On A Dark Night
*2024 stock* Berlin Strings is a string quartet consisting of Lisa Marie Vogel, Johanna Wundling, Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann and Luisa Babarro Fernández. Since meeting in the National Youth Orchestra and founding Berlin Strings 13 years ago, they have developed into explorers of their own sound. A sound that has always been imbued with the discipline of classical music, pure craftsmanship, the sublime rules of composition that make communication wordless. But also experimentation, flirting with dis…
Tractus
Tractus emphasizes Arvo Pärt compositions that blend the timbres of choir and string orchestra. New versions predominate, with focused performances from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction that invite alert and concentrated listening. From the opening composition Littlemore Tractus, which takes as its starting point consoling reflections from a sermon by John Henry Newman, the idea of change, transfiguration and renewal resona…
Dach
*2024 stock* When two worlds collide, you clean up afterwards. That's how the first impression of Dach, the joint work by the Frankfurt sound collective Ensemble Modern and Paul Frick, known from Brandt Brauer Frick, feels. Few people know that Paul studied classical composition and that it is therefore not particularly surprising that, in addition to his work with BBF and Tangerine Dream, where he has been dribbling synthesiser capers with the electronic music legend from Spandau for some time …
String Quartet No. 4
Huge Tip! Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to w…
Artic_Akt
Absolutely brilliant debut by the young pianist Andrea Riccio. "Every record is a text and every text is fabric, and this is a fabric of precious threads. A pianism that has gold in its fingertips, from the timbral calligraphy of the pages of Annette Dieudonne, restored to the present, to the dark abysses of a Kreisleriana that reaches the uncanny through beauty, passing through the intimism of Brian Eno, between Brahmsian suggestions, minimal and echoes of Sehnsucht and Lied. Made unique by the…
Passage
Jason Eckardt’s composition Passage is a profound exploration of the unsettling history surrounding the CIA’s interest in sensory deprivation and its impact on human psychology. Divided into three movements – Subject, Ascension, and Testify – Eckardt delves into the dark legacy of interrogation techniques, shedding light on the use of sound and light as weapons in various global conflicts. In a separate work, pulse-echo, Eckardt transforms the piano into a resonant body, drawing inspiration from…
The Possibility of A New Work for Electric Guitar
Other Minds is proud to present The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, a new limited-edition 12” 45 RPM vinyl disc of music by Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, performed by Wolff and Wendy Eisenberg. Side A features two performances of Morton Feldman’s The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, written for Wolff (who professes to be “not really a guitar player”) in 1966 as an experiment on the instrument. On his way to perform The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Gui…
Fame di Vento
Huge Tip! Fame di Vento is Manuel Zurria's latest work. A triple CD to evoke the many suggestions and projects that have taken place in recent years, full of collaborations, of the Sicilian flautist. Fame Di Vento is also an idealized homage to Alighiero Boetti, a nomad by culture and vocation. In his footsteps, Manuel draws on the most diverse cultures, from the Lithuanian mystics to India and Sicily, from just-intonation to European-style minimalism. As he has already done in the past, Zurria …
Satoko Inoue Presents Jo Kondo's New Works For Piano 2015-2020
Temporary Super Offer! "This CD, the third album of my piano works played by Satoko Inoue, presents all the pieces written for piano between 2015 and 2020, along with an introductory miniature piece." – Jo Kondo
Construire Sur Les Ruines D'un Passé Encore Fumant
Music performed and shaped collectively by Les Certitudes: Juliette Adam (clarinet), Félicie Bazelaire (cello) and Léo Dupleix (harpsichord). Score composed by Léo Dupleix. The ensemble Les Certitudes was created in 2021 as a means for developing acoustic music focusing on justly tuned tones and harmonies, taking as a starting point the physicality of the instruments –resonating wood and metal– in a long musical form.
Screens
An extraordinary album of compositions by Frank Denyer, played by Octandre Ensemble. 'Screens' contains five pieces, whose dates of composition range from 1973 to 2021. Anyone listening blind would struggle to identify which were early pieces, and which were late; they all simply belong to and come out of Frank Denyer unique and idiosyncratic soundworld.
A list of the instrumentation for the first piece, 'Broken Music' from 1990, gives an indication of the peculiarity and eccentricity of the mus…
Flax
'Flax' is a 79-minute solo work for piano by the Canadian composer Martin Arnold. It was commissioned in 2020 by the pianist Philip Thomas, but sadly Philip became seriously unwell shortly afterwards. Martin Arnold completed the composition in 2021, and - as Philip was now unable to perform it - the project was taken on by Kerry Yong, with Philip's agreement and support. 'Flax' was premiered by Kerry Yong at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2023, when the CD recording was…
Hereafter
Sofa is proud to mark its 100th release with the stunningly beautiful double album Hereafter, a new major work from guitarist/composer Kim Myhr, written for the 15-piece Stavanger-based ensemble Kitchen Orchestra. “Hereafter can be seen as a meditation on mortality and transience”, Myhr explains. “It was written at a time where the prime minister of Norway told the country’s population that ‘you have to be prepared to lose someone dear to you’. It was like taken out of Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice”. T…
Extended Piano
*2024 stock* Elliott Schwartz plays four of his compositions for solo piano and pre-recorded tape, a project that remains "a continuing attempt to enhance, expand, obscure, develop or otherwise modify the piano sonority and the act of piano performance, through electronics." In his improvisatory piece "Grand Concerto" he uses fragments from the Grieg, Tchaikovsky No. 1 and Liszt No. 1 piano concertos; it is as epic in scope as the classical favorites.
Computer Music
*2024 stock* Computer Music serves as the official musical documentation of the November 1981 International Computer Music Conference, held at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. The album features five compositions with music that ranges from electronic sounds to female vocals, flute and horns, stringed instruments, and percussion. The composers include Larry Austin, whose early works were recorded with the help of Leonard Bernstein; Bruce Pennycook, who now teaches music at the Butl…
A Different View
*2024 stock* Contrabass (double bass) solo virtuoso Bertram Turetzky performs seven solos on the contrabass in this 1981 release. Using bow, plucking strings, tapping on the instrument’s wood body, and employing a little audio technology, Turetzky demonstrates the full range of musical sounds that can be produced on the contrabass. His repertoire on this recording includes a piece dedicated to him (“The Last Contrabass in Las Vegas”), two of his own compositions, and the Lennon-McCartney ballad …
Girl
"a glorious, shifting collage of sound" -BBC Music Magazine
Sveglia
In May 2022, at the age of 88, Christian Wolff performed once again at AngelicA, nine years after the monographic concerts the festival had dedicated to him in 2013 (documented on the cd album Angelica Music, IDA 030). Among the greatest and most singular living composers (in 1950, at a very young age, he was already a member of the legendary New York School along with Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and John Cage), for the opening of the thirty-second edition of the festival he presented a world-ex…
Chorus at The Corner - A Joyfull Noise
Born in 1933, with a career spanning over 65 years, the American composer Philip Corner has explored the most diverse artistic and musical expressions: as a pianist and trombonist, he performed historic and contemporary authors such as Ives, Cage, Cacioppo, Hellerman (in 1963 he also took part in the first integral performance of Vexations by Satie curated by Cage in New York). As a composer and performer, he was a member of Fluxus (defining with his Piano Activities the most iconic performance …
Infinita Domenica
Tip! For José Manuel López López it is essential to approach the works on this album with an open mind and to explore other forms of instrumental expressivity and sonic emotionality. He draws significant conclusions from these seemingly fragile figures, gestures and minimal elements, which evolve and multiply to achieve a great expressive and formal perspective. All this affirms a hallmark that reveals a great continuity and coherence among the works included on this album.