Chordioid
Chordioid documents two distinctive approaches to contemporary chamber music, channeling the shared experience of J.P.A. Falzone and Morgan Evans-Weiler as composer-performers in various experimental contexts. Their collaboration, honed since 2016 in the Ordinary Affects ensemble, finds new voice in these recordings: a pairing of extended works that foreground restraint, attention, and timbral investigation. Falzone’s pieces present a delicate interplay between prepared piano and vibraphone. He …
Ricercar nell’Ombra
Ricercar nell’Ombra grew out of a collaboration between French composer Emmanuel Holterbach and the seven-member Florence-based ensemble Blutwurst, both devoted to the acoustic investigation of slowly transforming sonic patterns. Conceived during residencies at Villa Strozzi and other venues across Florence, the project sets out to pay homage to Italian music history while inventing new forms through a deeply collaborative method. Holterbach’s admiration for Italian music across centuries led hi…
Chamber Works
Luiz Henrique Yudo’s Chamber Works marks an insightful journey into the translation of visual art into sound, presenting music that bridges architecture, painting, and sculpture with contemporary chamber idioms. Brazilian-born and Amsterdam-based, Yudo composes using an original approach that is self-taught, drawing inspiration from structures, patterns, and artworks he admires. The album’s five works are performed by Apartment House, a leading ensemble in contemporary experimental music. Their …
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
Frank Denyer’s The Fish that became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed) stands as one of the most ambitious and singular orchestral creations of recent decades. Conceived over several years and premiered over twenty years after completion, this piece distills Denyer’s fascination with sonic diversity and theatrical intensity. The score assembles a phantasmagoria of acoustic colors: alongside chorus and solo violin, one encounters sitar, crumhorns, cimbalom, children’s songs, and a host of constr…
The Boundaries of Intimacy
British composer Frank Denyer presents seven beautiful chamber works dating from 1974 to 2018, opening a door to his unique soundworld. Released by Another Timbre in November 2019, The Boundaries of Intimacy features sublime, unexpected pieces of delicate intimacy performed by a variety of artists including Luna String Quartet, Juliet Fraser, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenberg and Nobutaka Yoshizawa.
"Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listeni…
Puma Court
Puma Court stands as a study of texture and sonority, shaped through the unique pairing of two double basses and two hardanger fiddles. Composed by Jon Heilbron, whose practice bridges modern settings and folk tradition, these works were born from collaborative sessions in Norway and Berlin. The project’s genesis traces back to a duo concert with Norwegian bassist Håkon Thelin, inspiring Heilbron to expand his ideas to a quartet format with the addition of hardanger fiddlers Helga Myhr and Rasmu…
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
Philip Thomas presents a major 5CD collection of virtually all of Morton Feldman's music for piano, the most extensive survey of Feldman's piano music to date. Released by Another Timbre in September 2019, exactly 20 years after John Tilbury's pioneering but long unavailable 4CD set, this box includes several pieces which weren't included there, and three works which have never been released on disc before.
Feldman (1926-1987) was part of a radical group of experimenters alongside John Cage, Chr…
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…