Chamber Works
Five chamber works by the Brazilian/Dutch composer Luiz Henrique Yudo, realised with brilliance by Apartment House. Each piece is the transcription into sound of a visual work of art.Luiz Henrique Yudo is a Brazilian-born composer now living in Amsterdam. He composes by transposing visual works of art into sound. “Music coming from structures, labyrinths, alphabets, codes, patterns, architecture, paintings, drawings, sculptures…” The pieces on the CD are wonderfully realised by Apartment House, …
Piano Works
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…
Black Sarabande
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 passing, and walking…
Songs & Melodies, 1973-1977
Since the mid-1960s, Jon Gibson has played a key role in the development of American avant-garde music. As a versatile reed player, he has performed with everyone from Steve Reich and Philip Glass to Terry Riley and La Monte Young. In the 1970s, Gibson would emerge as a minimalist composer in his own right and release two exceptional albums, Visitations and Two Solo Pieces, on Glass' Chatham Square imprint.Songs & Melodies brings together recordings from 1973 to 1977 (mostly previously unrelease…
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is the first of four operas about the "American" consciousness. The tetralogy, including Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado and Now Eleanor's Idea, is based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. The operas share principal characters and vocal techniques (including the relationship of the voice to instrumental settings). The singers are used interchangeably as soloists and members of a chorus. The immediacy of choral respons…
The Fish That Became the Sun
This CD offers the first recording of Frank Denyer's extraordinary hour-long piece for large ensemble The Fish That Became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed), composed between 1991 and 1996. The ensemble includes a huge number of home-made percussion instruments made from discarded materials, as well as obscure instruments such as eunuch flutes, ocarinas and crumhorns. The album comes with a booklet with notes by Frank Denyer and an essay by Michael Turnbull.Musicians include:Octandre Ensemble …
The Boundaries of Intimacy
The Boundaries of Intimacy foregrounds works that are very restrained and quiet, but as always with Frank Denyer, there is a sense of tension or danger in the air that occasionally explodes and cuts across the music."Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listening level, think of the musicians as being just over the other side of the room in which you are listening, rather than in another grander space. Imagine them performing intimately, witho…
Žiadba
Žiadba consists of five chamber compositions by the young Slovak composer Adrián Democ, who is currently teaching music at a school in Spain, as he says it is practically impossible to survive as an experimental composer in Eastern Europe. Democ's music is very varied: some of his pieces are quiet and restrained, while others are bursting with life and vigour. His Kvarteto begins with an intricate and fast-moving canon movement, brilliantly played by Apartment House and Ostravska Band / fama Q.
Dial 45-21-95
Dial 45-21-95 is a series of nine pieces composed by Ryoko Akama based on objects and fragments she discovered while conducting research at the Krzysztof Kieslowski Archive in Poland. The series was commissioned by Another Timbre with the only stipulation being that they should be pitch-based pieces. They were realised for the first time and recorded by Apartment House in June 2019.Anton Lukoszevieze: cello - Mira Benjamin: violin - Simon Limbrick: vibraphone & percussion - Heather Roche: clarin…
Puma Court
Puma Court is a project initiated by Australian born instrumentalist and composer Jon Heilbron, who now lives in Berlin. The CD consists of two pieces both scored for two double basses and two hardanger fiddles – violins with extra sympahetic strings, which are most frequently used in Norwegian folk music. The performers are Heilbron himself and Hakon Thelin (double basses), and Helga Myhr and Rasmus Kjorstad (hardanger fiddles).
Traces of Eternity: of What Is Yet To Be
**300 copies** "There have been quite a few releases of Antoine Beuger’s music over the past several years and it’s an odd, and very pleasurable thing to consider them en masse. On the one hand, his music is so diaphanous, so air-suffused that you’d think it might be difficult (not to mention unnecessary) to differentiate them mentally. On the other, they’re always very different. There’s that old AMM aphorism: “as alike or unalike as trees” that conveys something of my feelings about Beuger’s w…
Now Is The Moment To Learn Hope
**300 copies** "There have been quite a few releases of Antoine Beuger’s music over the past several years and it’s an odd, and very pleasurable thing to consider them en masse. On the one hand, his music is so diaphanous, so air-suffused that you’d think it might be difficult (not to mention unnecessary) to differentiate them mentally. On the other, they’re always very different. There’s that old AMM aphorism: “as alike or unalike as trees” that conveys something of my feelings about Beuger’s w…
Albertina Quartett
Hermann Nitsch's String Quartet No. 2 in six movements for two violins, viola, and violoncello, was performed by the Viennese Koehne Quartet. Recorded during the exhibition Nitsch. Spaces of Color at the Albertina Museum, Vienna on the May 29th, 2019.The music is played by The Koehne Quartett: Joanna Lewis - 1. Violine; Anne Harvey-Nagl - 2. Violine; Lena Fankhauser - Viola; Mara Achleitner - Violoncello. Recording and Mastering by Christoph Amann.
Secrets Of The Blue Bag
**500 copies** British experimental musician, composer, performer and producer Anthony Moore was a founding member of Slap Happy and has worked with Henry Cow, Kevin Ayers, and Pink Floyd among other great names in the British scene. In 1971 he moved to Hamburg, Germany, and worked in the boiling experimental scene of the city. As a result, two LPs were issued on Polydor Germany in 1971 and 1972, right before forming Slap Happy with old school pal Peter Blegvad and Dagmar Krause.Secrets of the B…
Lokale Musik
Despite having an undeniable canon, the minimalist music movement which developed during the 1960s and continues to flourish and evolve today, is defined by a remarkable breadth in ideas and compositional approach. Particularly in Europe, it rapidly took on a diverse number of influences and became very much its own thing. Of the composers who proposed an alternate reality for this territory of sound, there have been few more accomplished than the German composer, Walter Zimmermann.All too often…
Morton Feldman Piano
The Morton Feldman Piano box set is the most extensive survey of Feldman’s piano music to date. Released exactly 20 years after John Tilbury’s long unavailable 4-CD set, the new box includes several pieces which weren’t included there, and has three works which have never been released on disc before.Philip Thomas has been playing Feldman’s music for 25 years and is one of the foremost interpreters of his work with an extraordinary gentle touch. He and John Tilbury combined forces to produce the…
Moments
In essence, the sound of the piano comes in two parts: its attack and its decay. The striking of a hammer is followed by the resonance of a string or strings. (Much the same might be said about the vibraphone, as it happens.) This dual quality of sound comes to mind when listening to Moments by New York-based composer Michael Vincent Waller. Performed by pianist R. Andrew Lee and vibraphonist William Winant, Moments − his third album, following Trajectories (Recital, 2017) and The South Shore (X…
String Quartets
Violin was Milan Knizak's first instrument. He has composed hundred of works of this ilk; the first one DHK, 45 years ago. Next to his destroyed works, Milan took notations of different composers, cut them and put them together (with his own score) into a collage, expressing his feelings and his apprehension of music.Fama Q is a string quartet founded in 2005 in Prague. Its members, being also orchestral musicians with the Prague Philharmonia, were always devoted to chamber and string quartet mu…
Performs Songs from 'Kraftwerk 2' and 'Kraftwerk'
**500 copies** Not to be confused with the first volume released by Karlrecords in 2017, here comes the second installment of 'modern composition supergroup' - as nailed down by The Wire - Zeitkratzer's re-interpretations of early compositions by electronic pioneers Kraftwerk. Founded in 1997 by Reinhold Friedl, Zeitkratzer have since been creating an impressive broad catalogue of recordings, from the obligatory (20th Century avant-garde composers like Cage, Stockhausen or Lucier) to the unexpec…
Ensemble Works
Three detailed and fragile compositions from German minimalist composer Eva-Maria Houben reveal themselves over two CDs, performed by the Boston-based experimental music ensemble, Ordinary Affects, with Houben herself on organ recording at Memorial Chapel, in Wesleyan University. Disc 1: Echo Fantasy I, IV & VDisc 2: Gesang XI, Unter AnderenPerformed by Ordinary Affects: Morgan Evans-Weiler (violin), Laura Cetilia (cello), J.P.A. Falzone (vibraphone/piano), Luke Martin (guitar) with Eva-Maria Ho…