New Arrivals
The Magic Of Ju-Ju
A furious 18-minute raid occupies the first side of this 1967 album, where Archie Shepp (tenor sax) is surrounded by Reginald Workman on double bass and five percussionists: Beaver Harris, Norman Connor, Eddie Blackwell, Frank Charles and Dennis Charles. Even if Shepp never loses the initial energy, the rest of the music on The Magic of Ju-Ju has slightly less frenetic atmospheres; it is a departure from the first track, gradually sitting in a more traditional realm, with the addition of Martin …
Pleasure
Girls At Our Best! were one of the greatest and most influential bands to emerge in the early 1980s as part of a new wave of independent acts. DJ John Peel championed them, playing their singles repeatedly and inviting them to record a session for his programme. Wry vocalist Judy Evans and brutal yet melodic guitarist James Alan who’d met at art college in Leeds fronted Girls At Our Best!, the proto-Indie band that formed from the ashes of Alan’s 1977 punk band SOS! Pleasure, the sole album, rea…
Ascension
*180 copies limited edition* Venice Affair seeks only to give humans a look into their own lives, history, suffering, and peace, all while providing a backbeat sprinkled with sexuality, romanticism, and especially entertainment. The concept of “Ascension” is much larger than a description of upward motion; it is the human description of our evolution from four to two, from caves to high rises, from child to elder, and from stardust to flesh. This collection of songs has been in the works since 2…
Porno Incubo
*170 copies limited edition* As is now a well-established tradition, when 7 appears in the catalogue number it is the turn of handyman Asymmetrical. The title takes its inspiration from a tag that appeared in the bathroom of the historical Knick Knack Yoda after one of the (in)usual nights, and is a leap in time, a project born from the layering of different sessions that took place between 2018 and 2020 and only sees the light of day today. 7 is also the number of inches of PVC on which this do…
Astrïd and Sylvain Chauveau Cover Songs Originally Sung by Women Singers
Astrïd and Sylvain Chauveau previously released the collaborative album Butterfly in the Snowfall in 2014, and have played shows together and with Rachel Grimes. Sylvain often covers songs, changing the original music using electronic or a minimalistic harmonium. For their new collaboration, Astrïd and Sylvain decided to work together for the first time on an album of cover songs, starting with Nina Simone’s version of Dambala, then Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang (a song Sylvain regularly performs li…
The Blind Sublime
Andrew Ostler’s fifth album for the Expert Sleepers label continues his trajectory away from a sound largely based on synthesizers towards orchestral textures and heavily processed saxophone. Building on the string arrangements of his previous LP “Dots on a Disk of Snow”, and taking a heavy dose of sax drone from the earlier “Four Drones for Saxophone and Modular Synthesizer”, this record also adds a full choir, taking the music to another level of spiritual intensity.
The first side of the LP p…
How Buildings Learn
"Last year, a consultant from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors took stock of my home in Bristol. He told me the survey would be sent as a pdf via email; I asked him for the audio recording of his spoken notes. The visiting field recordist graciously gifted it to me.Around the same time, we had a security camera fitted. My daughters commented that the audio sounded like “Daddy’s music.” I can now travel anywhere in the world while producing field recordings of my home. ‘How Buildings Le…
Voiceless Mass
Listening is the foundation of Raven Chacon’s (b. 1977) wide-ranging artistic practice. “I am a listener,” he simply declares, but the attention he gives to sound is complex and vast, encompassing far more than what is immediately audible. From his earliest works, Chacon has been dedicated to amplifying the unheard, calling attention to what is absent or unknown. Although Chacon classifies the compositions on this recording as chamber music, all three of these works “zigzag” through his noise st…
Music from the Tudorfest: San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1964
In the spring of 1964 Pauline Oliveros organized a festival celebrating the work of pianist David Tudor, which featured compositions by Oliveros, George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Alvin Lucier, and John Cage. The Tudorfest was a watershed event in the brief history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which not only provided its members with an opportunity to collaborate with Tudor, but also to promote their own work. Co-sponsored by KPFA, the Tudorfest demonstrated the artistic diversi…
Music From The Once Festival 1961-1966
With Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise. Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America's heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformis…
Future Travel
Long out of print in its original, 1981 LP version from Street Records, Future Travel, has now been released again, remastered for digital media, by New World Records (80668-2). All the music composed and performed by David Rosenboom from this historic album is included, along with a new version of And Out Come the Night Ears, which was first introduced on an LP from 1750 Arch Records in 1978. One of the first albums composed almost entirely with a digital synthesizer, Future Travel, features th…
The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony
In response to the arguably self-righteous pronouncements made in the 1990s as to what jazz is and isn’t, Julius Hemphill (1938–1995) spoke up as he had done throughout his career. “Well, you often hear people nowadays talking about the tradition, tradition, tradition. But they have tunnel vision in this tradition. Because tradition in African-American music is wide as all outdoors.” This collection of music, this celebration of artistic collaborations that engaged Julius Hemphill throughout his…
Music of David Tudor and Gordon Mumma
This historic recording features the first-ever release of the two earliest surviving recordings of David Tudor's seminal work, Rainforest. Sandwiched in between are six keyboard works by Gordon Mumma in recordings featuring the composer and his close collaborator, Tudor. Together, these works constitute a fascinating and historically important document of the 1960s avant-garde in America.
In early 1968, Merce Cunningham created a new dance whose apparent impetus was Colin Turnbull's The Forest …
Spectral Malsconcities
In modern experimental music, and especially among a number of musician-composers emerging in America during the Sixties, a fixation on process and awareness became a structural hallmark, exploring the gradual change of sonic materials, built environments, and the human body. Though much maligned as a term by its practitioners, figures like Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley were among these 'minimal' composers; askew of them were electroacoustic explorers like Alvin Luci…
Ariadne's Lament
Mary Jane Leach (b 1949) explores the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. The use of sound phenomena, however, is only a means to an end, the ultimate goal being musicality.
Early music, with its imitative polyphony and modal harmonies, is the primary source of inspiration for the compositions on this disc, four of which are part of an ongoing project focusing on the myth of Ariadne－Ariadnes Lam…
Audio Combine
restocked: The music comprising John Bischoff’s new CD ‘Audio Combine’, just released on New World Records, is beautiful, fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable. Philip Perkins’s engineering and production values are superb.The five tracks on the disc are diverse, representing Bischoff compositions from 2004 to mid-2011. The third track ‘Local Color’ evokes traditional chinese zhong bells, but also especially calls into question the ‘who’ of music performance [in asmuch as some of the bells are compu…
Music For Keyboard 1935-1948 / The Early Years
This double-CD set combines two of the key titles of Columbia Records's
legendary "Music of Our Time" series curated by David Behrman. Jeanne
Kirstein's recording of Cage's early keyboard works remains a touchstone
of Cagean interpretation notwithstanding the passage of time. Christian
Wolff recalls, "I remember Cage saying that Jeanne Kirstein's playing
caught the spirit in which the pieces were written at the time he wrote
them-a kind of simple excitement and enthusiasm (also, surely, ou…
Chamber And Gamelan Works
Lou Harrison believed fervently in music’s power to create cultural bridges. To this end he applied his prodigious skills and creative energies to creating syncretic works that link diverse musical languages. Faulted at times for his eclecticism, Harrison responded with a vibrant defense of hybridity, cultivating a musical multiculturalism long before that term—or even the concept—held the currency it now enjoys. Harrison’s major contributions to twentieth-century American music lie in three mai…
Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952- 1965
This long-awaited reissue of the CRI recording of Earle Brown’s (1926–2002) music is the best overview of his seminal early works. “It is obviously a great pleasure for me that Cri is re-releasing its 1974 recording of my work, and an even greater pleasure that I am able to add to the repertoire. The performance of Times Five and Novara still seem very fine representations of the works and are performed brilliantly by the Dutch musicians. December 1952 as realized by the late, brilliant pianist …
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2
Harry Partch’s compositions of the 1940s have remained until recently an unwritten chapter in the history of American music. And yet it was these very pieces—the collection of four works he would later collectively entitle The Wayward—that brought him to the attention of the New York musical world. His concert of these pieces for the League of Composers established for him a small but permanent reputation as a musical maverick who had wandered off well-worn tracks and had developed a sort of lat…