Contemporary Composition / Electroacoustic

Acclaimed NYC composer, producer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci explores dissonance, drone and dynamics with two new longform compositions for strings, electronics, harp and percussion Of Shadow and Substance.

'A room outdoors' is a 48 minute piece written in 2006 by Michael Pisaro-Liu for sustaining instrument, harmonium and field recordings. This was the first work in which Pisaro-Liu incorporated field recordings into his score. This double CD contains two different realizations of the piece, one made in Brussels during the lockdown in April 2020 and one set up in Cremona in June 2023, each realized by the following artists: Disc 1 features Belgium-based Guy Vandromme (keyboards) and Adriaan Severi…

Two first recordings of electroacoustic works by Gerard Pape for 8-channel tape: Vers la lumière II, dedicated to Ana-Maria Avram, and Héliophonie, written for the solar eclipse of 29 March 2006. Binaural release, stereo compatible.

Three world premiere recordings by Carol Robinson that pair a live soloist (basset horn, double bass, electric guitar) with computer music, each inspired by weather: a winter thaw, a green sky over South Dakota and a hurricane.

Four works for flute by Phill Niblock from the late 1970s, each around twenty minutes: layered tones on tape that produce dense drones. First issued in 1990 as the first CD on Experimental Intermedia's XI label.

*2023 stock* A beautiful collection of recordings from 1972 to 1978, first released in 1990 (with different artwork). "Selbstportrait VI" contains compositions Roedelius did in addition to his work with Cluster, Harmonia and Brian Eno in the legendary Forst years. In the booklet Roedelius looks back on this personal and artistical important period of his life. He explains the magic of the idyllic place and its influence on his music.

*2023 stock* If we can agree on 1969 as the year of Cluster's inception, then Roedelius needed a good 17 years to discover the aural qualities and musical beauty of the grand piano for his own compositions. Rarely has the title of a Roedelius album so poetically and yet so accurately described its content. On "Like The Whispering Of The Wind" from 1986 Roedelius expands his Études towards amorphousness, then suddenly a disarmingly familiar melody appears, from a completely different source perha…

*2023 stock* Contemporary classical composer Masamichi Kinoshita was born in 1969 in Ono, Fukui Prefecture. He currently lives in Tokyo. Kinoshita regularly performs at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo. In February 2020 he held the first concert in the series "Ftarri's Harmonium," featuring the harmonium housed at Ftarri. The series has since continued at a rate of one concert every few months; the fifth was held on July 3, 2021. In each concert, Kinoshita (on harmonium) performs his own compositions…

*2023 stock* This CD documents a series of works that I call "Musical Procedure." In composers' usual works, the sounds to be performed are written in a score; but in these pieces the procedures (which could also be called programs, algorithms or specification sheets) for shaping music, such as performance methods and the general ideas of the works, are written as concisely as possible, and the type of sound to be produced is left largely to the performers. The score is merely an arrangement of …

*2023 stock* Published in the Edo era (1664), "Shichikushoshinshu" is a beginner’s guide to three musical instruments—the "hitoyogiri" shakuhachi, the koto, and the shamisen—which includes lyrics and fingerings for songs believed to have been popular at the time. Tai decided to create a new musical instrument in order to perform the shamisen music in "Shichikushoshinshu" (Japan’s oldest shamisen “scores”). The result was the self-made electric stringed instrument he calls the coiled cello. In 20…

Three years after the release of Black Angels Songs, Miroslav Tóth together with Dystopic Requiem Quartet comes up with a rare album inspired by non-places, i.e. buildings and objects that were either unfinished, abandoned, over-multiplied, or were marked by mining and yet had no meaning in the end. Also featured on Non-places is Nénia, a track dedicated to the victims in Ukraine, written three days after the outbreak of war during the album's creation. The recordings were made in the Czech Repu…

Works for the Ever Present Orchestra Vol. II continues Black Truffle’s documentation of the late work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who sadly passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. Like the first volume of the series, the two works recorded here were written for The Ever Present Orchestra, an ensemble founded in Zürich in 2016 to perform Lucier’s work exclusively. At the core of the music Lucier wrote for the ensemble is the electric guitar, an instrument he began to e…

Like Hunt’s composition “Lattice,” released on Texas Music in the same year, the four pieces included on Cantegral Segment(s) (IR-0032, 1979) represent a culmination and transformation of Hunt’s investigations from across the decade. The “Cantegral Segments” are a body of scores (or strategies) derived from and developed alongside the evolving compositional procedure Hunt called Haramand Plane, first used in a large-scale performance of that name from 1972 that employed elaborate homemade audio …

Tip! One of the first Irida releases, Texas Music (IRIDA 0026, 1979), collects compositions by Jerry Hunt (hailing from Dallas), Philip Krumm (based in San Antonio), and Jerry Willingham (“in and out” of Austin). The record was produced in two editions: one for mass consumption in a corrugated plain brown sleeve featuring a single fish stamp on the cover by the artist David McManaway, and a small “fundraising edition” sold in the same packaging at a higher price with a numbered print by McManawa…

Larry Austin (1930–2018), thirteen years Hunt’s senior, was a key interlocutor for the composer. The two met during Austin’s term as editorial director of the magazine Source: Music of the Avant Garde and both had studied music at the University of North Texas. Following stints at the University of California, Davis, and the University of South Florida, Austin returned to UNT as professor in 1976 and took over its electronic music studio, the Center for Electronic Music and Intermedia. When Hunt…

Music of Dary John Mizelle is a recording of three densely layered compositions by the eponymous Oklahoma-born composer. Originally trained in trombone performance, Mizelle was a graduate student in composition at the University of California, Davis, under Larry Austin. The two, alongside Stanley Lunetta, had founded the free improvisation group New Music Ensemble in 1963 on campus with the intention of exploring the outer limits of performance and composition. Mizelle became the youngest member…

James Fulkerson’s release on Irida, Works (IRIDA 0017, 1980), is the first collection of the trombonist’s own compositions, all of which he had written and developed in the mid-’70s. Just as Jerry Hunt had done with Cantegral Segment(s), Fulkerson problematized the presentation of his work as a record in the liner notes, where he noted the complex and intense relationship he had developed with the pieces over countless concerts and rehearsals: “I was overwhelmed with the sense of disparity betwe…

*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "A collection of five pieces, made between 2016 and 2019, in a short period that echoes, in part, the grief after my mother’s passing at the end of 2015. These pieces bring together artists from (a.o) Cape Town, The Hague, Toronto, Torino, and Johannesburg. Listening back to these earlier pieces I can discern feelings of emptiness, fleeting moments of joy and play. It is the unending sense of absence versus…

*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "During the period spanning from 2016 to 2020, I underwent a profound realization that led me to feel lost within myself. As each year passed, I found myself feeling a sense of rupture and absence, far from home. In search for comfort, I turned to my native language of Farsi. However, even within the confines of my language, I was unable to escape the feeling of fragmentation. Each sentence I read seemed to…

‘Scapegoat’ is the new album by Triola, the project led by the prolific Tokyo-based composer & experimental string musician Atsuko Hatano, featuring the Japanese violinist Anzu Suhara. Conceived as a string project, with Hatano on viola, cello, bass and Suhara on violin, Triola involves a rotating ensemble of guest musicians, including the likes of Chicago-born musician, composer & producer Jim O’Rourke (Drag City, Sonic Youth, Steamroom), the composer & musician Eiko Ishibashi (Drag City, Black…