Reissues
Selected Tracks 2. 1995-1998
**700 copies, 2020 stock** Selected Tracks 2. 1995-1998 is a double album with a new selection of tracks recorded by Esplendor Geométrico between 1995 and 1998. This is the second part of Selected Tracks, the first one was published in 2015 (GR 2136LP). Ten of the thirteen tracks appear for the first time on vinyl, and some rarities only released in very limited CDR editions during the '90s and without distribution, are also included. Esplendor Geométrico are pioneers and masters of rhythmic ind…
A Rainbow In Curved Air
**50th anniversary limited edition of 750 individually numbered copies on transparent vinyl** One of Terry Riley's most enduring works, and a haunting record that contains two extended modal minimal jams. By capturing Riley as both a conceptualist and as a virtuoso performer, this 1969 LP revealed a suppleness that stands in contrast to the baggage associated with “minimalism.” The range displayed over its two sides reaches out to the world (and, yes, the cosmos) rather than sitting inside any r…
The Lion's Throne
The Lion’s Throne bears witness to the performances that the legendary composer Terry Riley and Italian singer Amelia Cuni did together in the United Kingdom and Italy between 1999 and 2006. Riley, whose remarkable body of work seamlessly integrates a lifetime of devotion to Indian classical music into the western classical tradition, collaborates with Cuni, a singer trained in Dhrupad who, like Riley, experiments with Indian singing in a variety of ways.In these recordings, Riley plays piano or…
Black Water
Jim Fox’s music is usually noted for its quietude and ambling pace. In the mid-1980s, however, he drifted from these defining stylistic penchants for a couple of years, penning music that often bounced along, energetically and loudly, at a good clip. His clangorous Black Water, from 1984, is rich with dense, sometimes shimmering, sometimes rumbling tremolos and loudly struck chords covering the full range of the piano, set off by brief moments of quiet, twinkling serenity.Jim Fox writes, “Black …
Cold Blue Two
Cold Blue Two is an eclectic anthology of 14 new, previously unrecorded works—many of them written specifically for this CD—by a diverse collection of composers whose personal musical visions usually blend intuition with process. The composers include both the well-known and the not-so-well-known, most with longtime associations with Cold Blue, and two making their first appearance on the label: John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, In…
Four Thousand Holes
Four Thousand Holes is a sometimes lush, sometimes fragile, rhythmically complex and technically demanding work for piano and mallet percussion (performed by the extraordinary pianist Stephen Drury and percussionist Scott Deal) and ghostly electronic “auras”—electronic sounds created by processing the acoustic instruments’ sonorities.Unlike John Luther Adams’s other works, the pitch material used in Four Thousand Holes is drawn exclusively from Western music’s most basic elements: major and mino…
Alchemy
Esoteric Recordings is proud to announce the release of a new expanded and re-mastered 2 CD edition of the classic album “Alchemy" by Third Ear Band. One of the first releases on EMI’s progressive rock label, Harvest in July 1969, “Alchemy” was the debut album by the band. Formed in 1968 around a nucleus of Glen Sweeney (percussion), Paul Minns (Oboe), Richard Coff (Violin, Viola) and Ursula Smith (Cello), the Third Ear Band were unique in their exploration of exotic baroque music fused with exp…
Macbeth
New Re-mastered & Expanded Release with four previously unreleased bonus tracks. Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a new
re-mastered and expanded edition of the classic 1972 soundtrack album to
Roman Polanski’s gritty film of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. Originally released on EMI’s Harvest label in March 1972, the album
featured a new line-up of Third Ear Band featuring Paul Minns (oboe and
recorder), Glen Sweeney (drums), Paul Buckmaster (cello and bass
guitar), Simon…
Last Cicada Singing
Four serene, unique, and entrancing pieces for solo qin (a zither-like Chinese instrument). Quiet, sparse, almost Feldmanesque, almost delta-blues-like, too. Performed by the composer, Christopher Roberts, who mastered the qin while living and teaching for many years in Taiwan. (He performs on a qin built by Lin Li-Zheng.)Christopher Roberts writes about the piece:“Chinese scholars in antiquity took their qins to the mountains to compose music in accord with the aesthetics of nature. They develo…
Sudoku 82
Sudoku 82, a spare, beautiful, spacious piece for eight pianos, was composed utilizing systems derived from Sudoku puzzles and the GarageBand computer program.Christopher Hobbs writes about the piece: “Sudoku 82 is one of a series of pieces I have been working on since 2005. There are now over 125 of them that use Apple’s GarageBand software and random procedures culled from the numbers found initially in hexadecimal Sudoku puzzles and latterly from online random number generators. I choose the …
Music First
A collection of music pieces composed and performed by Enrico Serotti (of Confusional Quartet fame) for the works of Eva Marisaldi. "Museum/Art" edition including 16 page coloured inner booklet with introduction by Guido Molinari.
ZX81 In Concert
From Richard Aicher and Andreas Merz' secret vaults: their own tape-production for Sinclair Computers at Rothof Studio near Munich - an unreleased recording, made to promote Sinclair ZX-81 computers!
The Place We Began
John Luther Adams's The Place We Began contains four mysteriously evocative electro-acoustic works that the composer built from short recorded moments—audio fragments—of his early music (circa the early 1970s). This is not a trip down Memory Lane: in The Place We Began, Adams has reappropriated and transformed these sonic fragments into completely new works that speak to his current musical interests and directions, especially his recent installation pieces, and refer to his past only in ways th…
String Quartets
This CD presents the premiere recordings of two spirited and enticing quartets that draw on Peter Garland’s well-traveled ear and great sense of personal vision. Both works move with a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is purely Garlandesque—marked by a sometimes lively dancing, a sometimes alluring stasis, and an often sauntering gait that allow musical ideas to seem to appear intuitively and develop subconsciously..Performed and recorded beautifully by members of the ren…
Music On The Desert Road
The late Deben Bhattacharya was a noted Bengali record producer, ethnomusicologist, poet, documentarian, radio producer, and all around renaissance man. Having moved from Northern India to London as a young man, Bhattacharya began working for the BBC as a radio producer. In 1955, having worked all possible angles to securing funding Bhattacharya traveled to India to record musicians. The success of this trip allowed him to travel again soon after to the countries of the Middle East. With recordi…
Singing The Traditional Songs of her Kentucky Mountain Family LP
In the world of American folk music, Jean Ritchie was a truly unique presence. Most of the younger artists of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s were middle class urbanites and liberal arts college students who helped "rediscover" the older traditional artists of the South. Though these two groups intermingled at concerts and the younger artists idolized the "true" folk artists, Jean Ritchie was an anomaly in that she fit equally in each crowd. Born in Viper, Kentucky in 1922, Jean was born i…
The Last Castrato
Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) was the last known castrato, and the only one to have ever made recordings. He was born into a Catholic family in one of the so-called Roman Castles, where he was castrated either for health reasons, or because of his singing talents, the history is unclear. But either way he was discovered soon after for his talents and by a very young age was known as “l'Angelo di Roma” and quickly became the First Soprano of the Sistine Chapel choir, a position he held for more…
Trios For Deep Voices
Christopher Roberts's Trios for Deep Voices, a five-movement work scored for the unusual ensemble of three double basses, is a sort of musical evocation—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—of the sounds and life that composer Roberts experienced in the jungles of the Star Mountains region of Papua New Guinea, where he lived in the early 1980s.Trios is an emotionally charged music of extreme virtuosity and extreme beauty—from passages laden with devilishly difficult harmonics and bowing tech…
Nakadai
Nakadai, which KPFA Folio/Other Minds Radio called “one of the most explosive LPs of the ’80s,” is a set of five works that offer a catalog of musical “waves”—from ripples to tsunamis. It features Smith playing pedal steel guitar solo, overdubbed, and with a mallet percussion quartet made up of Bob Fernandez, John Fitzgerald, M.B. Gordy, and Theresa Knight.This first CD reissue of Nakadai allows today’s listeners to hear prototypical Smith—music composed when his present style was in its nascent…
The Webster Cycles
As it casually explores the trombone’s timbres, The Webster Cycles is at times lush, at times stark. Mobile-like in the way that phrases and individual notes drift in and out and twist as if blown by the wind, it is something of a musical conundrum: comfortably adrift in a sense of motionlessness yet definitely propelled by a sense of forward motion. From moment to moment, an individual voice calls out or a crowd murmurs or voices unite in contrapuntal or parallel efforts.The Webster Cycles, an …