beginning of the piece, …
Mandara Trilogy
few copies available for this long time deleted CD, early 80s works for Voice and Electronics. "Mandalas are sacred pictures that can lead viewers to a state of "Satori" through intense and concentrated viewing of them. It semed to be that "listening" was as cognitively viable as "seeing". Bloody human heads and skulls on the loins, copulating, and stomping on horrendous devils ... looking at those extraordinary and ferocious gods with their outraged faces twisted with anger, through the silence…
New Music
Henry Cowell ha inventato e perfezionato la gran parte delle speciali tecniche per suonare il pianoforte utilizzate negli ultimi 70 anni; nel corso della sua vita (1897-1965) ha composto un impressionante numero di musiche sinfoniche, vocali e da camera ed ha pubblicato il pionieristico libro "New Music Resources". Il suo contributo che più ha influenzato la scena contemporanea è però la sua opera per pianoforte, considerata di fondamentale importanza per la musica del XX secolo. "New Music" pro…
Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel
The reverberation length is so long (approximately 45 seconds) inside the 186-foot diameter cistern at Fort Worden, about 70 miles northwest of Seattle, that the composer describes the feeling as "this is where you have been forever and will always be forever". This engaging CD contains seven selections with Dempster playing solo on conch shell, didjeridu, and trombone, and in ensemble with nine other trombonists, two conch players and one on Tibetan cymbals. In the group pieces, the composer fa…
Acoustic Counterpoint
As a collection, these pieces reflect some trends for guitar music in the 80's -- a freedom from the influence of the Spanish tradition; individual and disparate languages of composition; the blurring of stylistic divisions; and the increased incorporation of the guitar in chamber music settings. These five pieces incorporate, in turn, a painting, a Central African horn theme (Reich's "Electric Counterpoint" -- recorded here in its first entirely acoustic rendition), an abstract form, the noctur…
Blends
Two extended works by Richard Teitelbaum for shakuhachi and synthesizer with percussion and bass accompaniment. Teitelbaum was one of the founders of the revolutionary MEV group in Rome, which explored live electroacoustic and collective improvisation in the 60's and 70's. Subsequent to that era he began work with the renowned shakuhachi master, teacher and composer, Yokoyama and began on a course of intercultural music. These works express his unique language and nuances of sound color which ha…
Mantra
1986 recording of this infamous piece (originally premiered in 1970), performed by Yvar Mikhashoff (piano) and Ole Orsted (electronics). Each of the sections comprises a microcosm from a different perspective. 'Mantra' is such a piece in that each of of its parts reflects itself, backwards, as in a mirror, standing on its head, elongated, compressed, twisted. It is super-redundant, pervasive, just like a bottle of Coke, that instead of a beverage produces the famous concept of 'Coca-Cola'... it …
In the Great Abbey of Clement VI
RESTOCKED: one of the real 'drone masterpiece'...The very first note is the loudest, and should be overpowering. This single first note, after I stop playing, continues for 14 seconds into silence just before the next note. You will eventually learn to tell when I quit playing and leave only the echo, but at first you may be deceived. "Standing Waves - 1976" is straight-forward enough until you begin to hear multiphonics. Later on I merge into intense multiphonics with altered mouth shapes to em…
Chanting the Light of Foresight
a beautiful album, Riley composed the pieces on this album for the legendary ROVA Saxophone Quartet. The work is based on the Taín Bó Cuailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley"), an invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill. Long out of print