Quaderno Di Strada
"Sciarrino is an important, and distinctive, figure in the Italian avant-garde. The present work is a setting of thirteen brief texts (its subtitle is ’12 canti e un proverbio’, twelve songs and a proverb) for baritone and 14 instrumentalists – the booklet notes say fifteen, but only fourteen are named. It puts before its hearer fragmentary, skittering sounds, sudden changes of dynamics, as sounds loom out of silence and disappear just as quickly. There are fluttery, fugitive sounds, repetitive …
Annunciation Triptych
"All is alive in Liza Lim's music, permeated by unstressed urgency. It's hard to think of anything less Kafkaesque than her Annunciation Triptych, in which she shatters the Romantic trope to pieces, rebuilds it in other ways, and uses the orchestra as a historical and cultural prism wherein the women - Sappho, Mary, and Fatimah - are portrayed as sources of transhistorical light in every movement. Each 'prism-orchestra' is, moreover, an assemblage itself, filtering its figure's radiance in unpre…
Tuscany
*2023 Repress* Los Angeles based pianist, producer, and songwriter John Carroll Kirby traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy in the summer of 2018 on a self-imposed writing trip. During his stay he composed Tuscany, a two side-long solo piano exploration of this particular geographical envelope, a place where nature is shaped into form.Kirby would cycle 12 kilometers each day to Cascata di Malbacco, a waterfall with jade pools and silver stone, and the inspiration for Side A of Tuscany. His own Cascata …
Sketches For Francis
"Atmospheric music that envelops you and transports you to wide linear horizons, distant, desert and strange lands. I particularly liked the organic sounds of the introduction of Sketch I." - Christine Ott
Theodore Wild Ride
Theodore Wild Ride started from the collaboration between French keyboardists Christine Ott (regular collaborator of Yann Tiersen, Tindersticks, Oiseaux-Tempête...), Mathieu Gabry (Snowdrops) and Oed player Ophir Levy. Theodore Wild Ride celebrates musical freedom and redefines the relationship between space and time with a special, unexpected orchestration.
The Further We Ventured
In recent years, pianist and producer Mirek Coutigny has worked on his own world of sound with electronic and acoustic instruments. He improvised on sketches that he wrote over the last 10 years and reworked them for piano, strings, percussion and electronics.The common thread running through “The Further We Ventured” is a fascination for the “suburbs”, more specific, the contrast between the often similar facades and the diversity of stories behind those facades.This is also reflected in the co…
Neha
Two orchestral works by Adrián Demoč, the highly-acclaimed Slovak composer currently based in Spain. The title track 'Neha' (2018) creates a shimmering tension by overlaying 'well-tempered' chords with the same chords using natural harmonics outside of the tempered tuning system. This doubling creates a gentle trembling of interferences. The second piece, 'Popínavá hudba', evolves from a single melodic line, which is repeated with slight variations such that it curves and is bent into fascinatin…
Sound Pieces
Apartment House realise seven works by the pioneering US experimental composer. The first six pieces are text scores for open instrumentation, while 'Peace/Tree' is a seven movement work for violin, cello and piano that specifies pitches, while still leaving a lot of freedom of interpretation. The download also includes an alternative realisation of 'Quintessential' that didn't fit on the CD
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In 2019, at the age of 85, reductionist composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler began an improvising duo, himself on piano, with cellist Tilman Kanitz.
What at first glance seems an uncommon move turns out to be a logical continuation of his minimalist compositional style that has been covered extensively on Edition Telemark and other labels. Kanitz, who was trained in classical western music but gathered musical experiences around the world and especially in India, considers his music-making and perfor…
Fries
Dietmar Bonnen (b. 1958) is a German composer, pianist and singer whose music moves between the cornerstones of art rock, chamber music, blues, and new music. He has extensively collaborated with a large numbers of musicians in his hometown Cologne as well as internationally.
"Fries" (German for frieze) was previously released on CD on Bonnen's own label Obst Music and is presented here on vinyl for the first time. Bonnen states that the piece's structure is "visually inspired by the wall frieze…
Brian Eno Performed by Dedalus Ensemble
With Discreet Music (1975), Music for Airports (1978), and Thursday Afternoon (1985), Brian Eno invented a new music genre, ambient music, which he defined as "able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." These versions performed and arranged by Dedalus Ensemble, according to the musicians and the critics who listened to it, goes beyond what you expect from it. A mental base that takes you far away. One…
Pruebas de Existencia
Marcos Díaz has been part of Buenos Aires underground for many years, being in projects like Bosques and making solo music under the pseudonym Entidad Animada (animated entity). Under this project, Marcos has explored sounds that involve a mix of feedback/distortion through synthesizers, guitars and drum machines that hint at the influence of Stereolab, Spacemen 3, and mid-nineties shoegaze. However, there are also ambient soundscapes with a slight rubbed of the ritualistic psychedelia of the Po…
Naldjorlak
Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue’s first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This album brings together two complete performances …
Continuité, fragilité, résonance
'Continuité, fragilité, résonance' is a 51-minute piece written by Jürg Frey in 2020-2021 for octet: string and saxophone quartets. The Montréal-based Quatuor Bozzini and the Bern-based Konus Quartett premiered the piece in September 2021, and later recorded it for this album with the presence of the composer, during a three-day recording session in August 2022 at the Auditorium of Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland. Both quartets have premiered other works of Frey's in the past and have a d…
Circles, Reeds, and Memories
This release brings together three Dutch composers/performers, Reinier van Houdt, Germaine Sijstermans, and Koen Nutters, who have each released their own work on elsewhere music in recent years. Nutters, who has collaborated in the past with both van Houdt (Cornelius Cardew project) and Sijstermans (DNK Ensemble, The Names), conceived the idea of a trio performance with the two musicians, which later developed into this three-way collaborative project.
Last December the trio played a concert at…
L’Occhio Del Vedere
L’Occhio Del Vedere is a one-hour piece by the trio of Giovanni Di Domenico (piano), Silvia Tarozzi (violin, 1/16th of a tone tuned violin), and Emmanuel Holterbach (large frame drum). In July 2022, while Di Domenico was working on an artistic residency at GMEA in Albi, France, he and Tarozzi and Holterbach made a trio recording, which was later completed by Di Domenico as a one-hour piece. Within a ‘triptych’ structure framework, sparse melodies discreetly and repeatedly emerge from the three i…
Encyclopedia of Pitch and Deviation
Matthias Kranebitter has written the odd piece without electronics in the past. However, the use of electronics in his music usually is a given. At the same time, the way in which electronics are employed in his work is anything but a matter of course. They are not simply an instrument amongst others, they don't serve as an atmospheric background, a synthesized ear-tickler, or formal glue which is meant to cover up fractures within the musical material. Rather, they themselves embody such fractu…
Sensational Bliss
"In the past, I was interested in themes of sound, such as, 'new sound', 'expressive sound' and 'metaphoric sound'. In fact, I still enjoy these expressions. However, my obsession with expressing sound itself has decreased, and I instead want to express my feelings, my thoughts and my life, with sound. With this change, I have enjoyed taking a closer look at my temperament, personality, and life, and have tried to display the results through sound. To better articulate myself, I have avoided any…
Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions
If you enter into the music of Martin Smolka, prepare yourself to come face-to-face with profound and enigmatic conflicts. The music of Martin Smolka resonates straight into the core of a suffocated planet, suffering through unending catastrophes in the political-social spheres. The Aleph Guitar Quartet and soprano Daisy Press present a selection from Smolka's oeuvre that spans almost 25 years.
Moon on the Sea – Sea in the Moon
If you enter into the music of Martin Smolka, prepare yourself to come face-to-face with profound and enigmatic conflicts. The music of Martin Smolka resonates straight into the core of a suffocated planet, suffering through unending catastrophes in the political-social spheres. The Aleph Guitar Quartet and soprano Daisy Press present a selection from Smolka's oeuvre that spans almost 25 years.