Music For Lock Grooves
**250 copies** SN Variations fifth release features two tracks in three parts each composed for lock grooves recorded onto acetate, percussion by Sam Wilson (Riot Ensemble / Actress) and violin performed by Aisha Orazbayeva. The tracks also feature the piano of Mark Knoop and the voice of Josephine Stephenson. A lock groove is one cycle of one groove on a record. This is 1.8 sec cut at 33rpm and 1.33 cut at 45rpm. Adrian Corker used the cutting lathe currently residing in the living room of The …
Three Realizations For Ensembles
Three compositions written by Francisco Meirino for ensembles. Utilizing pitch and timbre of traditional acoustic instruments Meirino’s unique compositional voice speaks out. Guiding the listener through tension and decompression, unease and malaise. Performed with Ensemble Vortex and Ensemble Phoenix in Basel, recorded during 2016-2019.Born in Spain in 1975, Meirino is active since 1994 (as Phroq until 2009) in experimental music and live performance. His music explores the tension between pro…
Orpheus Variations
Orpheus Variations is a new composition by Alvin Lucier for solo cello and seven wind instruments. It is based on a particular sonority from the first movement of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score, Orpheus; a sonority that has haunted Lucier for decades. Orpheus Variations is one of eight large-scale compositions made expressly for Charles Curtis by Alvin Lucier in the last 15 years. This performance was conducted by Petr Kotik, with Charles Curtis playing solo cello alongside members of the SEM En…
Chamber Music: Alvin Lucier & Morton Feldman
Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present a collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, "August Moon" and "Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba" are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier. A selection from Alvin Lucier's liner notes: "For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that's at the onset of every pi…
Two Orchestra Pieces
This recording is the first ever devoted to the orchestral music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) and thus documents a little-known aspect of his wide-ranging work. John, David (1998) introduces in its second part a prominent role for solo percussionist, playing a wide range of pitched and non-pitched instruments, including marimba, glockenspiel, a variety of drums, wood and metal instruments and other sources, the exact choice left to the performer. Rhapsody (2009), in contrast, uses instruments of…
Darkroom
Tiny space... dimmed lights... little steps... circling... like abstract curving lines... round and round... repeat... Composition by Slobodan Kajkut. Personnel: Dejan Trkulja - clarinet; Christian Pollheimer - vibraphone; Slobodan Kajkut - sampler, programming.
H1KhH2WM (Du Seuil), a Five-letter Sufi Word
The third chapter in the Sufi Word's series. Jean-Luc Fafchamps
on the release: "The Sufi Letters is a vast project of 28 compositions
(for the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet) undertaken in 2000 and still
ongoing. I am drawing inspiration from the symbolic charts found in
Sufi mysticism. Each Letter is a sonic meditation on the frontiers of
conscience and the paradoxes of time. Today's word, 'Du seuil' ('From
the threshold'), is the third word to be released by Sub Rosa. It is a
journe…
Muntzers Stern, Solo II
Jakob Ullmann has made the orchestral work "steine, feuer, sterne" (stones, fire, stars) based on a modular structure, such that individual sections can be played outside of a complete performance, solo or in predetermined combinations; this album presents one section for solo bassoon titled "Muntzers stern" performed by Dafne Vicente-Sandoval.From the liner notes by Hans-Peter Schulz; Translation by Peter Gebert: Solo II is part of a group of works with the title Buch der Stille 1 ('Book of Sil…
And On The Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma
The history of American avant-garde music is a snarled knot, twisting through the decades, spanning genre, practice, and approach. Most narratives plant its origins within the post-war period, orbiting around John Cage, Morton Feldman, and those artists springing from the movements of Fluxus and free-jazz. American creative innovation issued unquestionable influence over the later half of 20th century, but the root of its radicalism was earlier, with its origins often misplaced. Rather growing f…
Propaganda
Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise- sculpting, as well as invented and real instruments played by Fred Frith. This was a hard time and the mood is intense, lean and not cheerful, though there are some gruesomely cheery inserts. There's no fat but a lot of meat here.
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…
Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions
In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…
A Failed Entertainment: Works 2009-2014
Works from Italian composer Clara Iannotta recorded from 2012 - 2014, including a work for string quartet composed for the DAAD artist-in-Berlin program
Assigned #15
The leading contemporary music ensemble Apartment House perform a new piece developing out of James Saunders's long-term modular project '#unassigned'. The new piece, 'assigned #15', was recorded in April this year and creates a mesmeric, dense, jungle-like soundworld across its 45 minutes. Beautifully realised by Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Bridget Carey (viola), Simon Limbrick (percussion), Nancy Ruffer (flutes), James Saunders (dictaphones & radio), Philip Thomas (piano) and Kerry Yong (chamb…
Would Fall From The Sky, Would Wither And Die
A new composition by clarinetist and composer Magnus Granberg, the leader of the highly acclaimed ensemble Skogen, this time with a new, smaller group that includes percussionist Erik Carlsson, performing his beautiful, melancholic music.
Your work with the larger group Skogen is now relatively well-known, and indeed successful. Why the change of group formation for this release? And in particular why the absence of electronics, which was such a feature of your two Another Timbre discs with Skog…
Szenen, standbilder. works 1991 – 2009
German composer Michael Reudenbach's works and studies from 1991-2009 are presented in a six-panel digipack with a 22-page booklet of notes, images and photos
Sirenes
Works from Volker Heyn, an outsider artist interested in acoustic process, tone gestures, friction, discontinuous movements
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 2
3-CD Set. Recorded between 1960 and 1973, the original eighteen LPs that comprise Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series have been highly sought after in the secondary market since 1978 when they were discontinued. These rare and historically important recordings of international avant-garde music have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. Volume two includes music by Nono (Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica), Bruno Maderna (Serenata No. 2), Luciano Ber…
Rational Melodies
I am particularly pleased, because the result is so different from the solo flute recording of Eberhard Blum and the solo clarinet recording of Roger Heaton. It is not just another interpretation, but a case where interpreters have added so much insight to the music that the music itself has grown. When I was composing this music around 1982, I really thought I was simply writing melodies, but now these little pieces, though remaining melodies, have become something much more, something I…
Klangregionen 1951-2007
German composer Josef Anton Riedl doesn’t have many releases to show for nigh on six decades of activity. Of his small handful of albums, all long out of print, the best known is a 1972 Wergo LP. The second half of the noughties saw a minor swell of interest in Riedl’s work – the Wergo album was given the Creel Pone CD-R bootleg treatment in 2005, and one of his compositions was included on the fifth volume of Sub Rosa’s Anthology Of Noise And Electronic Music series – but for the most part he r…