★Tzadik
The Prophecy
John Zorn and Bill Laswell are two of the Downtown scene’s most consistently intrepid musical explorers, and PainKiller, formed in 1991 is their longest running project together. “The Prophecy,” the first official PainKiller release in over ten years, was recorded live in Europe in 2004–5 and pulls together music from several concerts into a powerful and mind blowing suite unlike anything the group has ever released before. Featuring master drummer Yoshida Tatsuya (Ruins, Korekyojin) the music t…
The Four Seasons
"Noah Creshevsky composes some of the most meticulously constructed electronic music around. For his third Tzadik CD he has created a sonic history of his life work, inspired by the idea of a retrospective. The Four Seasons presents a new large-scale composition that reflects his work from 1992 on to his present work with Hyperrealism, creating virtual "super-performers" using the sounds of voices and traditional instruments pushed beyond human capacities. Another brilliant and varied program ch…
Flora
Born in Japan and a resident of New York since 2001, Aya Nishina is a very special and beautiful spirit whose work touches upon nature, spirituality and the deepest human emotions. Five years in the making "Flora" is a brilliant suite of pieces for the human voice. At times layering hundreds of voices at the same time, the music is lush, orchestral and healing. Meticulously written, rehearsed, guided and recorded, this is a fabulous debut CD by a unique composer who has worked with Ryuic…
Segments Et Apostilles
Born in France and based in Paris, Pierre-Yves Macé is a composer of great imagination and passion. His first recording, Faux-Jumeaux, was released on Tzadik in 2002 and he has since released work on Sub Rosa and Orkhêstra to great acclaim. This second CD for Tzadik is his most ambitious project to date and includes a piece that premiered at the prestigious Festival d'Automne in Paris. Standing at the nexus of contemporary classical, electro-acoustic composition and sound art, Pierre is an excit…
Solo Concert 1980
This DVD presents a rare and powerful solo performance by one of the most important and original artists in the world. Recorded in 1980 at a studio on Long Island, Meredith is in full voice, relaxed and creatively inspired by a small audience of Monk cogniscenti. Recorded with a 3-camera shoot and then put on the shelf, Tzadik is proud to present the first release of this astonishing virtuoso solo performance.
Shofar Rags
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Active since the mid-’60s, Alvin Curran is one of America’s most courageous and outrageous musical mavericks. A true forefather to the Downtown scene, his music embraces the dialectics of composition/improvisation, tonality/atonality, minimalism/maximalism, electronic/acoustic and more. Alvin’s use of the Shofar in experimental music making goes as far back as 1988, and this long awaited release features several compositions for Shofar and electronics, rangi…
Trouble In Paradise
Phantom Orchard, the duo of Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, is expanded with 5 performers representing some of the most exciting women in modern creative experimental music, releasing a surprising, riveting, and amazing album.Members of bands as diverse as DNA, Skeleton Crew, Electric Masada, Hemophiliac and Björk, Zeena and Ikue have been leading figures of the downtown scene since the early 1980s. Their fabulous duo project Phantom Orchard is expanded here with five of the most exciting and creat…
My Life On The Plains
Lee Hyla is a composer of rare power and versatility whose work combines the complexity of atonal classical concert music with the energy of experimental jazz, rock and improvised music. Truly part of the American tradition, his work is imaginative, fresh, and embraces a widerange of diverse influences. Lee Hyla’s third Tzadik CD presents a collection of recent works large and small. Colorful and startling pieces filled with surprises and wild bursts of energy. This is a fabulous and varied prog…
The Yelm Sessions
Another important piece of the elusive and hermetic Eyvind Kang puzzle. This newest studio project from one of the most consistently interesting young composer/performers working today is instantly Kang’s most adventurous, varied and ambitious recordings to date. Featuring many of his most illustrious musical associates as well as several orchestral ensembles from around the world, this new CD brings Kang’s exuberant gift for orchestration and lyricism together with a keen sense of the miraculou…
7 Nades
Eyvind Kang's name may not yet be a household word, but we confidently predict that this exciting, young Seattle-based violinist/composer will quickly prove to be a musical force to be reckoned with. Tzadik is proud to release 7 Nades, Kang's astonishing and eccentric debut album. Kang began learning violin at age 6 - he has since performed and/or recorded with Bill Frisell, the Sun City Girls, John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz and Motel 6, Joe McPhee, Deformation and others. He has also composed scores …
The Complete Recordings
Collected here for the first time are the complete studio recordings of one of the major ensembles in the renaissance of Jewish Jazz. Featuring five Downtown New York improvisers, these four CDs originally released by Knitting Factory records from 1996 to 2001 embrace the Hasidic musical legacy with a fresh new voice. Blending together an intense mixture of ethnic and cosmopolitan sounds, Hasidic New Wave fuses spiritual songs from Hasidic dynasties to funk and jazz, Arabic dances with avant-gar…
Hermetic Organ
Breathtaking solo organ improvisations recording!! This is the first volume documenting Zorn's breathtaking solo organ improvisations. Although organ was Zorn's first instrument (he often credits Lon Chaney in the silent classic Phantom of the Opera as a primal influence), in 2011 Zorn surprised even his hardcore fans by initiating a new series of solo organ concerts in churches around the world. Premiering at the historic Christ Church in Philadelphia, the word on these concerts spread li…
Grass
Eyvind Kang’s newest CD collects quiet new compositions spanning the past five years, which he considers to be among his truly breakthrough works. Music for solo piano, string quintet and more take the unique sonic environments of Morton Feldman to an entirely new place via the metaphors of agricultural poetry, Chinese medicine, sweatlodge and Ikat weaving. Mesmerizing work from the elusive and ever-stimulating mind of Eyvind Kang!
Life Field
David Rosenboom is a composer/performer of unprecedented range and experience. He performed at the Electric Circus in 1969, on the original recording of In C with Terry Riley, with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music as well as with Anthony Braxton, Jim Tenney, Richard Teitelbaum and countless others. This exciting CD showcases four decades of compositional activity, embracing minimalism, electronics, indeterminacy, improvisation and more. Life Field is an essential document of one …
Anamorphosis
Romitelli was born in 1963 and died tragically in 2004 after a long illness. He studied in Italy with Donatoni, and later at IRCAM with the spectralists. His work blends the sonic experiments of spectralism with psychedelic rock in the kind of hybridization of art and popular music more common of the New York Downtown scene. His work is wild and exciting, and often combines acoustic and electric instruments with other bizarre sound sources creating a hallucinatory atmosphere. The Talea En…
Double Dupe Down
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Zeena Parkins is a keyboardist, harpist and composer who has worked closely with Fred Frith, Bjork, Ikue Mori and many others. Her brilliant work for dance has earned her three Bessie Awards, and her own bands have toured the world for over twenty years to great acclaim. This special compilation brings together her best compositions written for film and features some of the greatest musicians in the downtown scene. An endlessly creative collection of work by…
Heart Chamber Phantoms
The versatile composer/performer who has worked with Cibo Matto, Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Mike Watt and many others, creates a third CD for the Tzadik Oracles series highlighting her fascinating new instrumental approach. Mixing funky beats, hip samples and instruments both acoustic and electric, Yuka's dramatic sense of sound and color creates a hypnotic groove for young moderns. Endlessly listenable, her first CD in over five years is also her very best!
Aleph
*2022 stock.* In his liner notes to Aleph, Terry Riley explains that the work was created as "an improvised meditation on the various meanings of this supreme emanation from the Hebrew alphabet." It was made using a Korg Triton Studio 88 synth with his own sound design, and employing a just intonation scale used by Lou Harrison on his last work, "Nek Chand for Just Intonation National Steel Guitar," which was performed by Riley's son Gyan on the album Serenado. Riley has been using the scale for…
Who's Who In Central & East Europe 1933
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* This is the long awaited release of one of Dreyblatt’s most personal and major extended works. Created in 1991, it combined documentary photographs, films, texts and sound materials selected from archives and private collections with original music and was a landmark in multimedia opera production, touring a dozen cities and winning the Philip Morris Art Prize in 1992.Featuring Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings, three speakers and the charismatic voca…
Black Box: Torture Garden/Leng Tch\'e
"The controversial and influential Naked City Black Box couples two of Zorn's most extreme and violent creations. Torture Garden (1991) presents Naked City's intense and groundbreaking music combining free jazz, bebop, r&b, country, funk, rockabilly, surf, metal and grindcore—usually in the same song! The rare, seldom heard Leng Tch'e (1992), released only in Japan and long out-of-print features Naked City in an agonizingly slow, brutal 32-minute assault. This special 20th anniversary ed…