things that happen again
A portrait CD of UK composer Paul Newland's music, with five pieces dating from 2009 to 2023, all recorded by Apartment House in 2023. A rich variety of music, ranging from string quartet, two different trio combinations, a short work for solo piano, and a score for open instrumentation, realised in this recording by a septet.Cover artwork by Paul Newland
Mapping the Valleys of the Uncanny
Daniel M Karlssons Mapping the valleys of the uncanny is an investigation into a process and method, colliding with questions relating to what can be known to be real, within the field of algorithmic composition. This music and text-based work examines the roles and signifiers of instrumentation and timbre as they unwittingly conspire to designate access, power, status, work and ultimately class. Paradoxically, Karlsson uses this critical-analytical standpoint as a means to build a large-scale i…
Near Blue-A Taste of Melancholy
"Near Blue – A Taste of Melancholy is a soundtrack for being unstuck in time, if just for an hour. It is a glide through a rich past and present, with glimpses of a future worth reaching." - Bill Shoemaker
Franz Koglmann - flugelhornGert Schubert - violinKurt Franz Schmid - clarinetSandro Miori - tenor & soprano saxophones & alto fluteRudolf Ruschel - tromboneRaoul Herget - tubaRobert Michael Weiss - piano
String Quartet No. 4
Huge Tip! Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to w…
Insula Dulcamara
Paul Klee’s Naturstudium (1923) recalibrated the dialogue between art-making and the natural world. By peering closely at nature, Klee’s project was one of a magical de-mystification, seemingly a contradiction in terms until you realize that by looking clearly and dispassionately (the studium part of Naturstudium), he brought us full circle to wonder and awe. Spanish percussionist Luis Tabuenca also peers inward at his world—here the universe of percussion sounds—inviting us to a microscopic lis…
Satoko Inoue Presents Jo Kondo's New Works For Piano 2015-2020
Temporary Super Offer! "This CD, the third album of my piano works played by Satoko Inoue, presents all the pieces written for piano between 2015 and 2020, along with an introductory miniature piece." – Jo Kondo
Construire Sur Les Ruines D'un Passé Encore Fumant
Music performed and shaped collectively by Les Certitudes: Juliette Adam (clarinet), Félicie Bazelaire (cello) and Léo Dupleix (harpsichord). Score composed by Léo Dupleix. The ensemble Les Certitudes was created in 2021 as a means for developing acoustic music focusing on justly tuned tones and harmonies, taking as a starting point the physicality of the instruments –resonating wood and metal– in a long musical form.
Screens
An extraordinary album of compositions by Frank Denyer, played by Octandre Ensemble. 'Screens' contains five pieces, whose dates of composition range from 1973 to 2021. Anyone listening blind would struggle to identify which were early pieces, and which were late; they all simply belong to and come out of Frank Denyer unique and idiosyncratic soundworld.
A list of the instrumentation for the first piece, 'Broken Music' from 1990, gives an indication of the peculiarity and eccentricity of the mus…
Flax
'Flax' is a 79-minute solo work for piano by the Canadian composer Martin Arnold. It was commissioned in 2020 by the pianist Philip Thomas, but sadly Philip became seriously unwell shortly afterwards. Martin Arnold completed the composition in 2021, and - as Philip was now unable to perform it - the project was taken on by Kerry Yong, with Philip's agreement and support. 'Flax' was premiered by Kerry Yong at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2023, when the CD recording was…
Girl
"a glorious, shifting collage of sound" -BBC Music Magazine
Nothing Personal
*Limited edition numbered in metal box* Georg Graewe piano solo ultimate collection.
cd 1 recorded in Köln, Loft 2012 (1) and 2014 and 2017 (2-11)cd 2 recorded in Köln, Loft 2018 and 2019 (12-22)cd 3 recorded in Nickelsdorf, Konfrontationen 2016 (23-27);and in Vienna, RKH 2018 (28-35)
Works for Amplified Piano(s)
With this album, Yoshiko Shimizu presents a second outstanding recording of works for amplified piano(s) by American composer George Crumb, being the only pianist who has created ‘solo’ realizations of his compositions Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), Zeitgeist and Otherworldly Resonances. George Crumb praised her superb 2018 Kairos release (0015029KAI), declaring, “I consider her to be one of my very finest interpreters. Bravissima!”
Brown Wardle Hill
Brown Wardle Hill stands as an imposing yet noble hill on the South Pennine Moors of Whitworth, Rossendale, Lancashire. Regarded as a site of prehistoric importance due to the overwhelming amount of mesolithic flint scatterings discovered during the early 20th century, the hill also boasts an incredible amount of lore and legend. In 2019 David Chatton Barker spent a year walking and researching into the hill and its surrounding moors, the material gathered formed a series of performances, culmin…
Frédéric Lagnau
*200 copies limited edition* A half-voiced sieve whose method is the title (Je me souviens de do dièse majeur dans un prélude en do majeur de Jean-Sébastien Bach), an impressionist loop that becomes a groovy construction (À mesure et au fur), a repetitive mechanic that fuses (Solar loops), rocket scales that color each other (La gamme qui teinte), an ecstatic, pulsating teenage cantabile (Morning song of the jungle sun), a harmonic march that traverses the keyboard, out of phase with itself (Les…
Extended II - For Strings & Piano
Temporary Super Offer! "Extended II seems to me to illustrate the same point as its predecessor. These are men at work. The work is sound, as projected in three dimensions and across time. The composition is the realization of that process of work. Old philosophers used to refer to reality – the solid bricks-and-mortar and fellow-beings that surrounded us – as “the extended world” or as “extensions”, and that applies to the music you are holding. It extends because it exists in space and time, a…
Miragique
This second project released on Sub Rosa by the Japanese artist Kaoru Tashiro, manages to create a subtle dialogue between four composers, and four musical pieces, mixing a delicate blend of Japanese and European sensibilities. Those different approaches convergence thanks to the highly recognizable sensibility of Kaoru Tashiro's way to play. After "drifting" through unpublished pieces from Toshi Ichiyanagi (Fluxus) and Claude Ledoux on the album Cloud Atlas, Kaoru Tashiro is now highlighting th…
All the Wonders of Six Little Spoons
The ensemble consists of 10 musicians from different parts of the world, coming from various musical backgrounds: Thea Soti (voice), Ferdinand Schwarz (trumpet), Jonas Engel (alto sax, clarinet), Victor Fox (bass clarinet), Emilia Gołos (piano), Zoe Argiriou (vibraphone, bass drum, timpani), Magdalena Lorenz (violin), Jonas Gerigk (double bass), Anthony Greminger (drums) and Wojcik himself on electric guitar. The album is an attempt to escape and find an alternative to the hierarchical composer-…
Arbor Vitae - Quatuors + Quintettes
*2023 stock* The sixth volume of the collection, Arbor Vitæ, pays homage to the Canadian-American composer James Tenney with performances of the complete quartets and quintets. These works were composed over a period of more than 50 years, from the first string quartet, written at 21, to the last, posthumous quartet. Through various acoustic and musical phenomena, Tenney creates broad, open musical spaces, making music that is both rigorous and sensual. We feel privileged and honoured to be asso…
Momento
“It has been my conviction for a number of years that Music (and Art in general) must simply assume the humble task of describing its own end, or at any rate its gradual extinction,” wrote Italian maestro Aldo Clementi (1925–2011) in 1973. Three years earlier he had written B.A.C.H., a piano piece which proved to be pivotal. From this point on, almost all his works are — in David Osmond-Smith’s words — constructed from “tonal fragments arranged in a polytonal canonic counterpoint that ensures ne…
Prossime Trascendenze
*2023 stock* Pivotal work in Mimmo’s discography this “Prossime Trascendenze” explores the intriguing relationships between composed and improvised forms, “tight corners” and collective interplay. A seamless orchestration toward a higher level of articulation that leads the listener through a textural pulsing structure where enlightened details deliver a splendid intelligibility.