Reissues
Jewels of Thought
No one navigates a stormy sea and subsequent repose quite like avant garde pilot Pharoah Sanders. We are invited here to join the personnel in transcendental affirmations of peace, reassured by the yodeling of Leon Thomas and happy, revelatory ... Full Descriptionpiano work of the one and only Lonnie Liston Smith. Chimes, African thumb piano, and the talking hourglass drum are just some of the other elements which make this album musically and culturally compelling. The compositional minimali…
Black Unity
Digitally remastered by Erick Labson (MCA Music Media Studios). Hannibal Marvin Peterson's trumpet and Pharoah's tenor screech out of the melody in accord--their amity is in the process and the product.. Characteristic of Pharoah's other ... Full Descriptionwork at this time, "Black Unity" rides an often static bass figure. In this way, while the improvisations may evoke the reflective or the frantic, an assertive central theme pervades in the lower register: determination (Does "A Love Supre…
Little Red Record
2CD Expnaded Edition. This Esoteric Recordings edition has been newly remastered from the original master tapes and is expanded to include four previously unreleased studio session alternate takes and Matching Mole’s appearance on BBC Radio One “In Concert” in July 1972. The booklet restores all original artwork and includes an essay by Sid Smith. Matching Mole's Little Red Record (1972) is the second album of the British Canterbury Scene band Matching Mole. Compared to their first album, Little…
Ptah, The El Daoud
Ptah, the El Daoud was the third solo album by Alice Coltrane. This was Coltrane's first album with horns (aside from one track on A Monastic Trio (1968), on which Pharoah Sanders had played bass clarinet). Sanders is recorded on the right channel and Joe Henderson on the left channel throughout. All the compositions were written by Coltrane. The title track is named for the Egyptian god Ptah, "the El Daoud" meaning "the beloved". "Turiya", according to the liner notes, "was defined by Alice as …
Journey In Satchidananda
Originally issued by Impulse in 1971, this is definitely one of the best truly cosmic jazz orchestrations ever realized. Recorded at the Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York on November 8, 1970. Alice Coltrane (harp, piano); Pharoah Sanders (soprano saxophone, perc); Charlie Haden (bass); Rashied Ali (drums); Cecil McBee (bass); Vishnu Wood (oud); Tulsi (tamboura); Majid Shabazz (bells, tambourine). "Swamiji is the first example I have seen in recent years of Universal Love or God in actio…
Red Mecca
It's a taught, dense, horrific slab lacking a lull. Dashes of Richard H. Kirk's synthesizer are welded to Chris Watson's tape effects for singed lashes of white noise, best heard on the lurching 'Sly Doubt' and the jolting 'Spread the Virus.' Throughout, Mallinder's sinister jibber jabbering punctuates the high-pitched menace. The record contains all the characteristics that have made the Sheffield group such an influential entity when it comes to electronic music.
High Fidelity
Housed in a gatefold sleeve with a 36-page catalogue. The first LP is John Cage Speaks MUREAU by John Cage, its title assembled from the first syllable of the word "music" and the author's name "Thoreau." Malte Hubrig writes "The performance of Mureau -- its letters, syllables and words read by John Cage in a uniform intonation of the voice -- frees language of its meaning and opens it to sound." The second LP is Terry Fox's Culvert, a performance that took place at the University of Montana in …
Sinfonia per 8 voci - Eindrucke
Luciano Berio was commissioned to write a work for the New York Philharmonic's 150th anniversary. What resulted was the Sinfonia, a masterpiece of the twentieth century musical movement. This work combines many of the Italian composers fascinations - from Mahler to Martin Luther King - and sympathizes them. The result is fascinating, stimulating, and thoroughly enjoyable. Boulez's interpretation is really top-notch. He leads the orchestra with great power, gusto, and energy. This vision is evide…
Laborintus 2
Music performed by the Ensemble Musique Vivante, laying down a turbulent racket of avant-crinkle, over which the 4-piece Chorale Experimentale bellows vocal confusion. Berio has also succeeded in discovering sounds, phrasings, effects of all kinds which have permitted him to venture further and further into areas which had so far been thought impermissible or impossible for the human voice. These investigations are magisterially reflected in the larger works and particularly in 'Laborintus II.
Voice, Books and Fire 3
An outstanding album, Voice, Books and Fire is the result of Jakob Ullmann reflections about the relationships between music and language: language as sound and language as text, the numerous relationships between texts of different cultural and religious traditions, between the work of the human spirit in the present and in the past and the questions arising from the problem of understanding these different traditions, languages and texts and representing them in a present, which has lost knowl…
Works for Instruments
Edition RZ presents John McGuire's Works For Instruments. Performers: Ensemble Modern -- Julia Rempe (soprano); Pellegrini-Quartett: Antonio Pellegrini, Thomas Hofer (violin); Fabio Marano (viola); Helmut Menzler (violoncello); musikFabrik: Hermann Kretzschmar, Paulo Alvarez, Irmela Roelcke, Eun-Ju Kim, Ulrich Löffler, Jürgen Kruse (piano), Christine Chapman, Jodie Lawson, Charles Putnam, Rohan Richards (horns), Dirk Rothbrust, Carlos Tarcha (percussion). Each of the compositions of post-minimal…
Scott 3
Scott 3, originally released in 1969, marked a big change in Walker's approach to albums as, for the first time, the record is dominated by his original compositions. In fact, the only other songwriter that makes it onto the album is Walker's idol, Belgium's legendary singer/songwriter Jacques Brel. Scott 3 again features string heavy production courtesy of Wally Scott, though it occasionally moves out of pop ballad territory into a more cinematic feel influenced by Ennio Morricone, among others…
Scott 2
Originally released in 1968, Scott 2 made it all the way to number one on the UK pop charts, perhaps the strangest number one hit in pop history. Continuing with his orchestral obsession, Scott 2 features over-the-top string and horn arrangements, occasionally veering into dangerously schmaltzy territory. This production style is in drastic contrast to the lyrical content, songs of despair, prostitution, homosexuality, and brutal honesty, indicting the same glamorous and glitzy lifestyle that hi…
Scott
One of the most enigmatic figures in pop music history Scott Walker (nee Scott Engel) first saw massive success in England with his band The Walker Brothers in 1965. Not really brothers, nor were they British, the trio left Hollywood seeking fame in England, and they found it there for a time with their particular brand of orchestrated pop. Following the group's demise in 1967, Walker set out to pursue solo stardom in perhaps the most peculiar way possible, with over-the-top baroque pop songs ow…
Concerto delle menti
Pholas Dactylus have left, with Concerto delle Menti, a unique example of avantgarde prog containing only spoken lyrics that can be appealing to the most adventurous listeners even because the musical background is intense and mesmerising; the album contains a long suite divided onto the two sides of the record with no breaks, and even a rare single was released from it. The first representation of Concerto delle Menti came in the winter of 1972, in Cornate d'Adda. The group had a very good live…
Corona - For Away - Piano Distance - Undisturbed Rest
Performed by Roger Woodward (piano). Recorded Decca Studio No.3, West Hampstead, London, 4 May 1973. This is the first International CD release featuring this recording. Was first released on Decca's HEAD label in 1974. For Takemitsu, sound can be beautiful without being significant, can signify beauty without making 'sense'. The quality of the music is thus elusive: it is not something one must necessarily 'understand', but perhaps rather absorb and accept. His works have, all the same, qualiti…
Complete Piano Works
Tōru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Though largely self-taught, Takemitsu is recognised for his skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, drawing from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen. In 1958, the international attention he drew with his Requiem for st…
Come un Vecchio Incensiere all'Alba di un Villaggio Deserto
Transcendent and phantasmagorical work from one of the premier visionaries of the Italian cosmic rock continuum that includes the likes of Franco Battiato, Pierrot Lunaire, Franco Leprino and Arturo Stalteri (to name check just a few), and his work here on "Comme Un Vecchio...", while absent some of the blasted rockist momentum of his debut LP "Aria" ripples and shudders across your consciousness with such palpable psychotropic force, a contact high is almost a forgone conclusion. The deeply fol…
in C
Features three Terry Riley pieces: "In C", "In DO(M)", "In Moscow". "In April 2000 the American composer and performer on the keyboard Terry Riley performed in Moscow: one evening at Moscow Conservatory's Rachmaninoff Hall, which was the closing evening of the SKIF #4 (the Sergey Kuryokhin International Festival), and in two days at a large-scale concert at the Cultural Center 'DOM', which was the opening concert of the 13th 'Alternativa' festival of contemporary music. At the opening concert of…
Como Una Ola De Fuerza Y Luz / Sofferte Onde Serene / Contrappun
Luigi Nono began Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a wave of strength and light) as a piece for piano and orchestra in 1971, at the instigation of Maurizio Pollini. While the composition was in progress, Nono learned of the death of a young Chilean revolutionary and recast the work in his memory, with added parts for soprano soloist and tape. The resulting half hour work is clearly a lament, encompassing various expressions of grief, from stunned sorrow to anguish to the fiercest rage. As a kin…