String Quartets
Rand Steiger’s Introspective Trilogy is a series of string quartets with electronics composed over a period of eight years for the JACK Quartet. Reflecting on emotional states through musical expression, the quartets explore intense feelings of anger, frustration, and despair in response to alarming political developments in the U.S. and globally, from 2016 when the project began, to catastrophic recent developments. Steiger relates the resurgence of xenophobia and well-known elements of authori…
Désert Méditerranéen
The pianistic writing of Giorgos Koumendakis represents a rare encounter of delicacy, intellectual concentration, and profound compositional coherence. It belongs to a free post-modernity, rooted in the continuity of certain Eastern European composers who developed an independent and original modernity. The cycle Mediterranean Desert, which forms the central axis of this album, is a work for piano consisting of 22 pieces inspired by Mediterranean flora and fauna. It offers a distinctive sound ma…
Loo(p)cy
This album is intended to be a retrospective view of Luigi Manfrin’s compositional journey. Rather than following a chronological order, it identifies loops that run through his musical production: recurrences, foldings and returns that never replicate the same pattern, but instead reactivate structural tensions in different contexts. At the core is the idea of sound as an immanent experience. The unity of the album lies not in the identity of its materials, but in the constant questioning of th…
Third Places
*150 copies limited edition* Composer Vasco Mendonça presents his third album “Third Places”. The album brings together a collection of landmark performances and features some of the leading names in international contemporary music, including countertenor Iestyn Davies, mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj, the Porto Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble Het Muziek, and conductors Brad Lubman and Ernest Martínez Izquierdo. More than just a record, “Third Places” stands as a space for artistic…
Many Many Women
Many Many Women by Petr Kotík is a large-scale composition for voices and instruments from 1975-78 on the text of Gertrude Stein's novella of the same name. It was published in Paris in 1910 as part of the book G.M.P. - Gertrude, Matisse, Picasso. In 1972, the book was published again by Dick Higgins in his publishing venture Something Else Press. Kotík used the complete text, which determined the length of the piece. Inspired by his close collaboration with the composer and singer Julius Eastma…
Treatise by Cornelius Cardew
*2026 stock* For this collection of live performances, we approached Treatise not just as a score, but as a piece of visual art—an abstract landscape that drew us in with its raw graphic beauty. We felt compelled to translate it into sound using our instruments, while also engaging with the work on its own terms. In researching Cardew’s notes and his Treatise Handbook, it became clear that he didn’t intend the piece to be an open-ended free-for-all. Rather, he encouraged performers to develop a …
New Directions In Music 2
Morton Feldman’s New Directions in Music 2 is one of the true cornerstones of modern classical music. Originally released in 1959, the album captures Feldman at the very beginning of his radical journey into sound, space and silence, developing the sparse, floating language that would go on to influence generations of experimental composers and ambient musicians alike. With cover artwork by abstract painter Philip Guston and clear parallels to the chance-based ideas of John Cage, the record perf…
Mille soleils à l'oeil nu
*100 copies limited edition* Virginie Reid announces the release of Mille Soleils à l'oeil nu, a luminous new album that explores the delicate intersection of acoustic intimacy and boundless sonic imagination. Recorded with a keen ear for texture and a fearless commitment to improvisation, Mille Soleils à l'oeil nu invites listeners into a world where small gestures expand into vast, cinematic landscapes.
Mille Soleils à l'oeil nu traces a journey through light and shadow. Reid's compositions ba…
Infinito Nero / Le Voci Sottovetro
1999 release ** Both peculiar archaism and highest sensitivity characterize this quiet, while extremely tense sound landscapes of the Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.
Salvatore Sciarrino’s music-theatre piece Luci mie traditrici (Oh my deceitful eyes) was originally based upon the colourful life of the composer Carlo Gesualdo, but when he discovered that Schnittke was also busy on an opera on the same subject, Sciarrino changed track and eliminated all references to the great madrigalist i…
Meadow Rituals
Lüüp, the acclaimed international project with collaborations / contributions from musicians from different countries known for blending folk textures with cinematic ambience, releases Meadow Rituals, an expansive 3CD collection that unfolds like a seasonal hymn to nature, memory, and communal ritual. Across three discs, Lüüp weaves delicate acoustic instrumentation, ritualistic percussion, choral textures, and intimate field recordings into a cohesive sonic journey that feels both timeless and …
Robert Morris: Carnatic String Quartet
The interesting thing about Robert Morris’s (b. 1943) remarkable career as a composer (and a theorist) is how free he is to move from composing works of great rigor with intricate integrity in his use of pitch-class design, to works of sonic beauty to be performed in a natural outdoor environment, to imaginative electronic/computer music, to the music of acculturation. Among the latter, his monumental Carnatic String Quartet is an outstanding example. In his own words: “Carnatic String Quartet (…
Godspeed In 4/4 Time
This double LP with 16-page booklet is the extensive documentation of the exhibition "Godspeed in 4/4 Time" at the church St. Matthäus in Berlin, where artist William Engelen installed an instrument consisting of 366 metal tubes that was on display from May to September 2025. The tubes were mounted next to each other surrounding the nave of the church. Each tube was unique and differed from the others in length, diameter, thickness and/or material (copper, brass, stainless steel, aluminium), and…
Volumes Variations
*200 copies limited edition* Following the album Volumes released on the Bern-based label CRTTR in April 2025, Tobias Lanz has continued working with this original composition through two new interpretations. While the earlier recording sought to recreate and expand the pallete of the church organ through digital means, these new works shift attention back toward an acoustic interpretation. Both pieces were recorded in the Stadtkirche Burgdorf, where the large hall functions as an active collabo…
György Kurtág: Secreta
Bastille Musique presents its fortieth release »György Kurtág: Secreta« featuring Quatuor Béla. The album contains a new studio production of Kurtág’s complete works for string quartet from 1959 to 2011, including the first recording of a previously unpublished composition. The recordings, produced by the SWR, are complemented by a 56-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with texts by Tobias Bleek, a conversation with the quartet and the recording producer, several autograph pages and two concertina-…
Symphony No.5.: The Last Light is Your Own Star
The latest album from Michael Cashmore (formerly of Current 93, plus known for his work as Nature and Organisation and collaborations with artists such as Marc Almond, Nick Cave, Bill Fay, Rose McDowell and Antony and the Johnsons, amongst others) veers from the paths his previous releases have been on into an area altogether more grandiose or stately. While all of his recordings under his own name have alluded to orchestral or soundtrack work to varying degrees, he has long committed himself to…
Palais de Mari
*300 copies limited edition* "Feldman used to say that music is not so much an ‘art-form’ as a ‘memory-form’. Scientific research informs us that personal memories are not stored in one stable unchanging state, but that each time we retrieve a memory, it is slightly modified. We hear the opening four-note gesture of this work, it soon passes, but the resulting resonance from the sustaining pedal remains a little longer, and then only a delicate memory trace is left. This opening gesture is heard…
For Bunita Marcus
*300 copies limited edition* "Technique and art both take time, so nothing durable happens by accident. But, is durability enough once appearance and disappearance become important? Can ebb and flow be set in stone? Or cut to vinyl? Or digitised? Perhaps we have only become habituated to the possibility. A pianist depresses a key, strings are hammered. At what point does the sound begin? It is not quite right to say that, in this moment, there was no sound but that now, in this moment, there is.…
Alina
It's unlikely that many will have missed the fact that ECM - an unparalleled home for groundbreaking music, whose catalog has predominantly been restricted to the CD format since the 1980s - has begun releasing stunning, beautifully produced audiophile vinyl pressings of a select number of their most in-demand releases. Among the most requested to receive this treatment, Arvo Pärt's 1999 full-length, Alina, has long topped their list. Finally, such a dream has come to be with its multiple render…
Clock In, Clock Out
"Musica Mosaica undertakes an experimental exploration of sounds, viewed not merely as simple acoustic phenomena, but as truly living realities. From this perspective, experimentation is by no means a convenient metaphor used to illustrate an intuitive or informal approach. On the contrary, it is meant literally — deliberate, almost scientific: each musical piece becomes a small laboratory where sounds are observed as animated entities, with their own morphology, with impulses that bring them cl…
Ghosts Beneath The Brine
Amsterdam-based collective Wanderwelle concludes their trilogy on Important Records with an album that confronts the climate crisis and its devastating impact on coastal ecosystems. From overfishing to warming and acidifying seas, the group documents the decline of fish, seabirds, crustaceans and other marine life. Following 2024's All Hands Bury The Cliffs At Sea and 2022 Black Clouds Above The Bows, Ghosts Beneath The Brine is another mournful take on the woes of the natural world. There's ris…