During a Lifetime
During a Lifetime stands as a portrait of Toronto-born, Berlin-based composer Chiyoko Szlavnics, commissioning three major pieces: “During a Lifetime” (2015), “Freehand Poitras” (2008), and “Reservoir” (2006). Szlavnics’s music is marked by tender asceticism and an immersive approach to process - her scores privilege long sustained notes, slow pitch glissandi, and luminous combinations of sinewaves with wind and string ensembles.
The title piece features Konus Quartett (four saxophones) entwined…
Explosion Of A Memory (A Literary Canvas For Orchestra)
An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…
Gaps, Absences
A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…
Solo ensemble
2016 release **
When I was small, my grandparents had an old upright piano in the living room of their terraced house. I never learned how to play the piano ‘properly’, but I remember spending hours sat at that instrument, stomping on the extreme upper and lower notes, always with the sustain pedal held down, marvelling at the sounds it produced. The “solo” disc of Johan Lindvall’s double album “solo/ensemble” reminds me very much of being at that piano, though the composer’s 24 short, sparse pr…
Sale Quanto Basta
Paolo Angeli’s latest is an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar; and although it’s just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than 3 people. Great compositions, each like a short novel, beautifully recorded. Paolo’s unique music defies genre or category - at once accessible, experimental, tuneful, tactile, ambient, with a folk root and a rock inflection and a contemporary outlook. And his instrum…
For Clarinet (And Piano)
Clarinet (and Piano) brings together Amsterdam composer Dante Boon and Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey for three works at the porous boundary of composition and improvisation. In the long opening duo “O’Hare,” Boon’s gentle piano arpeggios glow beside Frey’s quietly expressive clarinet, combining spiraling lyricism with stately stillness across nearly twenty-five minutes. The piece unfolds in a gradual arc, eschewing conventional development for the slow revelation of timbre and intervallic resonanc…
Two Circles
Alvin Lucier’s (b.1931) work has been more often described in terms of science than of art and his scores often contain experimental procedures. Lucier perfectly represents the fusion of a scientist with an artist. His pieces arise from an inspection of a pure physical phenomenon. The performers on Mode’s fourth disc of Lucier’s music are the Italian experimental music ensemble Alter Ego — two of the works were written for or dedicated to them — and Alvin Lucier himself. This new recordi…
Piano Sonatas & String Quartets 1
Limited edition of 500 numbered copies. The LP was mastered from the 96khz/24-bit files. Lacquers were cut by vinyl veteran Scott Hull at Masterdisk in New York. The LP is pressed by RTI in California, one of the most highly regarded pressing plants in the USA. All of this to insure the best sounding, highest quality LP. After all, why make an LP if it doesn’t sound great and have something special to offer ?
It is packaged with a 4-page insert of liner notes by the late Bob Gilmore and a score …
Umbrae
2016 release ** The four works on this CD, ranging in date from 2004 to 2014, form an integral part of Andrzej Kwiecinski’s creative development and at the same time demonstrate his particular affinity with music for strings. Umbrae (2004) for string quintet. Mural (2008-10) for string quintet. Luci nella noote V (2014) for four string quartet. Contregambilles (2014) for string quartet. After studying composition, musicology and Baroque singing (countertenor) in Warsaw, Kwiecinski moved in 2005 …
Relative Calm
Jon Gibson (b. 1940) is one of the less frequently mentioned pioneering composers of minimal music and is probably best known as a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Gibson also holds the unique distinction of having performed with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young (as a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music), in addition to Glass, the four composers widely regarded as the founding fathers of minimal music. Gibson also has a track record of composing for modern and …
The ECM Recording
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…
Volume
Illogical Harmonies is the collaborative project of Berlin residents Johnny Chang (violin) and Mike Majkowski (double bass). Their album Volume presents fifty-four minutes of highly focused, acoustic improvisation - five tracks, each marked by an almost ritual commitment to duration, a fascination with harmonic overlap, and an ongoing search for balance between individual and ensemble sound. Eschewing quick changes or dramatic gesture, Chang and Majkowski operate in a zone of gradual development…
dialogues with environments
2013 releae **
"Three works for solo piano in a kind of homage to Cage's "4'33"", insofar as the room in which the recordings took place is accorded coequal prominence, at least as the stated intention of Lee. So one hears various rustles, coughs and whatnot while the beginning of the last track, "Piano Solo No. 5" (2011) sounds as though recorded in close proximity to a number of aging fluorescent bulbs. More to the point, the piano sound is noticeably different in the three spaces. The music i…
Vokal / Instrumental
2013 release **
"Sometimes, music reaches my desk which I genuinely feel is beyond my ken to write about--I simply don't have the necessary tools. This wonderful disc, in large part, is one such so I'll pretty much stick to just giving my impressions and make no real attempt to put the music into context. I do feel confident in saying that, though I haven't heard everything released from Wandelweiser, the music herein will pretty definitely not coincide with your impression of the label, and I …
11 Microexercises
2013 release **
"11 Micro-Exercises were invented by Christian Wolff in response to a commission from the Miniaturist Ensemble. For Wandelweiser Editions, other miniaturists perform these eleven pieces (plus two bonus pieces): Beat Keller and Reza Khot. Keller and Khot are two electric guitarists who pierce the ivory (sometimes tear it) and respect the principle of a musical art free from preconceptions. Nine seconds, twenty-two, one minute and thirteen, or eleven minutes and forty-seven… The le…
drei, 1-21
2013 release **
From the early 2000s, Stefan Thut began a series of scores named according to the number of performers, somewhat like Cage's later works. Ranging from one performer to seven, including the more indeterminate "some" and "many," each score is very open, completely undefined, with a few written indications (limited mainly to volume restrictions), plus a kind of guiding thread to follow (composed of letters, lines, etc.) during the performance, without any indication of duration, for…
Urs Peter Schneider . Klavier
2014 release **
"Peter Streiff’s music moves in historical webs, encompassing the connected worlds of allusion and individuality in a language that is at once direct and cryptic. This new disc of his piano music, performed by fellow composer Urs Peter Schneider, is a microcosm of Streiff’s creative trajectory. For ease of comprehension, I will use English versions of composition titles in this review. “Of Magic” (1970), the earliest material represented here, has a fair amount in common with the…
Kompositionen 1973-1986
2014 release **
"The structure of this 2-disc set is durationally symmetrical, four pieces lasting (more or less) 8, 60, 60 and 8 minutes. I've no idea how representative this sample is of Schneider's work (I think it's my first experience of it) but there seems to be at least something of a common thread int he way he uses quasi-repetition of forms (not in a minimalist sense) that, over time, result in something larger than the individual elements. "Zeitgehöft" (the title of a collection of poe…
songs and piano pieces
2014 release **
"Beethoven’s fifth symphony begins with that now-iconic but aphoristic “short-short-short-long” musical motive about which so much has beenwritten and said, a radical statement for string melody without harmonic accompaniment. On his 2008 composition “Song 2,” for bass flute, Wandelweiser composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos essentializes the very concept of a similarly constructed four-note phrase, presenting each gesture in isolation, long silences allowing for listener recont…
24 petits preludes pour la guitare
2013 release **
"True, there are 24 pieces contained on this disc, which range in duration from 2:00 to 3:45, but in part due to the large amount of silence in which the single notes are swathed and also because the composition are "of a piece", the recording reads almost as a continuous work. The preludes seem to consist of sets of two to five notes, generally, perhaps always, in a rising pattern and very often diminishing as they appear, purely struck, with incredible gentleness, so much so th…