Composition / Contemporary

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…

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 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de mort, the lavish package includes a 64-pages trilingual booklet (EN, FR, DE) and two photo leaflets with previously unpublished pictures of Claude Vivier as well as the artists during a staged performance.

*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…

* Edition of 200 * A composition for two bass Renaissance flutes. Performed by Mara Winter and Johanna Bartz. Rise, follow is a dialogue of long tones played by two bass Renaissance flutes, featuring subtle but persistent changes over the duration of one hour. It is performed in one sitting without interruption. The composition adopts the principle of instrumental ‘consort-style’ playing in Europe during the 16th century: a family of similarly pitched and constructed instruments performing polyp…

bastille musique presents its twenty-ninth release »Helmut Lachenmann: Mes Adieux« featuring Trio Catch, trio recherche, Karolina Öhman (cello), WDR Sinfonieorchester and Lin Liao (conductor). With Notturno (1966-1968), Allegro sostenuto (1986-1988) and the world premiere recording of Mes Adieux – Streichtrio Nr. 2 (2021-2022), the album brings together three outstanding works by Lachenmann from three different creative periods. The WDR recordings are complemented by a 48-page bilingual booklet …

Beautiful collection of Morton Feldman's earliest, shorter piano works from the early 50s, going through the late 70s

**Restock of a rare, must-have record for contemporary music lovers. Comes with 4-page 12" booklet ** Great dense orchestral scraping and bowing from 1982 & 1983 by Romanian composer Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008), among the great masters of Spectralism and subharmonics. This absorbing LP includes two groundbreaking works centered around the 'Sound Icons' - pianos standing on their sides, played with bows between the strings. On side A is the hypnotic, otherworldly Clepsydra for 16 Sound Icons (E…

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…

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…

"[..] 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…

The French pianist and composer Melaine Dalibert possesses an exquisite touch and engagement with his repertoire. On this new album he tackles the stripped-down music of Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos, a key member of the post-Cagean Wandelweiser Collective, tracing out the delicate, sparsely mapped notes from a dozen contemplative, spacious miniatures.  The pieces are built around austere melodic fragments, all of which hang pregnant in the air, unfolding carefully before the next p…

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 …

Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to which it al…

The sixth volume of the collection, Arbor Vitæ, pays homage to the Canadian-American composer James Tenney with performances of the complete quartets and quintets. These works were composed over a period of more than 50 years, from the first string quartet, written at 21, to the last, posthumous quartet. Through various acoustic and musical phenomena, Tenney creates broad, open musical spaces, making music that is both rigorous and sensual. We feel privileged and honoured to be associated with t…

Tom Johnson uses numbers as base material, turning formulas, combinations and other mathematic phenomena into music. And somehow, this music becomes poetry, sometimes like a haiku, sometimes like a sonnet, sometimes descriptive and clear, often enigmatic but always beautiful.

"Originally written for orchestra, Phill Niblock’s Disseminate (1998) and Baobab (2011) were arranged by the composer specifically for the Bozzini Quartet, or rather, for ‘multiples’ of the Quartet: twenty different tracks are mixed in each piece — twenty different instruments, the equivalent of five string quartets. The music is essentially a work on the shifting nature of overtone patterns that arise from acoustic instruments. As composer Robert Ashley convincingly argued, these pieces inscrib…

“It has been my conviction for a number of years that Music (and Art in general) must simply assume the humble task of describing its own end, or at any rate its gradual extinction,” wrote Italian maestro Aldo Clementi (1925–2011) in 1973. Three years earlier he had written B.A.C.H., a piano piece which proved to be pivotal. From this point on, almost all his works are — in David Osmond-Smith’s words — constructed from “tonal fragments arranged in a polytonal canonic counterpoint that ensures ne…

Much-needed repress. "I was very honoured to receive this request from Quatuor Bozzini, whose immense talent I already knew. The first meeting was very warm, friendly and familiar, like a reunion of old friends after a long separation." —Éliane Radigue Thus began the collaboration between Quatuor Bozzini and Éliane Radigue. In the hospitable atmosphere of her apartment, the composer conveyed the intricacies of her sound to QB. Her entire career, Radigue has been dedicated to building a body of w…

“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…

12 instrumenter til Henning (english: 12 instruments for Henning) is a new arrangement by Danish composer Anders Lauge Meldgaard (formerly known as Frisk Frugt) that sees Meldgaard exploring the music of Danish avant-garde artist and composer Henning Christiansen. A trio piece by Christiansen from 1975 is the source material for a bright and stimulating new work for extended chamber ensemble, with the tonal language the original blossoming outwards via Meldgaard’s own brilliantly colourful sound…

Eden Lonsdale is a composer of acoustic music living and working between London and Berlin. His music focuses on exploring the various ways that movement and stasis can co- exist, as well as the inter-connectedness of harmony, timbre, melody and rhythm. Often using very limited materials, his dense and immersive sound-worlds attempt to draw the ear into the smallest details and hope to inspire the listener’s self-guided exploration into the music’s manifold layers. The three pieces from this alb…

*2022 stock* 'We can appreciate some musical works for a variety of reasons. Some unleash a narrative that can read our present and its problems very well, others prefer to move on abstract codes, whether experimental or electronic. Still others may propose ethnographic readings as much aimed at an examination of the past and tradition as they try to probe the future through spatial or psychedelic atmospheres. Then there are proposals capable of going beyond any stylistic framework and floating …

** 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…

Tip! After its reading of Julius Eastman's Feminine, released in 2021, the Ensemble 0 revisit the repertoires of Pauline Oliveros and György Ligeti from another angle. From the works of Oliveros, they exhumed a deeply meditative piece for accordion and voice, giving it a new life in the form of vaporous, cloud-riding chamber music. With Ligeti, the piano radicalism of the Musica Ricercata miniatures crops up again in a new and as yet unreleased orchestration.

This second project released on Sub Rosa by the Japanese artist Kaoru Tashiro, manages to create a subtle dialogue between four composers, and four musical pieces, mixing a delicate blend of Japanese and European sensibilities. Those different approaches convergence thanks to the highly recognizable sensibility of Kaoru Tashiro's way to play. After "drifting" through unpublished pieces from Toshi Ichiyanagi (Fluxus) and Claude Ledoux on the album Cloud Atlas, Kaoru Tashiro is now highlighting th…

”The earliest and still predominant influences on my conceptual attitude toward art were the works of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock ... the integral but unpredictable ‘floating’ variations of a mobile, and the contextual ‘rightness’ of the results of Pollock’s directness and spontaneity in relation to the materials and his particular image of the work…as a total space (of time).”   Earle Brown’s influence on the avant-garde community has been philosophical as well as tangible and practica…

**CD version** Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery. Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passi…

Proudly co-produced with Teriyaki records, this volume is simply Unique!

Three CDs and a 144-page book of Walter Zimmermann's vocal music from 1979-2016, on texts by Eckhart, Hadewijch, Mandelstam, Jabès, Creeley and others, with a 1982 rock and new music band recording, Freunde.

Chamber works by Walter Zimmermann from 1986-89 for piano, cello and piano, bass flute and piano, and violin and piano, played by the HCD Ensemble with cellist Michael Bach and violinist Peter Rundel.

Four chamber works by Walter Zimmermann, Schatten der Ideen, Ursache und Vorwitz, Distentio and Shadows of Cold Mountain 3, played by Ensemble Recherche. The music reflects the influence of John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Other Minds is proud to present The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, a new limited-edition 12” 45 RPM vinyl disc of music by Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, performed by Wolff and Wendy Eisenberg. Side A features two performances of Morton Feldman’s The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, written for Wolff (who professes to be “not really a guitar player”) in 1966 as an experiment on the instrument. On his way to perform The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Gui…

*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Although by now almost habitually referred to as Britain’s foremost early music vocal group, the Hilliard Ensemble (founded 1974) has long had an equal, and complementary, commitment to contemporary music. Its members have sought out new music that adapts itself to the group’s blend of voices and, where necessary, commissioned works from composers they admire. In their recitals, century-spanning leaps – from John Cage, say, to Josquin Deprez (or vice versa), from P…