Composition / Contemporary

*In process of stocking* "Cologne bassist and composer Stefan Schönegg seems drawn to sound without end, a vibrating mass that crawls like a glacier toward the infinite. He’s used the moniker Enso for five recordings now, and although each album has featured a shifting group of collaborators, his vision has persisted without distraction. Enso: Strings & Percussion, which was recorded following a performance with the same ensemble as part of Cologne Jazzweek in September of 2021, introduces a new…

*2022 stock. In process of stocking* The world slowed down immeasurably in 2020 as the Corona virus pandemic spread across the globe, and Cologne bassist and composer Stefan Schönegg applied that shift to his own music. “I developed a deep longing for reduction and deceleration—in music and in life,” he says. Indeed, Strukturen, the latest transmission from his ensemble Enso, is marked by a Zen-like serenity. Since launching the project back in 2016 Schönegg has embraced minimal materials for th…

*In process of stocking* The second release of the trio T.ON - Matthias Muche (trombone), Constantin Herzog (double bass) and Etienne Nillesen (extended snare drum). This time T.ON presents four fixed media commissioned compositions by Anne La Berge, Madison Greenstone, Sam Pluta and Nate Wooley with talkboxes, bells and tubes, which were performed in four churches of Gottfried Böhm.

*2022 stock.* Actually, the CD "Nachthelle" should have been a concert for the 80th birthday of Johannes Fritsch (1941-2010). Because of Corona, it now became a CD. Luck in misfortune. Johannes Fritsch was a composer, improviser, violist, author, publisher, organiser and, last but not least, professor of composition at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, where his class was always open to guests over the years, also from the field of improvised music. The present publication contains the pieces "Vio…

The Multiple Joy[ce] Orchestra presents its new CD "works by Carl Ludwig Hübsch" with all kinds of illustrious musicians from Cologne (and non-Cologne)!

*2022 stock* In November 2020, stuck in cologne, Elisabeth Coudoux composed this pieces – more close to her own intuition. These ideas are a direct result of a conceptual processes that matured over the span of many years, shaped by the individual sound and the personalities of the musicians involved. 12 short sonic islands teem with abstract, experimental sounds that don’t shy away from melody or formal play. Earis - The ear behind the iris - the idea of seeing without words, of forming a music…

KRAAK is proud to present the first LP by Bloedneus & de Snuitkever, Milli Mille. Finally in wax, it’s Lukas De Clerck’s musical vehicle for his explorations with the aulos, that ancient reed instrument that mainly satyrs and archeological enthusiasts found beguiling. Equipped with his handmade pipes and the artful sense of devotion of a true modern-day aulete, De Clerck has dug deep into the technical and cultural peculiarities of this long-silenced instrument, paying it the kind of attention a…

*In process of stocking* 'L'effet rebond' is not one album but two. Two parallel albums sharing the same title. One by Pierre-Yves Macé, the other by Sylvain Chauveau - two friends and regular collaborators for nearly twenty years. Both works come from the same original material:a few tracks of guitar, piano, harmonium and vocals, initially recorded by Chauveau. The lyrics (in French, English, Japanese) are very short poems by or quotations from e.e. cummings, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, Basho, …

*In process of stocking.* Other Minds is pleased to present Lockdown Fantasies, the new album from composer Neil Rolnick. The album features two new works for piano and electronics written for and performed by Geoffrey Burleson and Kathleen Supové. Both works are dense and thoughtful with an emotional edge, much like the oeuvre that Rolnick has built up over his 40 year career as a composer. The album opens with its titular piece, "Lockdown Fantasies," performed by Geoffrey Burleson. The piece w…

French pianist Vanessa Wagner collects solo piano studies of graceful minimalism and rare finesse for new album Mirrored.

At Synge Verden Ind I En Ny Og Mangefoldet Tid was composed during Anders Lauge Meldgaard’s period as composer in residence at the old Danish castle Rønnebæksholm on the south of Zealand. He has previously released music as Frisk Frugt, Supermelle, Music for Six Electric Guitars, Kirsten Ketsjer and been a part of the experimental collective yoyooyoy. This release marked Anders taking on new musical adventures by composing for an ensemble of classical musicians. The music, however, retains the f…

“Music and nature have a long and illustrious history together,” writes violinist, composer, improvisor, hiker, Richard Carr. “It’s been done a zillion times, but I can’t fight it anymore. True, I spend more time than most knocking around the woods and winding up and down the trails. Over the course of six decades, I have explored the major mountain ranges of six continents. This has been long enough to witness first-hand the changes that have been so apparent not only to the naked eye but also …

*In process of stocking* Play Off is the new record by the composer Vasco Mendonça, performed by Drumming GP and edited by Holuzam. Resulting from the accomplice creative partnership between Vasco Mendonça and the ensemble led by Miquel Bernat, all the works on this disc (which includes an unusual piece for countertenor and percussion, from poems by Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith) are commissions from the group to the composer, under the Composer in Residence programme in 2019/2020. At this l…

*In process of stocking* Releasing music since 2006, Tiago Sousa is one of most talented and heartfelt pianists of his generation. His compositions are soulful, generous, and mindful. He has released records on Immune, Discrepant and for years oversaw Merzbau, a visionary Portuguese label that inspired many in the mid-2000s. After years of flirting, we are very happy to announce Tiago's first release on Holuzam, “Ripples On The Surface”. The opener “Sunflowers” sits close to Steve Reich – “Music…

Volker Bertelmann and Hildur Guðnadóttir hardly need an introduction - their distinct styles have graced the speakers of pretty much anyone enamored with experimental music in the last decade, and between them the two have chalked up an enviable canon of successes. Bertelmann, under the Hauschka moniker has explored the extremities of prepared piano improvisation, and Guðnadóttir has taken cinematic, explorative cello music into a new era of depth and passion, so to hear them both together is a …

On his latest recording, Hyperchromatica, Kyle Gann expands on Conlon Nancarrow’s work with player pianos and multiplies it. This expansive new work was written for three computer-controlled disklavier pianos that Gann tuned to an intricate system of his own design, with the express goal to “reinvent tonality.” Gann treats the work not as a piano trio but a work for a single instrument with 243 keys. Hyperchromatica extends the possibilities of the piano well beyond the range of human possibilit…

hortly before his death (ten years ago), Fausto Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art (a furnace of sensations, they called it, an_ initiation rite_) in the manner of the Futurists: rhythms and gleams of light striking metals (for the video part), poems in iron and chrome singing of fusion with matter (Kenka Lekovich), acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner a…

Issued by Leo Fegin's visionary record label in 1993, this refreshed and revised reissue collection of Hungarian composer Tibor Szemző's chamber pieces with spoken text – composed at 1980s for the legendary GROUP 180 – is unlike anything else of its kind.

The second part in a collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces, cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965.

Tip! A collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965... Morteza Mahjubi (1900-1965) was a Iranian pianist & composer who developed a unique tuning system for the piano which enabled the instrument to be played in all the different modes and dastgahs of traditional Persian art music. Known as Piano-ye Sonnati, this technique allowed Mahjubi to express the unique ornamental and monophonic nature of Per…

*In process of stocking* Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our curren…

*300 copies limited edition* Cloud Shadows is the third album by the American gamelan composer, Daniel Schmidt. The pieces in Cloud Shadows, which are quite varied and more current than the work represented on his first two albums In My Arms, Many Flowers & Abies Firma, mostly came about each in their own way. For example, the cloud shadows on the mountains of central Nevada, unimaginably old, invited Daniel into their realm, resulting in the opening composition ‘Cloud Shadows’. The composition …

Comes in a four panel case with 16 page booklet, designed by Sam Songailo ** Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray studied in Moscow at the Russian Gnessin Academy of Music with Professors Tatiana Zelikman and Vladimir Tropp, and the Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany with Professor Tibor Szasz. In 2008, Konstantin won First Prize at the Sydney International Piano Competition. Konstantin has performed with the Russian National Philharmonic, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, O…

** Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Notes by Jon Dale ** By the time I landed in Adelaide somewhere in the mid 1990s, to complete my secondary schooling and get the hell out of dodge – the tiny country hamlet that I’d been living in, in the northern parts of the Upper Hunter in New South Wales, at the foot of the Barrington Tops – I’d already been indoctrinated into a set of ideals through my reading, listening, and the questionable guidance of a few family members. Foremost was a kind of id…

*300 copies limited release* Originally released in a tiny CDr edition in 2005 on the now impossible-to-find and almost literally named Vanished Records imprint, Excavation Patterns is a uniquely pervasive touchstone of Adelaide’s music culture, and has since put down roots around the world among devoted aficionados of minimalism, ambient music, and improvisation. At 52 sprawling minutes in length, it has been lovingly Direct Metal Mastered and exquisitely pressed by RAND in Leipzig, in a hand-n…

*2022 Stock.* “I was born and raised in Kentucky, and for many generations my direct ancestors and extended family have been farmers. So, creating music that is ‘about’ soil, plant life, and the natural world, is my way of honoring that legacy.” Composer Tyler Kline’s tools, though, are not the plow – and vegetables are not the crop – in this collection of brief piano pieces commissioned by and for over a dozen pianists. Instead, Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Born in Seoul and now a resident of Brooklyn, Ha-Yang Kim is a cellist, composer and improviser who has developed a unique language of extended string techniques and electronics. Drawing upon influences as far ranging as Balinese and Karnatic traditions, jazz, rock, western classical music and downtown experimentation, she has created an original music of imagination and passion. Her first CD features a startling solo piece, two pieces for her long running d…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Ha-Yang Kim is a cellist and composer of striking originality whose musical influences draw equally from a range of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, noise, and improvised music, to non-western musical sources from Bali, Korea and South Indian classical music. For her second CD on Tzadik she presents a major new composition for string quartet, performed here by the world renowned JACK quartet. Dedicated to Jewish poet Paul Celan, “Thre…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "...the music you can listen here on this CD is result of collaboration of musicians from five countries gathered for participating in DIMC held in Rudme in summer 2001. Some compositions are examples of collective improvisation notated graphically, by different ways. Thus, graphical score can look like a sort of "verbal instruction" for performers, with a prescription how selected musical models interact. It is this way by which pieces by Henrik Rasmussen an…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "This CD features music from concerts with Intuitive Music Group (founded 1990) and from some of its members' touring activities in Poland and Russia. It centers around composer and pianist Henrik Ehland Rasmussen. There are three long solo pieces, including one based on a formula given by his countryman Niels Viggo Bentzon, in which countless varied statings of the formula produces an astounding number of ever-developing pianistic phenomena. The other pieces…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock* "The Group for Intuitive Music originated in 1974 around the Copenhagen University Institute of Music with Jørgen Lekfeldt and his piano teacher, Elisabeth Klein, as the founder members. Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Anders Keiding and Niels Rosing-Schow, also students at the same place, joined the group. Pieces from Stockhausen's verbally notated collections From the Seven Days and For Times to Come constituted the group's first repertoire. Soon, however, it devel…

The first complete CD of music by New York composer Jason Eckardt: four first recordings, After Serra, Tangled Loops, A Glimpse Retraced and Polarities, played by Ensemble 21, saxophonist Taimur Sullivan and pianist Marilyn Nonken.

Second volume of John Cage works for saxophones, played by Ulrich Krieger and his ensemble: early pieces of unspecified instrumentation, saxophone parts drawn from Atlas Eclipticalis and Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and the first saxophone version of Two.

Stefano Scodanibbio's Oltracuidansa for contrabass and 8-channel tape (stereo version), built from almost six hours of contrabass sounds made with 26 methods of sound production, with the tape created at CCMIX in Paris.

Five first recordings of works by composer and harpist Anne LeBaron, 1975-1986, including Lamentation/Invocation, Rite of the Black Sun, Planxty Bowerbird, Noh Reflections and Concerto for Active Frogs, played by the New Music Consort and others.

A tribute to Eduardo Polonio for his eightieth birthday and his nearly sixty years of compositional work. Eduardo Polonio is one of the pioneers of electroacoustic music in Spain.  The book, beautifully edited and profusely illustrated, shows in its 196 pages a panoramic view of his work, from the first instrumental works of the sixties, in conventional or non-conventional notation, through the chapter on composition processes, installations and multimedia actions, electroacoustic operas, discog…

*In process of stocking* As both an instrumentalist and composer, Jessica Pavone explores the tactile and sensorial experience of music as a vibration-based medium. Since 2012, she has established an individual body of material for solo viola, concentrating on these elements of performance. The structured yet indeterminate pieces stem from intensive long tone practice and an interest in repetition, song form, and sympathetic vibration. "When No One Around You is There but Nowhere to be Found," i…

Limted LP edition. Second Room is Martin Taxt’s second album in a series of works investigating possible relations between music and architecture. In this work written for alto saxophone, two microtonal tubas, double bass, church organ, hand bells and modular synthesizers he is inspired by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, and his ideas on different concepts of living. In a lecture at the Harvard University in 2011, Fujimoto sets up a comparison between the nest and the cave, as two fundament…

*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Anthony Pateras is a composer/performer based in Melbourne who is as comfortable writing for full orchestra as he is performing in intimate improvisational groupings. Pateras represents the best in the new generation of musicians combining the spontaneity of improvisation with the formal logic of composition and for his second Tzadik CD, he has chosen an eclectic mix of ensemble pieces that blend instrumental virtuosity and electroacoustic sonorities in star…

*2022 Stock.* The Stockhausen Edition no. 105 contains chamber works recorded between 2011-15. In Freundschaft was written as a clarinet solo for (and dedicated to) woodwind player Suzanne Stephens for her birthday and was first premiered by her in 1978, though a flute version was performed earlier during Stephens' actual birthday celebration. In the following years, Stockhausen composed versions for many more instruments, including recorder, oboe, bassoon (w. teddy bear costume), basset horn, b…