Composition / Contemporary

1998 release ** "Wendy Mae Chambers (b 1953) is known for the scope and originality of her works, typified by large and unusual instrumental combinations. In Chambers’s own words, Twelve² is a voodoo tone poem in eleven movements for twelve percussionists. Each movement is about 4 minutes in length. The last movement is 4'33" of lots of sound (in tribute to John Cage's 4'33" of silence). Voodoo drumming [calls] forth Cage’s spirit and the bells, chimes, and gongs [celebrate] ... celestial qualit…

1986 release ** "Ondekoza (鬼太鼓座, Ondekoza) ("demon drum group"), sometimes referred to as "Za Ondekoza", is a Japanese troupe specializing in taiko drumming. Founded in 1969 by Den Tagayasu, Ondekoza was influential in the rise of the kumi-daiko (group taiko) style of taiko. Not a taiko player himself, Tagayasu helped transform taiko from a festival-based music form to a virtuosic performance art performed on stage. Ondekoza's performances in North America in 1975 was the first exposure for many…

1991 release ** "Luis de Pablo represents the first post war generation in Spain, a lawyer, his music has graced all the primary festivals of new music in Europe, not so much the USA,nothing at all. He writes incredibly for strings in any genre there, solo, duets or trios. These pieces are more colorful mixtures of winds percussion,piano and strings and reveals a certain surface playfulness, an affinity for the dance gesture I think. The Notturnino has a kind of wispy arid flush of colours, ongo…

Olivier Messiaen saw birds as his greatest teachers, capturing their songs with passion and precision. His piano works, especially Catalogue d’oiseaux and Petites esquisses d’oiseaux, translate birdsong into rich, colorful music. Messiaen’s fascination with rhythm, color, and nature shaped his compositions, blending ornithology with spirituality. Pianist Alfonso Gómez delivers an astonishing interpretation on this recording, adding to his acclaimed discography for this label. As Messiaen himself…

Evis Sammoutis’ music is a dynamic fusion of physicality, virtuosity, and cultural depth. Drawing on his Cypriot roots and diverse training, his compositions explore tactile soundscapes, poetic contrasts, and neurological aesthetics. Works like Echopraxia and In Darkness challenge conventions of imitation and vulnerability, while Rhymes and Engravings evoke intricate structures and materiality. Inspired by literature, visual art, and the expressive potential of sound, Sammoutis crafts music that…

1994 release **

1991 release **

First released in 1969 on the Advanced Recordings label, this album represents Richard Maxfield’s music manifesto. A wild collage of highly manipulated sonic events from an extreme variety of analog sources.

The Lost Genesis of Ambient Minimalism: Harold Budd's Seminal The Oak Of The Golden Dreams Returns to Vinyl

In his album Tarió, Manuel Contreras Vázquez presents a profound engagement with Latin American history, sound exploration, and experimental notation. Through intricate timbral textures and an architectural approach to composition, his works navigate themes of memory, resistance, and human experience. From intimate solo pieces to collective vocal and instrumental forces, Contreras Vázquez challenges conventional musical boundaries, blending silence, phonetics, and social narratives. This album o…

This compelling album presents works by Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin, exploring the fragile balance between destruction and communication, control and surrender. Seltene Erde transforms the double bass and ensemble into a shifting landscape of illusion and resonance, evoking the invisible forces shaping our world. Atara, born from the isolation of 2020, is a powerful orchestral lament, where vast sonic masses collide with the delicate voices of two singers, lost yet luminous. Through these w…

1995 release ** "This reading by Anthony de Mare of pianist Frederic Rzewski's compositions is a revelatory reading, in that those works that were written for piano and voice have never been heard outside of the composer's own interpretations. There's the amplified heavy breathing at the beginning of "De Profundis" that gives way to an angular series of scalar arpeggios and staccato phrasing before a long written oratory inspired by Oscar Wilde. At over 26 minutes, and composed for de Mare, Rzew…

2015 release ** "The Albanian patrol boat Katër i Radës sank in the Strait of Otranto in 1997 after being rammed by an Italian corvette that was trying to repel it. Around 100 women, men and children died while fleeing the civil war. Almost twenty years after that tragedy, the Albanian composer Admir Shkurtaj, who has lived in Salento by adoption, has written a contemporary chamber opera for the 2014 Venice Biennale (which commissioned it), with a libretto by Alessandro Leogrande and staged by t…

*250 copies limited edition* "Play" is a work by Berlin-based composer Hannes Lingens. The score consists of 100 cards on which brief instructions to the musicians are written. The CD "Play" (hitorri-963), which contains two performances of this work, was released on the Hitorri label in October 2023. Tom Soloveitzik, a musician from Israel who was living in Tokyo at the time of that release, had participated in one of the performances on the CD. As a result, a performance, produced by Soloveitz…

*2025 stock. 300 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based composer Yuka Shibuya released the album "Works for Piano," a selection of piano compositions performed by Satoko Inoue, on the Ftarri Classical label in 2021. This new CD release, also from Ftarri Classical, documents performances of six compositions by Shibuya. "Found Moment" is comprised of live performances held in the concert space in Ftarri, Tokyo. In a concert that took place on September 20, 2021, “View from the Round Window 2” (2018) …

*250 copies limited edition* Composer Taizo Hida was born in 1972 and lives in Osaka. In 2022, the album "of rain," in which pianist Satoko Inoue performs compositions by Hida, was released on Ftarri Classical and received high praise. Two new albums have been issued simultaneously on Ftarri Classical in order to showcase the richness of Taizo Hida's creations. One of these is the CD The Rain Traces Its Outline. “The Rain Traces Its Outline” is a work for piano that Hida completed in 2023. It wa…

1993 release ** "When the founders of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) set out to develop a Department of Music, they decided to start with composers and leave it to them to attract performers and scholars to an environment that could be a home for exploration and invention, unceasing challenge and debate. The intention was to have musicians as committed to new perspectives and discoveries as, say, UCSD's physicists. Even before the department was established, Harry Partch was invi…

1991 release ** This disc features a colourful array of contemporary works by international and Canadian composers. From the reflective and lyrical Little Venice to the dazzling, virtuosic percussion piece She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket, Toronto’s premier contemporary chamber ensemble, Arraymusic, provides the listener with a five course meal for the ears. Linda C. Smith Little Venice, Steve Reich New York Counterpoint, José Evangelista Merapi, Rodney Sharman Dark Glasses, Kevin Volans She …

1992 release ** "'Rebonds' (I. Xenakis), 'Akea' (I. Xenakis), 'Epicycles' (I. Xenakis), 'Mania' (C. Tsoupaki), 'Concerto For Oboe And Chamber Ensemble' (D. del Puerto) - Machiko Takahasi (fl.), Ernest Rombout (ob.), Mark Dijcks, Ria Kleinjan (cl.), Jonathan Reeder, Stefanie Liedtke (bsn.), Fokke van Heel, Guillermo Zarzo (h.), Peter van Dinther (tp.), Willie Verdievel (tb.), Jan van der Sanden (tu.), Mifune Tsuji, Izumi Okubo, Paul Hendriks (vl), Susan Bierre (vla), Tadashi Tanaka (cel.), Thom d…

2019 release ** "Rippling piano lines fill the air, once again rethinking the possibly of what contemporary Italian music is and was."

Nachschriften: A set of 26 short pieces that cycle through all the major and minor tonalities, Nachschriften are a series of reflections and variations on themes - sometimes, variations on variations. For the most part they are simple dances - minuets, mazurkas, waltzes and ländler. Ländler: The references, the paying of homage to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf and Zemlinsky are so obvious as to hardly need comment. They are heard through lenses polished by a later, more red…

*250 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based guitarist/composer Taku Sugimoto and cellist/composer Stefan Thut, who lives in Solothurn, Switzerland, have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Japan. Their duo CD "Taku Sugimoto / Stefan Thut," which was released on the Ftarri label in 2018, was highly praised. The new duo CD by Sugimoto and Thut, "atwain," documents their performance of a single 39-minute work on the riverside in Solothurn in …

*200 copies limited edition* Jun-Y Ciao (born in 1978 in Shanghai) is a musician whose main instruments are sax and clarinet. Having studied in Dusseldorf and Mainz, Germany, in the second half of the 2000s, he is currently based in Shanghai and Dusseldorf. He has numerous releases on Zhu Wenbo's cassette label Zoomin' Night. Beijing-based Zhu Wenbo is known both for his own performance activities and for running Zoomin' Night, which plans events and releases cassettes. A musician with many conn…

A dismal moment, try not to think about it so many of us, so restless, a dull chapter worth skipping, mind numbing. Constantly talking, when all we really wanted to do was… As usual perhaps, daily impressions of unremitting danger make people seek refuge in futile obsessions with furniture, food and clothing. Endless words, irritating until we stopped saying them, then sorely missed. A conjunction of multiple evils that could have been avoided, had it only been seen as profitable to do so. Naggi…

, for vibraphone and tape, I attempted to enter Pietro Grossi’s sound spectrum of six Ostinati (OSTN) intended as moving soundscapes, maintaining the specific grain of each field as the centre of sound gravity. The vibraphone motor was conceived at different speeds for each field in the search for a vibrant and luminous sound, maintaining, within a sound unit of organic character, two dimensions: figure and background in the dialectic relationship of listening. In the first ostinato, a constant …

*250 copies limited edition* Composer Taizo Hida was born in 1972 and lives in Osaka. In 2022, the album of rain, in which pianist Satoko Inoue performs compositions by Hida, was released on Ftarri Classical and received high praise. Two new albums have been issued simultaneously on Ftarri Classical in order to showcase the richness of Taizo Hida’s creativity. One of these is the CD Yunagi. The CD consists of five tracks, "Yunagi 1" to "Yunagi 5." Hida composed "Yunagi 1" in June of 2020. He lat…

2014 release ** "Alessandra Novaga plays the electric guitar and this is her solo debut, with five songs composed for her by Paula Matthusen, Travis Just, Sandro Mussida, Vittorio Zago and Francesco Gagliardi: all top-notch musicians, who left in Alessandra's hands scores that were very little "classical" on which she was able to give space to her personality by interpreting and shaping the sound. Because the sound is the basis of the whole album, in this case that of an electric guitar and an a…

*2025 stock* Erased Tapes releasex ‘Give It to the Sky: Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning Expanded’ by composer and producer Peter Broderick and French 12-piece group Ensemble 0; a complete re-recording of Russell’s epic minimalist orchestral composition originally released in 1983. ‘Give It to the Sky’ also includes unreleased tracks by Russell which have been restored and re-recorded, resulting in an 80-minute reanimation that threads several lost songs into a meticulous and gorgeous rendering…

Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke’s music does not use just intonation, it projects that “corporeal“ quality that this predecessor valued as essential.The pieces on this disc make for in…

Gary Graffman and I have been staunch friends since we met as students at the Curtis Institute in 1943. The notion of pooling our talents, however, arose only when we returned to that Institute nearly five decades later, Gary as director, I on the faculty. Now Gary, who has not made professional use of his right hand since 1980, felt an urge to expand the admirable but restricted literature of left-hand works (most of them composed long ago for the elder brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstei…

Eric Chasalow (b 1955), who grew to aesthetic maturity as Postmodernism was evolving, points (not at all surprisingly) to jazz as part of the family tree. In 1983, Chasalow created a set of three works for soloist and electronic sounds. The composer fashioned each, for cello, for soprano, and for flute, with particular accomplished performers in mind, taking his inspiration, he says, "from their personal styles and energy." Chasalow composed Hanging in the Balance (1983) for the redoubtable cell…

This recording is the product of a remarkable intercultural musical experiment. It contains five strikingly varied works, each one the fruit of musical cross-pollination between America and the island of Bali. The three American composers represented here－Evan Ziporyn, Michael Tenzer and Wayne Vitale, along with their peers in the Sekar Jaya ensemble－have, since 1979, devoted an extraordinary amount of effort, intelligence, and talent to the study and performance of traditional Balinese music. T…

Carlos Surinach (b 1915) is an American composer whose Spanish heritage, together with the rigors of German musical training, has enabled him to produce an oeuvre that "achieves an effect of novelty by exploiting all the familiar clichés of the `Spanish idiom' with new technical resources and with a completely non-impressionistic sensibility," as Gilbert Chase wrote in Music of Spain. Like Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto, the Doppio Concertino (Double Concerto) of 1954 is basically neocla…

Michelle Ekizian (b 1956) and Louis Karchin (b 1951) represent a generation of American composers that has seen postwar American serialism enriched by other compositional approaches, both new and old. The process of stylistic synthesis and individualization, evidenced in the works presented here and in others, continues unabated today. Written in between the first and second installments of her ongoing orchestral cycle, The Exiled Heart Series, which now includes “The Exiled Heart” (1986), “Morn…

The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. This is music, to paraphrase William Blake, of innocence and of experience. The innocence and experience are not simply those of a boy growing up amid the terrors of China's Cultural Revolution—they are also components of a well-trained composer's creative equipment: the beloved folk music of a land left behind and…

In 1986, three composers and three flutists met in a novel commissioning project supported by a National Endowment Consortium Commissioning Grant. Flutists Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, and Paula Robison, each a longtime supporter and performer of new music, asked Joseph Schwantner, Paul Schoenfield, and Robert Beaser to write new works for flute and orchestra. On this recording, each solo artist presents the orchestral work composed for him or her, as well as a flute and piano "encore" by the s…

At the outset of his career, Harold Shapero (b in 1920) was widely recognized as one of his generation's most promising composers. While in his twenties, he undertook to study closely the musical phraseology and rhetoric Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as a discipline to help him sharpen melodic contours and better manipulate larger musical forms. When the brief piano sonata he set out to compose based on classical principles took only a few days to finish, he decided to write two more. Although t…

A few years ago a German presenter asked me for my "artistic Credo," which seemed a characteristically European request, but in the spirit of international cooperation I furnished the following: "to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions." Grand and general though it is, the statement seems a good place to begin describing the music on this record.  Sketches for all the pieces preceded their commissions, but the institutions and frie…

Modern music－especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space－can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John Harbison (b 1938), and Stephen Hartke (b 1952)－four American composers from different generations with different sensibilities, representing very different approaches to writing for the violin. Yet however much these works represent various facets of …

Of the three composers recorded here, it is Jacob Druckman (b 1928) who has changed the most in his approach to composition. After years of involvement with serial techniques, it was in Windows (1972) that he began to readmit elements of the musical past into his work. The titles of Druckman's works—Incenters, Windows, Aureole, Prism—often display an interest in visual or spatial concepts. In Chiaroscuro, scored for a fairly large orchestra, including electric piano and electric organ, he set o…