Reissues
From A Folio
Michael Jon Fink's From a Folio, a suite of six short pieces for cello and piano and one central piece for six cellos, a set of songs without words, was composed for new-music cellist Derek Stein, with whom Fink has been performing in various small groups during the past few years.As the elegant, subtle music unfolds, radiating a deep, emotional sense of form, the listener is quickly drawn into a highly nuanced, lyrical sound world. Fink’s characteristically reductive but expressive style is evi…
Music For Airport Furniture
Music for Airport Furniture is Cold Blue’s first release of Stephen Whittington’s refined, beautiful music. Whittington is something of a musical vagabond, traveling widely and writing music that is often multicultural in its inspiration. With this in mind, this compelling and sublime string quartet could be heard as a strange homage to the act of traveling, airport to airport.Stephen Whittington writes about the piece, “Music for Airport Furniture is a work for string quartet that alludes to Er…
Patience Soup
Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements presen…
Ragnarok
Silence present a vinyl reissue of Ragnarök's self-titled debut
album, originally released on the same label in 1976. Some music never
becomes dated and this debut record by Ragnarök from Kalmar in Sweden is
just filled with that kind of music. Many listeners have tried to
describe the music they have carried in their hearts throughout a whole
life or just discovered. They all say it does not sound like anything
else they have heard, some say it sounds like looking at water, others
that i…
Rock (Bande Originale Du Film, 1982) Lp
2019 Small Repress. The first release by Transversales, a French label based in Paris founded by Sebastien Rosat and Jonathan Fitoussi, is the original soundtrack of the film Rock, composed in 1982 by Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013). Parmegiani was a major figure of electro acoustic music and member of the historic GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) where he composed an important work of concert, among which is the masterpiece: De Natura Sonorum (REGRM 009LP). The work of Parmegiani, a virtuoso…
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…