Works For Piano & Prepared Piano · Vol. II (1944-1958)
*2022 stock* This recording deals with works composed between 1944 and 1958, including several of Cage's lovely and masterful prepared piano pieces, which will come as a major surprise to those familiar only with his chance compositions. Joshua Pierce is the principal pianist (assisted by Dorothy Jonas on the Three Dances, written for two pianos) and attacks the pieces with a nice balance of delicacy and aggression, although compared to the earlier Angel recording of the abovementioned Three Dan…
Music Of Changes
*2022 stock* It's over 70 years since John Cage wrote his pivotal Music of Changes, and it's beginning to show its age. It feels very much of its time, with its uncompromising adherence to the 64 hexagrams of I-Ching, the Chinese book of changes, determining the direction of the piece and its use of sudden, percussive attacks on the strings or the body of the instrument. But for all that there is no denying the extreme stamina and concentration required of the performer, and here Herbert Henck e…
Silver Apples of the Moon / The Wild Bull
Silver Apples of the Moon' is without a doubt the best known work from influential composer and electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick. It was originally commissioned by Nonesuch records back in 1967, when electronic music was more of a series of ideas than a recognised art form, and since then it has achieved well deserved classic status, influencing so much that would come after it is impossible to conceive. Subotnick's instrument of choice was the Buchla modular synthesizer, a gigantic pat…
I Like To Think Of Harriet Tubman
*2022 stock* 'A true Leninist would argue that art in a smoothly running socialist state would become redundant and disappear, though while waiting for such a perfect society to come about, we have an idea of what socialist literature, painting, sculpture and cinema are like. But what does socialist music sound like? Luigi Nono? Eisler? Robert Wyatt? The Ex? Well, all four. and you may add Christian Wolff to the list. Like fellow experimental composers Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, Wolf…
Tempi Agitati
On April 6, 1327, a 22-year-old Italian poet named Francesco Petrarca caught a glimpse of a young woman, Laura, in a church in Avignon. He later reported that “living sparks issued from two lovely eyes”. Those sparks enflamed Petrarch such that he spent the rest of his illustrious career coming to terms with them. Madrigals were developed in the 16th century by Adrian Willaert and Cipriano de Rore, which took Petrarch’s agonized images as justification for violating the rules that had guided mus…
Weinviertel Sinfonie
Nitsch loved the countryside where he lived, the austrian „wine county“ – with this release he wanted to combine his music, his art and the landscape.
Recorded on 28th August 2021, Nitsch Museum, MistelbachConductor: Michael MautnerPerformers: Members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna (RSO Wien)Mix and Master by Christoph Amann, Vienna
Excavation Patterns
*300 copies limited release* Originally released in a tiny CDr edition in 2005 on the now impossible-to-find and almost literally named Vanished Records imprint, Excavation Patterns is a uniquely pervasive touchstone of Adelaide’s music culture, and has since put down roots around the world among devoted aficionados of minimalism, ambient music, and improvisation. At 52 sprawling minutes in length, it has been lovingly Direct Metal Mastered and exquisitely pressed by RAND in Leipzig, in a hand-n…
Music for Woodwinds
Through her novel approaches to texture and melody, German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888–1944) became one of the most distinctive modernist voices of the mid-20th century. Beyer was the first woman known to have composed for electric instruments (Music of the Spheres, 1938). Her compositions anticipate elements of minimalism, a movement that would manifest two decades after her passing. Beyer was long omitted from the written history of ultramodernism, but her activities as a c…
Visions
Yamila reveals her most intimate catharsis in Visions, an album that brings together and provokes the hallucinatory powers of music. Like an ancient herald, she announces the profound feminine mystique while crossing epic melodies full of pleasure and pain. This album is a journey that prodigiously unites baroque accents, Spanish folklore –such as flamenco– and contemporary electronic music. Her voice and music –sometimes torn and others buoyant– could resemble the score for a biblical passage (…
Bayou-Borne / Jitterbug
*300 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* 'In 2017 Maze gave a stunning interpretation of Jitterbug at the Tactile Paths Festival in Berlin, full of subtle detail and fluid energy. That they have returned to the work now - and have also created this beautiful realization of bayou-borne, for Pauline - is something for which I am deeply grateful. Both works draw on improvisation and are guided by graphic imagery: of a river system in Texas and of rocks from the Continental Divide in Mon…
John Tilbury plays Terry Riley
There are certain works by minimalist pioneer Terry Riley that are rightly celebrated as classics, paradigm-shifting masterpieces that exerted a wide influence within classical music, but also well beyond its often hermetic borders. Hello, “Baba O’Riley!” But there is so much more in his repertoire deserving the same accolades. On “Terry Riley: Keyboard Studies”, released by Another Timbre, one of the premiere contemporary music labels of our time, three mid-1960s masterpieces are interpreted by…
Landmarks
Eight collaborative compositions for organ and percussion by the longstanding Canadian duo, who also appeared on Isaiah’s previous, and now sold out, CD ‘Bow’.
Hope Lies Fallow
Six pieces developed by Johnny and Keir from music by Hildegard van Bingen and Orlando de Lassus. Three violin duets, + three tracks for violins and the voice of Celeste Oram.
Tehran Dust
Three chamber pieces by the Austrian composer Klaus Lang, plus two arrangements by Klaus of early music by Johannes Ockeghem and Pierre de la Rue.
Played by Trio Amos with Klaus Lang
The Pankow-Park Sessions
What happens when a composer starts improvising in his mid-80s… Duo from Berlin for cello and piano.
Gold
* Digipack CD* The lightning rod for Alabaster DePlume’s luminous follow up to the widely-acclaimed 2020 release To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 was personal. “Someone was going through a thing,” says the Mancunian poet-performer. “I said, ‘go forward in the courage of your love’. And then I thought 'yeah, that's what I need to hear as well’.” Gold is a sonorous double album that celebrates the communal act of making music and the relationships that can be explored when you purposefully avoid …
Michael Pisaro-Liu: Radiolarians
*In process of stocking* Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world-in-variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms “transcriptions” of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel’s drawings. Radio…
World in World
Black Truffle is pleased to announce World in World, the latest solo offering from prolific Berlin-based guitarist-composer Julia Reidy. Where the recent trilogy of LP releases – brace, brace (Slip, 2019), In Real Life (Black Truffle, 2019), and Vanish (Editions Mego, 2020) – focussed on increasingly lush electronic settings for Reidy’s propulsive fingerpicking and auto-tuned vocals, arranged into wide-ranging side-long epics, World in World finds Reidy refocusing on the core elements of their a…
In Otherness Oneself
Kaja Draksler states that “as a person who speaks and understands different languages, I have an impression that my identity is multifaceted, I have to lose something in myself in order to let the “spirit” of a new language inside me. So in this way I am constantly becoming in otherness myself.” In building this album pianist and composer Kaja Draksler worked on developing specific musical languages for each piece. She attempted to restrict herself to maintaining each language although as she po…
Caspar
This habit some experimental musicians have of applying forced context or stories to what is essentially pure improvised music does sometimes perplex me. Here Janek references Kaspar Hauser with the title and in the sleeve notes. He also states the intention “…to de- and reformulate the idea of beauty”. When referencing the case of Kaspar Hauser, I assume Janek sees himself as “…set free…” from traditional technique, and aims, on this disc at least, to “…redefine by discover[y] and recover the p…