Composition / Contemporary

2025 stock "Kagel's witty intelligence objectifies the ordinary to create important art." - The Wire

*2025 stock* "In composing a piano trio, I fulfilled a long-fostered desire. This is a genre which, like the string quartet tradition, can slightly intimidate any composer. I too waited patiently but anxiously to make my own contribution. The pre-history of the piece is closely tied to my Music Epic about the devil, La Trahison orale (Oral Betrayal), which I wrote in 1981-83. When conceiving this work, I had already decided to compose character pieces, relatively short numbers with a particular …

*2025 stock* Famous for his examination of unusual and exotic instrumental sounds, here Mauricio Kagel focuses on the most mundane of sound materials. While attending a music trade show, Kagel was taken by the many levels and orbits of sound activity emanating from the various booths and stages. In 'Playback Play' (subtitled 'News from the Music Fair, A Radio Piece') he has arranged a spatially sensitive tableau of crowd noises, sales pitches and fragments of the sort one hears in music store sh…

Seven beautiful, melancholic motets and a chanson by Renaissance composer Nicolas Gombert, arranged for instruments by James Weeks, who also composed the interludes. "One of the least expected and most beautiful records we are likely to hear this year." - Clive Bell

*2025 stock. 300 copies limited edition* A twelve CD box set of Anthony Braxton’s complete Syntactical Ghost Trance Music (SGTM) - the subset of Braxton’s revolutionary Ghost Trance Music compositional system written especially for the human voice. The recording also introduces the Tri-Centric Vocal Ensemble - a twelve member choir featuring some of the most exciting and accomplished singers in creative music. The recording is available digitally and in a limited edition 300-copy pressing, a del…

*2025 stock* Trillium J is a Braxton opera, and documents a surreal and witty installment in Braxton’s ongoing Trillium cycle. Available as a four-disc box set in both physical and digital forms and live performance video on Blu-ray disc, it includes a booklet with libretto, photos, and critical essays. Live performance recorded April 19, 2014 at Roulette, Brooklyn. Studio realization recorded April 21-22, 2014 at Avatar Studios, New York, NY.

*2025 stock* Trillium E is the first-ever studio recording of a Braxton opera, and documents a surreal and witty installment in Braxton’s ongoing Trillium cycle. Available as a four-disc box set in both physical and digital forms, it includes a 72-page booklet with libretto, photos, and critical essays. Each of Trillium E’s four acts features a different episode: a genie in a bottle, the invention of human cloning, interplanetary space travel, and the exploration of a jungle pyramid. The perform…

Noriko Baba’s music transforms fleeting details into profound artistic expressions, weaving nostalgia, nature, and her Japanese heritage into evocative soundscapes. From the intimate, lantern-lit glow of Bonbori to the tumultuous echoes of the 2011 tsunami in Shiosai, her works balance delicacy and intensity. 9600 romanticizes the age of steam locomotives, while Au pavillon de (Monsieur) Porcelaine offers a deeply personal meditation on joy and loss through Mahlerian inspiration. With Avant le c…

In tönendes licht., Klaus Lang imagines the Gothic cathedral as a resonating body shaped by the architectural principles of hierarchy and proportion. Performed by Wolfgang Kogert and the Wiener Symphoniker conducted by Peter Rundel, the work creates a unique interplay between the physical structure of the cathedral and the ephemeral presence of the music, evoking the medieval understanding of light and sound as pathways to the divine. Inspired by the ideals of Gothic art, Lang explores the conce…

Didier Rotella’s "Zone Grise" unfolds in a space of perpetual transformation, where sound navigates between density and purity, acoustic and electronic, structure and fluidity. Catharsis combines hybrid instruments and spatialized textures to evoke a dramatic journey of evolution and renewal, while Fragrances draws inspiration from perfume composition, blending musical elements into a rich, multi-layered tapestry. Mogari reflects on ritual and humanity through augmented instruments and poetic ge…

Oriol Saladrigues Brunet’s music crafts intricate interactions between time and communication, turning moments into rich artistic expressions. His compositions treat time as a flexible and multi-layered concept, balancing precision with unpredictability. Musical textures emerge and transform, revealing patterns that are both structured and fluid, creating a space where a dialogue between instruments and ideas unfolds. Through thoughtful exploration of irregularity and balance, Saladrigues create…

*Edition of 250 hand-numbered copies, handmade textile artwork, printed inner sleeve* Rauelsson's third solo album for Sonic Pieces focuses on simplicity and minimalism. It recalibrates his love for ambient with an austere approach that conjures an atmosphere of silence and solitude. On Niu, the artist has traded his craft for shimmering layers of sound clusters and electronic editing in favor of a predominantly raw and acoustic recording. Recorded primarily in Sofia and Berlin and mixed at Saal…

Johannes Kalitzke’s opera Captain Nemo’s Library weaves themes of identity, childhood and fantasy into a powerful poetic narrative. Inspired by Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Per Olov Enquist’s novel, it explores the intertwined fates of two boys in a Swedish village, their imaginary refuge aboard the Nautilus and the trials of their friendship. With a mixture of singing, puppetry and the integration of musical motifs by Bach as well as impressive electronics, Kalitzke creates a …

"The CD entitled Contrappassi sees the two protagonists, Leonardo Zunica on piano and Leandro Lo Bianco on electric guitar, engaged in compositions by contemporary authors, with pieces that find poetic-musical inspiration in the fascinating and complex world of Dante. A program with broad musical visions that transport you to an unexpected soundscape, with the two performers who give life to moments and atmospheres of surprising suggestion. The CD's lineup opens with the Sonata n. 1 "Dante Sonat…

*350 copies limited edition* On Andrew Chalk's 2025 album for An'archives, 'Dioramas,' he returns to the art of the miniaturist, after the long-form exploration of 2024's 'Songs Of The Sea.' It's an appropriate mode of address given the title - each of these fifteen pieces indeed feels like a replica of a specific scene, rendered in miniature. As with much of Chalk's music, they set out to explore humble terrain, a thread of melody in slow motion, or a weave of texture, sometimes in aquatic repo…

bastille musique presents its thirty-third release »Klaus Ospald: Escribí« featuring world premiere recordings by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano), Teodoro Anzellotti (accordion), Edicson Ruiz (double bass), WDR Sinfonieorchester and Ensemble Modern, and conductors Enno Poppe, Peter Hirsch, David Niemann and Lin Liao. From a piano concerto and a concerto for double bass with accordion to an ensemble piece and a clarinet sextet, the album combines four of Ospald’s instrumental works from 2014 to 202…

bastille musique presents its thirty-second release »Beat Furrer: Spur« featuring world premiere recordings by Quatuor Diotima, Claudia Chan (piano) and Thorsten Johanns (clarinet). The double album combines Furrer’s complete four string quartets with his piano quintet and clarinet quintet, spanning a period of almost four decades from 1984 to 2021. The WDR recordings are complemented by a 48-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with texts by Harry Vogt, Andreas Karl and an interview with the interpr…

bastille musique presents its thirty-first release »Urquiza, Terranova, Rataj, Djordjević, Kranebitter, Glojnarić, Schüttler: Gassenhauer« featuring seven world premiere recordings by the Trio Catch. The album combines new works for clarinet, violoncello and piano by Mikel Urquiza, Daniela Terranova, Jakub Rataj, Milica Djordjević, Matthias Kranebitter, Sara Glojnarić and Mart*in Schüttler, all commissioned for and premiered by Trio Catch. In addition to the recordings produced by the SWR, it al…

2024 stock bastille musique presents its eighteenth release »Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Sinfonien (live)« featuring Emily Hindrichs (soprano), Anna Radziejewska (mezzo-soprano), Bettina Ranch (alto), Peter Tantsits (tenor), Hans Christoph Begemann (baritone), Otto Katzameier (bass), the WDR Sinfonieorchester and Emilio Pomàrico (conductor). The set comprises Zimmermann’s Sinfonie in einem Satz (1951) and Vokalsinfonie (1957-1963) from Die Soldaten, recorded live at the Kölner Philharmonie by the WD…

2024 stock bastille musique presents its seventeenth release »Lucier & Bach: Sitting in a Room« featuring Hanna Herfurtner (soprano, voice), Clara Blessing (oboe), Joosten Ellée (violin), Linda Mantcheva (violoncello) and Elina Albach (harpsichord, organ). The album combines Alvin Lucier’s sound art piece I am sitting in a room with arias by Johann Sebastian Bach (from BWV 61, 1, 58, 199, 57, 36, 248, 68). Recorded in co-production with Deutschlandfunk, the set also includes a 48-page bilingual …

2024 stock bastille musique presents its thirteenth release »Claude Vivier: Lonely Child« featuring five works by Vivier from 1977 and 1980: Lonely Child performed by Katrien Baerts (soprano), the WDR Symphony Orchestra and Bas Wiegers (conductor), Shiraz by Akiko Okabe (piano), Pulau Dewata and Zipangu by the Holst-Sinfonietta and Klaus Simon (conductor), and Love Songs by the Neue Vocalsolisten. In addition to these recordings produced by the WDR, SWR and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, the set also i…

2024 stock bastille musique presents its first release »Claude Vivier: Kopernikus« in a SWR studio recording by the Opera Factory Freiburg, the Holst-Sinfonietta and Klaus Simon (conductor). Besides the CD containing Vivier’s chamber opera from 1979, which he called opéra-rituel de mort, the lavish package includes a 64-pages trilingual booklet (EN, FR, DE) and two photo leaflets with previously unpublished pictures of Claude Vivier as well as the artists during a staged performance.

Belt of Orion by Stockholm-based Isak Edberg is the composer’s second solo release on XKatedral, and his first to focus solely on instrumental music in the form of two pieces of extended duration for solo piano.

Time of year and day, light; warmth, coolness; wind, rain; breath of air, babbling of the stream; People and other beings going about their lives: a strangely unpredictable mix of expected and unexpected events that contribute to the precise conditions of the moment in which we find ourselves. The here and now conveys a special feeling and a unique sound identity. Mason enables us to connect with times, places, people and situations that go far beyond the here and now. Mason is one of the most i…

*2025 stock* Since its birth 200 years ago, the accordion has experienced a wild odyssey through the most diverse (musical) worlds. Teodoro Anzellotti plays a decisive role in its integration into the world of new music. Anzellotti records five works for accordion solo at WDR, which were written on his skin. The pieces reveal the enormous range of the instrument among others composed by Georges Aperghis, awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2022. Anzellotti, born in Italy, raised and res…

For almost his entire life, Béla Bartók's music fell on deaf ears. Unnoticed by the general public, this extraordinary composer created a unique cosmos of Hungarian/South-Eastern European folk and art music. Like Schönberg and Stravinsky, he is one of the protagonists of 20th century musical art. A few years after his death, his music became a bestseller and this success has reached unimagined heights again in our time. Accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti presents an individual selection of Bartók's…

*2025 stock* Left, alone is Winter & Winter's seventh release of works by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen. The collaboration began in 2009 with »Schnee«, followed by »/Walden/Wald/«, »Zählen und Erzählen« [with Four Pieces for Orchestra, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Ten Studies for Piano], »Gifts and Greetings« for the 40th anniversary of the Arditti String Quartet, »let me tell you« with Barbara Hanningan, Andris Nelsons and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, which is one…

2024 Stock. Minor signs of wear from long-time storage. **

Jonathan Bockelmann is a classical guitarist and composer based in Munich who first made waves in 2023 with his debut album ‘Childish Mind’. His entry into composing were arrangements he had made of pieces by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Some of these have been released digitally in three editions and are now available on vinyl for the first time. The record comes in high quality packaging with an embossed art print and features both some of Sakamoto’s lesser-known works like the ‘Suite f…

Close to five years since the future-fwd dancefloor classic Workaround, Seven Reorganisations sees Beatrice Dillon return to the long-player format a long way removed from the club she helped reimagine. In some ways, the immediacy of that previous record positions it as somewhat of an outlier in Dillon's impressive catalogue of modern experimentation, and this latest collection, derived from a commission made by Mark Fell, represents a continuation of what now looks like a long established inter…

"[..] With Rebecca Bruton’s piece, the melody/ harmony is transmuted into something psychedelic by manifesting its essential indivisibility from the shifting textures of the music as a whole. There’s often an ephemeral virtuosity to this music, an intricate (sometimes opaque, sometimes disorientingly transparent), florid weave of sound. But this virtuosity doesn’t assert dramatic effects; there are gestures here, but they’re the movements of sounding bodies, not the quasi-meaningful gesticulatio…

300 numbered and signed copies. 180 gr. Clear Vinyl. 'The Snow Is Dancing' is the new album by musician Arturo Stàlteri. A true homage to snow, its lightness and purity. Inspired by Claude Debussy's composition of the same name, the Roman pianist within this work guides listeners on a diaphanous and enchanted sound journey, in which the piano becomes a diary capturing subtle emotions and moments of wonder: “I have always loved snow. An impalpable white blanket that seems to erase every imperfect…

“Amistad is an opera that was ten years in the making. Thulani and I first discussed the idea of making an opera on the Amistad Rebellion in 1986, after the premiere of our opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. We were drawn to the drama of the story, a successful uprising of captives on a slave ship, and the implications of the Amistad incident in an understanding of ourselves and the American experience. Through the Amistad, we could revisit the story of the Middle Passage, the contradicti…

** Original copies of this obscure electro acoustic marvel from Mexico. Few copies available, unplayed ** Sparse avant-garde composition from Mexican great Manuel Enriquez. Aleatory, contrapuntal, and soloistic passages alternating with long timbral blocks are characteristic of his music though the 1960s and 70s . Manuel Enríquez Salazar (17 June 1926 – 26 April 1994) was a Mexican composer, violinist and pedagogue. He was a fellow member of the Academy of Arts of Mexico, of the National Seminar…

** Original copies of this obscure electro acoustic marvel from Mexico. Few copies available, unplayed ** Musica De Camera it's an interdisciplinary creative group formed by Angel Cosmos (writer, multidisciplinary author), Juan José Diaz Infante (photographer and designer) and Arturo Márquez (composer and musician). Created in Mexico in March 1984, it has already presented several concerts, being the world premiere of its first eight works -among them, five of those included in this disc-, one o…

This album contains three new works by Italian composer Giuliano d'Angiolini, ')))(((', '7 flauti', and '100100', following his previous three albums: 'Simmetrie di ritorno' (Edition RZ, 2010), ‘Cantilena’ (Another Timbre, 2016) and ‘Antifona’ (Another Timbre, 2020). ')))(((' was composed in 2023 for four flutes and sheng or accordion, or six clarinets, and the version here is for four flutes and six clarinets. It is recommended to listen at high volume. '7 flauti' was written in 2010 for seven …

"Spektralmaskin, a collaborative album by the Norwegian musicians Jo David Meyer Lysne and Peder Simonsen, owes its name to a sort of prospecting: the process of sliding e-bows—small magnetic motors of adjustable speeds used to sustain sounds, here of Lysne’s own design—along guitar strings to produce harmonics. As these harmonics can occur erratically, the technique rewards the musician patient enough to scoot the e-bow about the string, waiting for the delicate sounds to crest. The duo’s fasci…

** Edition of 300 copies, gold foil printed sleeve, includes 12-page booklet and 2 leporello inserts printed on translucent paper ** Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward-thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider f…

Tip! Explicit isolation is the third album by the international collective E/I, led by composer and percussionist Szymon Pimpon Gąsiorek. The group’s seven core members came together while studying at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory and the Royal Danish Academy of Music. For this latest release, they are joined by Slovenian musicians Samo Kutin (hurdy-gurdy) and Kaja Draksler (organ), alongside Danish tuba player Rasmus Svale. The three compositions distill sound down to its essential e…

Anton Lukoszevieze, cellist, composer and interdisciplinary artist, founder of Apartment House. Le Jardin des Plantes, in four parts, for cello and electronics. A place in Paris and a novel by Claude Simon. Memory spaces, a source, a scrying of time.