Composition / Contemporary

Composer, alone by Jürg Frey (performed by Reinier van Houdt) is a luminous retrospective stretching across three discs and 35 years. Twelve solo piano pieces—fragile yet substantial—trace Frey's evolution, distilling time and silence into crystalline musical objects. Van Houdt’s touch brings warmth and clarity, illuminating the invisible architecture within Frey’s sensitive landscapes.

The concert version of Einstein on the Beach by Ictus, Suzanne Vega, and Collegium Vocale Gent distills Philip Glass’s pioneering minimalism into a mesmerizing sound ritual. Stripped of Robert Wilson’s grand staging, Vega’s measured narration weaves through the ensemble’s crystalline precision, revealing the raw musical architecture of this modernist epic.

Infinity Gradient unites Tristan Perich’s meticulous 1-bit electronics and the grand timbre of James McVinnie’s pipe organ in a sustained, seven-part exploration of sonic architecture. This hour-long symphony envelops listeners in a hybrid sound world that fuses mathematical clarity with the emotive breadth of the organ, traversing austere pulses and prismatic harmonic clusters with exceptional scale and subtlety.

Round Sky brings together Léo Dupleix and Asterales in an exploration of just intonation and radiant calm. The album’s three compositions subtly merge analogue synthesizer, harpsichord, spinet, bass, flute, and guitar in landscapes of nuanced minimalism. Methodical in structure yet alive to spontaneous beauty, the record unfolds as a quietly luminous meditation on the complexities of harmony and texture.

Vanessa Wagner breathes new life into Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes, revealing the powerful lyricism and subtle turbulence of Glass’s minimalist language. Her interpretation brings emotional intensity and poetic nuance across all 20 etudes, reflecting over a decade spent exploring the repertoire and making for an immersive listening experience.

Raven Chacon's Voiceless Mass, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, with two other compositions performed by Present Music. The Diné composer was born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, Arizona, in the Navajo Nation.

Morton Feldman's Intermission 6 (1953) is a sparse piano piece that typically lasts between 3 and 12 minutes in standard performances. Finnish experimental musician Antti Tolvi has created a radical 72-minute realization that extends the work's meditation on silence and resonance to an unprecedented duration. Tolvi discovered the piece through Philip Thomas's five-CD Feldman Piano box set on Another Timbre, becoming fascinated by Intermission 6 as "the piece which has the most silence in it, and…

Japanese guitarist Tsunehito Tsuchihashi, celebrated for his versatile artistry across both classical and contemporary repertoires, proudly presents his debut solo album, “Crypte.” This extraordinary recording, released in April 2025, brings together the visionary works of five contemporary composers, most written on commission and premiered by Tsuchihashi himself, showcasing his commitment to expanding the guitar’s expressive potential through innovative collaborations. “Crypte” is a testament …

This album features two film scores by Satoshi Satō. Scooping Water, the Moon in Hand is a documentary film tracing the life of legendary poet and Chinese literary scholar Ye Jiaying (1924–). It won the Best Documentary Award at the 33rd China Golden Rooster Awards (2020), often referred to as China's Academy Awards. Ye Jiaying is also a scholar of Du Fu, and Satō Sōmei set Du Fu's poem “Eight Poems on Autumn Feelings” to music at the request of the film director. Director Oguri Kōhei's Foujita …

*2025 stock* Renowned Japanese composer Jo Kondo unveils his captivating album “Near And Far,” performed by The Cambridge New Musik Players and conducted by Paul Hoskins. This distinguished release, first presented in 1996, features five transcendent works that invite listeners into Kondo’s unique sound world across 47 minutes of meticulously crafted chamber music. With a deep sensitivity to both space and sonority, “Near And Far” balances subtle instrumental interplay with Kondo’s signature min…

*2025 stock* Renowned Japanese composer Jo Kondo is celebrated for his unique and refined approach to contemporary classical music. This recording offers an intimate journey into Kondo’s distinctive musical world, marked by clarity, restraint, and subtle yet powerful expression.   In Yokohama brings together a collection of works that exemplify Kondo’s lifelong exploration into sound, silence, and the delicate spaces in between. Throughout the album, the listener is invited to experience music t…

*2025 stock* Renowned percussionist Shiniti Uéno unveil this latest recording project: Music for Percussion Ensemble by Japanese Composers. This remarkable album offers a profound exploration of Japan’s contemporary music landscape, highlighting the diversity, refinement, and innovation that can be found in its modern percussion repertoire.   The recording showcases six visionary composers whose works have shaped and expanded the language of percussion music in Japan: Joji Yuasa, Akio Yasuraoka,…

*2025 stock* A landmark new recording brings together two of Frederic Rzewski’s most powerful and socially engaged works, interpreted with striking intensity by pianist Takuya Otaki. At the heart of the release is The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975), a monumental set of 36 variations on the Chilean resistance song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!”, composed as an ode to solidarity and resilience in times of political struggle. Widely considered one of the pinnacles of late 20th…

*2025 stock* A new recording brings together the refined artistry of Japanese composer Jo Kondo, the visionary musicians of Ensemble Nomad, and the distinct pianism of Satoko Inoue in a captivating exploration of sound, texture, and form. Orient Orientation offers a rare and illuminating entry into Kondo’s world, where silence, resonance, and subtle contrasts guide the listener through an intimate sonic landscape.   The album presents works that showcase Kondo’s unique compositional language—mar…

*2025 stock* The celebrated pianist Aki Takahashi presents an essential interpretation of Morton Feldman’s monumental work "Triadic Memories", a cornerstone of late 20th-century piano music. Known for its meditative expansiveness and delicate shifts in color, this composition stretches the boundaries of time, inviting listeners into Feldman’s unique sound world where silence and resonance carry as much weight as the notes themselves.   Recorded with Takahashi’s characteristic sensitivity and tec…

*300 copies limited edition* Ars nova meets dark folk, aural cinema, contemporary music, drone and much more... An astonishing album gathering three extended pieces that unfold the works of medieval musical genius Guillaume de Machaut, the greatest and last of the troubadours. Lovingly recorded by sound master Frederic Alstadt, featuring Clara Levy, Stéphane Clor & Eugénie De Mey, this album captures all the poignancy and poetry, of this timeless music. A passionate performance by virtuosic musi…

Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016's On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology. Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as laye…

Joanna Woźny’s music resists certainty. Fragmented, elusive, and ever-transforming, it listens into the noise of the everyday and distills from it something fiercely alive. Her works trace perception’s fault lines – between sound and noise, sense and abstraction – constantly unmaking and remaking form. In this sonic terrain, repetition never means stasis; structure dissolves into process. Each piece is a beginning: a seismographic record of emergent thought, a refusal to conclude. For Woźny, com…

Felipe Lara’s music is driven by a visceral sense of presence and process. Beneath its notated clarity lies a deep trust in the performers: a shared language built over years of collaboration, where every sound becomes a negotiation between gesture, breath, and form. Lara’s work moves between the intimate and the monumental, but always seeks what lies behind the surface – where structure becomes porous, expression is embodied, and music emerges as a living tension between instability and control…

"The line is a whole, an identity, for a particular place and time." — Fred Sandback

An Index of Metals, Fausto Romitelli’s final work, is an ecstatic ritual of sound, light, and image—a multimedia opera that fuses electronic music, psychedelic ecstasy, and brutal-poetic texts into an intoxicating sensory flood. Blending techno, pop art, noise, and spectralism, Romitelli propels music theatre into a hallucinatory present: metallic, eruptive, rebellious. The voice is distorted, the image disintegrates, sound becomes palpable material. In this uncompromising fusion of composition,…

Found Keys is the debut album by American artist Ruth Maine. Although Ruth has been playing and composing music for over two decades, this is the first time she decided to record some of her varied compositions and share them with the public. But in times when it is the norm to clamour for attention, she prefers to go the opposite way. Ruth likes to let her music speak for itself and stay in the shadows. The 16 short piano pieces heard on this album, each about two to three minutes long, were re…

Adding to their already singular catalog of releases, Three:Four Records returns with Carnaval 2, a stunning new work by the composer Alessandro Bosetti, performed by pianist Reinier van Houdt. A vividly conceptual and post-modern hybrid, reinterpreting Robert Schumann's Carnaval as a radically reconsidered series of piano and electro-acoustic interludes - forcing the sensibilities and aesthetics of 19th Century chamber music to coexist with those of avant-garde - it's easily one of the singular…

"Speechless (2019) is an opera for 4 vocal soloists, bass orchestra and community choir, and is intended as a personal response to the plight of refugees worldwide. It inspired by the Australian Human Rights Commission report, ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention,’ overseen by Gillian Triggs. When this report was tabled in the Australian Parliament in 2014, I was overcome with the cruelty of the debate around the future of detained asylum seekers. Spee…

The fourth CD in Zorn’s remarkable series of piano trio recordings exploring classical forms, Nocturnes is an absolute delight. Preceded by Suite for Piano (2022), Ballades (2024), and the Impromptus (2025), Nocturnes is Zorn’s personal take on the beautiful tradition of night music. Touching on Chopin, Scriabin, Debussy, Berg, and more, the music is a wonderland of subtlety—dreamy, drifting, and utterly compelling. Brian, Jorge, and Ches, three of Zorn’s closest and most trusted collaborators p…

*300 copies limited edition* Valby Vokalgruppe returns with Solids for Voices — a new album landing on 7th November 2025 via Hands in the Dark. Initiated in 2008 by Anja Jacobsen, the Danish collective’s current line-cup is completed by Lil Lacy, Sonja LaBianca, Cæcilie Trier and Laura Marie Madsen. The group has written and performed a large number of cross-aesthetic pieces over the years, including an album Bah New Era released in 2012 on Eget Værelse. Sharpened to its core, the group dives de…

Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis and their leader Jaan-Eik Tulve have established themselves among the leading interpreters of Arvo Pärt’s music over a quarter-century of close collaboration with the composer – a relationship that builds on the almost half a century long artistic partnership between Pärt and producer Manfred Eicher. Of the ensemble’s ECM New Series recording The Deer’s Cry, the BBC Music Magazine wrote that “the level of artistry necessary to achieve the kind of living, bre…

Aeris is the ninth ECM New Series album to feature the vibrant and highly expressive music of Erkki-Sven Tüür. Olari Elts, a long-time champion of Tüür’s compositions, conducts the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in compelling, intensely-focused performances of Phantasma, De Profundis and Tüür’s tenth symphony ÆRIS, a vast drama of shifting energies and interactions, which is scored for horn quartet and orchestra. The symphony is in four movements that transition seamlessly. Tüür: “Each mov…

*2025 stock* Éric Gaudibert’s greatest legacy lies in his artistic generosity, aesthetic openness and commitment to exploration, qualities he shared throughout his career with fellow musicians and students. A decade after his passing, a vibrant and diverse artistic ecosystem shaped by his influence is brought into focus. To honour his memory, twenty-two composers who were accompanied or mentored by Gaudibert on their artistic paths were invited to create miniature works. These brief compositions…

We are delighted to announce the latest project by acclaimed pianist and composer Masako Ohta, My Music Garden, a luminous and intimate journey into the poetic world of sound. Masako Ohta is celebrated for her sensitive performances and her ability to transcend borders between classical, contemporary, and improvisational music. With My Music Garden, she invites listeners into a personal landscape of reflection and discovery, where every note blooms like a flower in a musical garden.   The progra…

2016 release ** "This release by Edition Wandelweiser Records collects recent compositions by Katharina Weber, Jack Callahan, Alex Goretzki, and Alfred Zimmerlin, performed by Christian Buck on guitar and Christian Wolfarth on percussion. It opens with Callahan’s ‘New Piece’, beginning with quiet feedback and low rumble before moving on to evenly spaced chords, cymbals, and soft beats. There’s an ambiguity or uncertainty to these sounds, or to my hearing of them, in terms of their harmony and ti…

2016 release ** "In the early days of Wandelweiser records, a disc of music by the forgotten composer Herman Van San extended the label’s scope and helped to cement its aesthetic.  He was composing long before there was a Wandelweiser group or label, but his outsider static and innovative music was a perfect fit.  This disc of music by the all but unknown Mikheil Shugliashvili achieves a similar purpose. Born in 1941, the composer died in 1996, the year of the label’s first release, but his radi…

2009 release ** "Two sets of pieces written for the duo Contour (Stephen Altoff-trumpet, Lee Forrest Ferguson-percussion), a potentially unwieldy combination. Frey's "22 sächelchen" (small things) is rather just that, 22 miniatures lasting 32 1/2 minutes that vary from quiet reductionism to outright fanfares. I guess some of the latter sort are a bit...shocking, at least in a Wandelweiser context. But there are also oblique references to jazz (the mute in #11), processional music (the tympani in…

The album Nagual by Matt Choboter is a sonic ritual that dissolves the boundaries between composition and improvisation, tradition and innovation. Drawing on just intonation, Balinese tuning systems, and South Indian rhythmic theory, Choboter and his ensemble craft a vivid, shape-shifting musical world—at once ancient and otherworldly. Nagual resists the comforts of familiar forms, embracing ambiguity, sensory multiplicity, and intuitive collective listening. This music does not follow a path—it…

*75 copies limited edition* On Not here but somewhere, the Japanese ambient guitarist crafts freeform soundscapes that feel less composed than discovered. Each track unfolds like a whispered conversation between emotion and environment — guitar lines ripple like wind over water, subtly shifting direction, as if carried downstream by a current of pure intuition. The result is a quietly enveloping odyssey, where every piece becomes a new place, felt more than defined.

EM Records is proud to present 8 Automated Works, the first full release by Componium Ensemble, an "indeterminate chamber music" ensemble helmed by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks. The project is inspired by the long history of automated musical instruments, beginning with the ancient Greek Archimedes and further developed by the Banū Mūsā brothers in 9th century Baghdad, who "first perfected the concept of a programmable, automated musician: a mechanically controlled flute which used hydraulic …

"Hyperrealist Music, 2011-2015" is a selection of late masterpieces by Noah Creshevsky, a proponent of "Hyperreal Music," which opened a new door to cyber-human music.

American composer Kory Reeder’s 10th album In Place returns to the Grid Series heard on 2 of the 4 tracks from Reeder’s debut release on Edition Wandelweiser Records Love Songs/Duets. With raw recordings of three works from the mid-phase of this Series of 45 works, In Place is the first release exclusively containing pieces from the Grid Series and features Reeder on piano with long-time collaborators Kathleen Crabtree and Michael Moore on violas. Each track is a space to dwell, on the edge of s…

Veiled Erosion, the debut album by Anqi Liu, invites listeners into a world of spectral nuance, cultural memory, and fragile connection. Her music breathes through thresholds—between noise and tone, breath and bow, self and other. In the closing Etude for Friends, Liu renders friendship as a sonic practice: intimate, unstable, and quietly transformative. Drawing from Mongolian long song and microtonal chamber traditions, she composes sound as a site of listening, learning, and being-together. Ve…

Rispecchiato in quarzo, Dal nero immenso, lèvita, and Traspare assente albore unfold as structured sequences of transformation—transparent, hypnotic, fairy. Each solo instrument (piano, contrabass clarinet, bass flute) interacts with multi-layered electroacoustic textures built entirely from acoustic sources. These “electronics” remain sensitive and natural, shaped through breath, resonance, and subtle manipulations. An 1876 Steinway, spectral clarinet multiphonics, and whispered flute tones for…