Hieroglyphs
Temporary Super Offer! "‘Hieroglyph’ is a word that history has gradually prised away from its linguistic roots as the Greek term for sacred carvings. Over time it came to be associated principally with the enigmatic symbols found in Egyptian burial sites and because these symbols resisted translation for so many centuries the word hieroglyph became a synonym for incomprehensibility. It was the discovery of an artefact – the socalled ‚Rosetta Stone‘, containing both hieroglyphs and parallel text…
Because a circle is not enough
music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…
3 String Quartets
Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968–71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers— timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials—were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musici…
Musica Nuvolosa
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.
Things That Didn’t Work the First Time
With each composition, Annesley Black embarks courageously on a new experiment with an open future; while at the beginning of the compositional process the material can still mean many things, it gradually ceases to do so. And at some point, all ambiguities are cleared up: the piece stands. The paths that have led to this point are ultimately paradoxical: they are “immensely labyrinthine and completely logical at the same time” (Black). In their own unique way, the pieces gathered on this CD pre…
Ultima Thule
One could take Wolfram Schurig's Ultima Thule for five ensembles, a work whose mere instrumentation in-vokes that utopian place which, according to the composer, should automatically be the goal of any authentic artistic activity, as a motto for Wolfram Schurig‘s entire compositional œuvre. In ancient Greece, the name Thule referred to the northern-most part of the world, whose accessibility and actual existence, however, remained uncertain. Since Virgil, th…
Approdi 1, Avanguardie Musicali a Napoli - Volume I
Approdi is a cultural operation involving thirteen composers and numerous other artists from heterogeneous segments of the Neapolitan visual arts. The guest composers of the first volume are Carlo Vignaturo, Enzo Amato, Max Fuschetto, Girolamo De Simone, Giusto Pappacena, Piero Viti, Vito Ranucci, Gabriele Montagano, Patrizio Marrone, Enrico Iannaccone, Alessandro Petrosino, Carlo Mormile and Gaetano Panariello. The album was then joined by the poet Luca Buonaguidi, with a lyric for the late com…
Symphony No 106
Documenting a reunion of Musica Elettronica Viva's founders Frederic Rzewski (piano and vocals), Richard Teitelbaum (keyboards and computer) and Alvin Curran (keyboards, computer and shofar) at the 32nd International Festival Of Current Music in Victoriaville, Canada in 2016.
Occam XXV
In 2018 experimental festival Organ Reframed commissioned Éliane Radigue to write her first work for organ, 'Occam Ocean XXV'. Radigue worked closely with organist Frédéric Blondy at the Église Saint Merry in Paris before transferring the piece to Union Chapel for its premiere at Organ Reframed on 13 October 2018. The recording on this compact disc was made at a private session at Union Chapel on 8 January 2020. 'Occam XXV' inaugurates the very special record series of works exclusively commissi…
Concerto Pour Violoncelle / Photoptosis / Tratto II
2022 Stock * With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.
The "Studio Reihe” starts with a CD with works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann. His complex “pluralistic” style fuses past, present and future into a musical unit of the h…
Momente - Version 1965
With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time."Studio Reihe” now continues with a work by Karlheinz Stockhausen: His “Momente” [Moments] for soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists have not been designed a…
Pulse Music
*CD gatefold wallet with tip in booklet* Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seria…
Live im Haus des Rundfunks
The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks…
How Lonely Sits The City?
How Lonely Sits the City? by Magnus Granberg stands as a meditation on absence, fragility, and the slow unfolding of collective musical thought. Rather than foregrounding overt drama or sharp contrast, Granberg distills his process into an album-length work where every gesture feels both deliberate and spare, each silence thick with meaning. The piece finds an ensemble poised between composition and improvisation, where timbral detail, suspended harmonies, and gradual variation take precedence o…
Together on the Way
A concert-length work for pipe organ, piano and percussion, created by the composer and the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys and George Barton) at the recent Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Wonderfully brooding music, beautifully played.
Adjacent Sound
Adjacent Sound positions Gabriel Paiuk as a composer attuned to the phenomena of perception, proximity, and the thresholds where listening itself becomes the subject. Rather than presenting a collection of isolated pieces, the album unfolds as a unified exploration into how sound delineates and dissolves boundaries - between performers, between recorded and live presence, between the material and the ephemeral. Every aspect of the release is shaped by a careful questioning of what it means to li…
Discreet Angel
Discreet Angel brings to light the uniquely understated voice of Mark Ellestad, gathering three chamber works composed between the late 1980s and early 1990s. What unifies the album is its atmosphere of meditative quiet and fragile resilience, qualities honed through Ellestad’s focus on pared-down gesture and subtle shifts in form. Rather than presenting polished showpieces, these compositions favor modesty, restraint, and an honest vulnerability - traits that resonate strongly with listeners se…
Luft.Inneres
Luft.Inneres presents an introspective and rarefied journey through the musical world of Kunsu Shim, focusing on the delicacy and subtlety that mark his approach to sound and silence. The album is shaped less by linear progression or overt contrast than by the quiet shaping of atmosphere, touch, and internal resonance. Across its span, Kunsu Shim offers music that seems to hover at the threshold of audibility, gently probing the listener’s awareness of detail, space, and the interplay between in…
The News Trilogy / Revolution Songs in an AI Environment
Nicholas Bussmann was born in 1970 and is a very diversified artist. He first made a name for himself in the real-time music scene as an improvisational instrumentalist, then he devoted himself to electronic music and now he moves quite freely between artistic styles. His works are usually highly praised and are mostly part of exhibitions or other types of total artworks.The News Triology fills the first page of this work and is thus the first part of this extraordinary project released on vinyl…
Truth, Exercise For A Listener
*In process of stocking* The score for ‘Truth, exercise for a listener’ comprises a catalogue of options for a musical performer. In four parts each focusing on a different facet of our faculty to listen, it offers open ended material for the performer to deal with; sounding actions, silent actions, still actions, moving actions, interpretative actions. All can be selected, combined, omitted or extended at will. Multiple exercises can happen simultaneously. In a general sense the piece is an at…