New Arrivals
Fabric for String Noise
Michael Byron's Fabric for String Noise, Parts 1 and 2 (2018), composed for New York’s notable violin duo String Noise, is wildly virtuosic music that is unlike just about anything else ever written for two violins. This two-movement work, a tremendous (and relentless) river of complex lines, may be said to resemble a sort of universal folk music of madly driven ecstasy, a sonic canvas wherein intense continuous activity shares space with an overarching sense of motionlessness.The composer chara…
Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1)
Peter Garland's Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1) is a quiet, sparse, introspective six-movement work for three large gongs and a large tam-tam. Performed by celebrated new-music percussionist William Winant, it unfolds with a muted sensuality and a glacial inevitability—as if bent on suspending time. Each of the movements (or individual “pieces,” as the composer sometimes refers to them) has a distinct character, developing in its own fashion—utilizing such traditional means…
River of 1,000 Streams
Daniel Lentz's River of 1,000 Streams is a complex, slowly growing, densely textural piece for solo piano and up to 11 layers of “cascading echoes” (which are created in a live performance via a computer running a MAX patch). Each of the piece’s hundreds of “echoes” is a short moment (generally one to a few bars in length) of the piano solo that may reappear anywhere from a half-second to 25 minutes after the pianist first plays it. Floating sparsely amid the piece’s rich primary texture of trem…
Tales Of Hackney
Arild Andersen (double-bass, electronics), Clive Bell (Thai mouth organ, shakuhachi, pi saw, shinobue), and Mark Wastell (percussion, shruti box). This genre defying trio release their debut offering, Tales Of Hackney. Quick to capture the energy and undeniable empathy of their celebrated live performances at Cafe OTO on September 24, 2017, the troika reconvened the following day for an intense ten-hour east London studio session. The beguiling, often meditative results see Andersen deploy his u…
Spinneret
Mandhira de Saram and Benoît Delbecq met in 2016 in Paris and soon discovered that they loved playing together. They recorded Spinneret a year later, over a day of quiet and meditative composing, at curious distance from the animated playing they are both usually drawn to in their own projects. With a natural flair for exploring the possibilities of their instruments, they weave together a delicate tapestry of sound and texture, which hangs as though stretched and suspended in the air. Spinneret…
Torrid Zone The Vertigo Recordings 1970 - 1975
Mindblowing! Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of a newly re-mastered 6CD clamshell boxed set anthology featuring all the recordings released by Vertigo Records by the legendary jazz-rock group Nucleus and their founder Ian Carr.“Torrid Zone – The Vertigo Recordings 1970 – 1975” features every track from the highly celebrated albums “Elastic Rock”, “We’ll Talk About It Later”, “Solar Plexus”, “Belladonna”, “Labyrinth”, “Roots”, “Under The Sun”, “Snakehips Etcetera” & “Alleyca…
Screen Off
The high impact duo of Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) and Ken Vandermark (reeds) has been working together at an accelerated rate since 2002, and they have put out seven albums of exceptional and wide ranging improvised music since then. Though they have both worked in many critically acclaimed groups- from the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Lean Left (with Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor of The Ex) to Double Tandem (with Dutch saxophonist, Ab Baars)- they have continued to return to their duo for more…
Unseen
Italian composer and bass-player Massimo Pupillo (ZU) and Australian drummer Tony Buck (The Necks) collaborate in a beautifully haunting, absorbing ambient set, taking in electronic abstraction and free improvisation. Pupillo and Buck are well known for their work with their long-running bands, as well as for their collaborations with musicians of the current international avantgarde scene; Pupillo released for instance with Cindytalk, FM Einheit, Oren Ambarchi, Chris Corsano; Buck with Fennesz,…
Foggy Notion / I Can't Stand It
Between May and October 1969, the Velvet Underground:Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Moe Tucker and Doug Yule recorded fourteen songs at the Record Plant in New York City for what would have been the band's fourth album for MGM/Verve Records. But when the Velvets left the label soon after, the recordings were shelved, and would not be heard by the public for a decade and a half. These songs, from those long-lost sessions, capture the Velvet Underground at a fascinating transitional point between th…
Magic Time: The Millennium/Ballroom Sessions
An awe-inspiring three CD set! We’ve emptied the Columbia vaults of material by these late-‘60s Curt Boettcher-led groups, whose dazzling soundscapes and choral arrangements created a perfect hybrid of sunshine pop and psychedelia. Produced with the bands’ full participation, Magic Time is the definitive compendium of Millennium/Ballroom material, including the entire Begin and Ballroom albums and an additional wealth of unheard songs and alternate versions, plus interviews and rare photos! Magi…
Dragging Her Wings of Rusty Knives: Selected Recordings 1994-201
A Handful of Dust was founded over three decades ago by two giants of the New Zealand underground, Bruce Russell (The Dead C) and Alastair Galbraith. Declaring their raison d'être in the now infamous Free Noise Manifesto the group has advanced a radical aesthetic; rejecting any notion of structure or comfort they've ground music to its sub-elemental parts. A scraping and howling electricity, spontaneous, unrestrained, physical. Contains expanded and unreleased works spanning the group's history …
Home Fi
Edition of 400. "Vinylization of the recent Home Fi cassette (originally released on the Australian Brierfirld Flood Press label) by this magnificent New Zealand singer/songwriter. We were never able to score a copy of the tape, despite the fact we released Maxine Funke's last LP, Silk (FTR 410LP), so we figured we would perform the public service of making it generally available to the whole wide world. That's just the kind of guys we are! Recorded in stark and simple terms, Home Fi represents …
freeHorn
The form of both freeHorn and ii-v-i consists of a continuous modulation between three different harmonic series. freeHorn weaves together the live interaction of acoustic instruments and computer software written by Larry Polansky and Phil Burk. ii-v-i, a reverberant cloud of moving intonation, gradually drifts from one natural harmonic series to another. Only open strings, 2nd, 3rd and 4th harmonics, and notes stopped at the 7th and 12th frets are used, and the guitars are audibly re-tuned fro…
Windmill
Stephen Whittington writes:“…from a thatched hut draws upon a particular strand of Chinese culture: the Chinese scholar who withdraws, temporarily or permanently, from society. The thatched hut was the place where the great Tang dynasty poets Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Li Bai (Li Po) withdrew from the world. Their example was followed by many others, including the poet Bai Juyi (Po Chu-I), author of Record of the Thatched Hut on Mount Lu, and Xia Gui, the Song dynasty painter of Twelve Views from a Thatc…
Bhajan
Nicholas Chase's Bhajan, described by one critic as “a pas de deux between violin and electronics,” is in four joined/continuous sections. Influenced by many musics from around the globe, the work tantalizes and bewitches the ear with a breadth of sounds that ebb and flow as if guided by an elusive but inherent sense of logic. The composer performs its electronics/computer part while noted violinist Robin Lorentz (who has appeared on four previous Cold Blue CDs) propels the music compellingly, i…
Ecstatic Descent
Erik Griswold's Ecstatic Descent is a prepared-piano work that melds composed and improvisational elements to create an intensely animated, one-of-a-kind textural sound world. Performed here by the composer, at times it may call to mind an enormous out-of-control music box or mechanical toy. It also readily lends itself to comparisons to various ever-changing (yet ever the same) natural sound phenomena, and has been likened by composer Annea Lockwood to the bubbling frequencies of a river.The co…
Twilight Of The Dreamboats
Chas Smith's Twilight of the Dreamboats, one of his quintessential electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures (instruments with such names as Bertoia 718, Que Lastas, lockheed, Mantis, Sceptre, DADO) and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars (Clinesmith, Emmons, Guitarzilla, Cadillac bass), performed by the composer. “Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and market…
After the Wars
Peter Garland's After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is quintessentially Garlandesque. In some ways it marks a slight shift of focus from his more overtly melodic and rhythmically driven material of the past 30 years. Garland writes about the piece:“After the Wars was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as part of her A Sweeter Music project. The idea (I believe) was to focus on the idea of…
In the Village of Hope
Michael Byron's In the Village of Hope is a restless (and in some ways relentless) virtuosic harp solo performed by Tasha Smith Godínez, who commissioned the work. This ever-changing, ever-churning, ever-developing music is unlike anything else in the solo harp repertoire, though not unlike some of Byron’s other recent work, such as his Book of Horizons for pianist Joseph Kubera.Byron writes about the music:“In the Village of Hope,” a purely sentimental title, was composed at the invitation of h…
In The Sea Of Ionia
In the Sea of Ionia is a wildly spinning, charismatically eclectic album containing four of Daniel Lentz’s recent piano works: (1) 51 Nocturnes (2011), a set of very short, contrasting nocturnes that are played without pauses, as one continuous work; (2) Pacific Coast Highway (2014), a primarily textural three-piano piece built of polyrhythmic layers of continuously shifting/drifting harmonies; (3) Dorchester Tropes (2008–09), a four-movement piano solo; (4) In the Sea of Ionia (2007–08) a piece…