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…
Incidental Music and Keyboard Miscellany
Volume 7 of Mode's Edition Christian Wolff, on 2CD: the composer plays his own Incidental Music (2003-04), written for a Merce Cunningham Dance Company Event, and the ongoing series Keyboard Miscellany, on piano and melodica.
abregistrieren
2005 release **
“select a sound of one or three tones within the range of an octavedistribute the pitches between the keyboards (use each pitch only once)select 3 – 31 stops from principals, flutes and reeds and distribute them evenly between the keyboards (do not use mixtures)play the pitches and hold the keys down (e.g. with lead weights)push the stop very slowly until you hear a change – then stop the movement, listen for a while and pull another register in the same way for a long time, on…
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
Broken Line
Four works by Alvin Lucier, Carbon Copies, Risonanza, Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums and Broken Line, performed by the Berlin-based Trio Nexus.
Assigned #15
Assigned #15 continues James Saunders’s trajectory of modular, context-sensitive composition. Derived from his long-term project #[Unassigned], this work is scored for seven musicians - violin, viola, cello, percussion, melodica, chamber organ, and objects - each participant given bespoke instructions drawn from Saunders’s accumulated material. Apartment House’s performance (recorded at St Paul's, Huddersfield) embodies Saunders’s philosophy: structure and interpretation are reconfigured for eac…
Would Fall From The Sky, Would Wither And Die
Skuggorna och ljuset is a quintet featuring Magnus Granberg (clarinet, composition), Anna Lindal (violin), Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Kristine Scholz (prepared piano), and Erik Carlsson (percussion). Their sole album, Would Fall from the Sky, Would Wither and Die, departs from Granberg’s larger ensemble Skogen. Without electronics, the sound is more chamber-like, each gesture and note given time to settle, bloom, and fade in a gently hypnotic field.
The work transforms the harmonic material o…
Variations V
First commercial release of John Cage's Variations V, the 1966 NDR Hamburg television production with David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and the Cunningham Dance Company, with the Paris 1966 audio, dancer interviews and a 12-page book.
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
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 3
The voice as instrument, the temple bell as orchestra, the piano as detonator. Vol. 3 of Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series traces three radical propositions about sound and its sources - each originating from a different continent, each redefining what was possible within its medium.
The first disc belongs to Cathy Berberian. Originally issued on Time Records in 1962, it captures the American mezzo-soprano - then based in Milan and married to Luciano Berio - at the height of her extraordin…
Sirenes
Works from Volker Heyn, an outsider artist interested in acoustic process, tone gestures, friction, discontinuous movements
The Works for Percussion I
The complete Imaginary Landscapes 1-5 and Credo in US by John Cage, with radios, phonograph records and percussion, played by Percussion Group Cincinnati in the first volume of the Mode Cage percussion works.
Cardew works 1960-70
2024 stock. Cornelius Cardew's music of the Sixties is arguably from his most creative and experimental period as a composer, beginning with Autumn 60 and ending with the last paragraphs of The Great Learning in 1970. This decade can be divided into two parts, where the first half focuses on indeterminate music and the latter sees a growing emphasis on improvisation. Treatise functions as a bridge between these two periods, as it contains elements of both. This recording is a document of this du…
The Art of the Toy Piano 2
Margaret Leng Tan's follow-up to The Art of the Toy Piano: Cage's Suite for Toy Piano and Dream, a George Crumb song and other pieces, played on six toy pianos plus toy instruments, grand piano, music boxes and percussion.
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…
Mondweiß
Recordings from the Elektronic Studio at the TU Berlin, the Studio of the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, and at Patrick Kosk's own studio
The theory of impossible melody
Larry Polansky (1954–2024) was a visionary American composer, guitarist, theorist, and educator whose work forged deep connections across mathematics, computer science, intonation theory, and experimental music. His compositions-performed here by collaborators including Jody Diamond (voice), Chris Mann (voice), Phil Burk and Larry Polansky (live computers, fretless electric guitars), and Robin Hayward (tubas)-embody a rare synthesis of rigorous theory and expressive musicality.
Polansky’s music …
Faint Traces
Six chamber works by Frank Denyer from 1973-2001, including Out of the Shattered Shadows 1 and 2, Faint Traces, Music for Two Performers, Play and Passages, in composer-supervised performances by The Barton Workshop.