The Redness of Blood
Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke’s music does not use just intonation, it projects that “corporeal“ quality that this predecessor valued as essential.The pieces on this disc make for in…
A Miriam Gideon Retrospective
There is in American painting a dynamic movement known as abstract expressionism, led by such well-known artists as Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.
In Music there is an equivalent--and equally important--development, which we call atonal expressionism. Its lineage stretches from Carl Ruggles and Roger Sessions to Stefan Wolpe and Elliott Carter. The work of Miriam Gideon stands out as a major and individualistic realization of this style.
One of the characteristics of abstra…
Ziua Fără Sfârșit
Before spectral music had a name, Romanian polymath Corneliu Cezar was crafting electro-acoustic revelations. Ziua fără sfârșit collects his 1967-75 recordings - radical explorations of natural resonance that predate Western spectralism by a decade.
In Resonance With Elsewhere
"Composer-performer & visual artist Charlotte Hug: Shaman of contemporary music. Reflections on her solo-album «In Resonance with Elsewhere». This fourth solo album by Charlotte Hug presents the distilled version of a composition commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale in 2022. On that occasion, Hug performed in a huge former machine hall and created various acoustic-imaginary spaces with Son-Icons (expansive Visual-Music on semi-transparent paper, usually painted on both sides with both hands and lon…
Popofoni
This 2CD is a reissue of the holy grail of Norwegian free-jazz and electronic music, Popofoni, released by Sonet in 1973. It features compositions by Arne Nordheim, Terje Rypdal, Kåre Kolberg, Gunnar Sønstevold and Alfred Janson played by an extended Jan Garbarek Quintet.
The Popofoni-project was initiated after a heated debate on Haagen Ringnes’ TV-show Åpen Post in autumn 1969, which dealt with the subject popmusic. Standing on one side you found the defenders of pop, actress and singer Eli…
Turn Liquid Into Dust
Ziúr lines up with The Tapeworm for an exclusive cassette-only release featuring Kenichi Iwasa, exploring the electroacoustic realms. Invited to perform solo at Tarek Atoui's performance series at Kunsthaus Bregenz in October 2024, Ziúr decided to write a new piece for the occasion. This composition, 'Turn Liquid Into Dust', was then performed within the framework of Tarek Atoui's 'Waters' Witness' exhibition as an 8-channel spacial audio piece, transmitting sounds through the installation's str…
Pitched Variations
*200 copies limited edition* Sullivan Johns is a composer and musician from the UK. He studied at Leeds Conservatoire and Leeds Arts University. His previous release, Assembled Parts (Rusted Tone Recordings - 2022), constructs a narrative on themes of loss, grief and memory using minimal drones and field recordings. Described by Bandcamp New and Notable as "Striking experimental compositions that conjure both childhood joy and icy terror”, pieces from Assembled Parts were Broadcast on BBC Radio …
Orbits • Western Springs • Hieroglyphics 3
1999 release ** "In 1950 Henry Brant began to write spatial music of a particular kind in which the planned positioning of the performers throughout the hall, as well as on stage, is an essential factor in the composing scheme. This procedure, which limits and defines the contrasted music assigned to each performing group, takes as its point of departure the ideas of Charles Ives. Brant's principal works since 1950 are all spatial; his catalogue now comprises nearly 100 such works, each for a di…
The Henry Brant Collection, Vol. 2
2004 release ** Let no-one say that Henry Brant, America’s senior experimental composer, doesn’t have a sense of humor. If Charles Ives had been into Monty Python it would not have reached the heights of epic grandeur and inspired lunacy heard on this second volume of Henry Brant works. Here are three concertos: a triple concerto for Oberlin College’s zaniest, a violin concerto for Daniel Kobialka (violin wizard of the San Francisco Symphony), and a double bass concerto for Lewis Paer (who has r…
The California EAR Unit
1989 release ** Chamber works: Louis Andriesses, Hoketus; Elliott Carter, Enchanted Preludes, Espirit Rude, Esprit Doux; Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dr. K Sextet; Michael Torke, The Yellow Pages; Rand Steiger, Quintessence; Arthur Jarvinen, Egytian Two Step. Personnel: Erika Duke, Lorna Elder, Arthur Jarvinen, Amy Knoles, Robin Lorentz, Gaylord Mowry, James Rorig, Rand Steiger, Dorothy Stone, Tony Holmes, Teresa Tunnicliff.
Raoul De Smet
Big tip! *300 copies limited edition* First LP in the ‘Signature Series’, a small new series in the Metaphon catalog, documenting previously unreleased archive works of less known composers. Metaphon presents their ‘signature’ in the most personal and elementary way.
Raoul De Smet (1936), mainly known for his numerous instrumental and chamber music works, started composing in the early 1960’s. Between 1974 and 1989 he also recorded several electro-acoustic compositions at the IPEM in Ghent, one …
Crank and Cloud Orchestral Works
One of Carola Bauckholt's major talents is the gift of attentive and passionate listening. Through persistent research, she uncovers the hidden musical potential of ambient sounds such as the gurgling of a fountain, a grinding crank, birds, dogs, construction machinery or a babbling baby, which then become the core of entire works. These sounds need a mediator like Bauckholt who translates them, thinks them through musically, and places them into often surprising contexts. This album features th…
The Complete String Quartets
Chris Otto (violino), Austin Wulliman (violino), John Pickford Richards (viola), Jay Campbell (violoncello). The world class JACK Quartet, both individually and as an ensemble, have had a personal relationship with Zorn for well over a decade. Here they deliver passionate and virtuosic recordings of his complete string quartets. Zorn’s writing for strings is legendary, and his eight string quartets, written in a thirty-year period from 1988–2017, are some of the most important and original works…
Obras Electroacústicas 1969-1981
Eduardo Polonio (1941–2024) was one of the foundational figures in the emergence and development of electroacoustic music in Spain. The anthology "Eduardo Polonio: Obra electroacústica 1969–1981" revives his legacy with a selection of essential pieces from his early electroacoustic period. The album includes eight compositions created between 1969 and 1981, spanning from Polonio's early experiments at the Alea Electronic Music Laboratory in Madrid to his later work at the Phonos Laboratory in Ba…
The Mauricio Kagel Edition
"It's fascinating, and a wonderful reminder of how fresh and unique Kagel's place in the history of music in the last half-century is." - The Guardian
Playback Play
*2025 stock* Famous for his examination of unusual and exotic instrumental sounds, here Mauricio Kagel focuses on the most mundane of sound materials. While attending a music trade show, Kagel was taken by the many levels and orbits of sound activity emanating from the various booths and stages. In 'Playback Play' (subtitled 'News from the Music Fair, A Radio Piece') he has arranged a spatially sensitive tableau of crowd noises, sales pitches and fragments of the sort one hears in music store sh…
Seven Reorganisations
Close to five years since the future-fwd dancefloor classic Workaround, Seven Reorganisations sees Beatrice Dillon return to the long-player format a long way removed from the club she helped reimagine. In some ways, the immediacy of that previous record positions it as somewhat of an outlier in Dillon's impressive catalogue of modern experimentation, and this latest collection, derived from a commission made by Mark Fell, represents a continuation of what now looks like a long established inter…
Collected Works
Box set on Nonesuch with 27 discs (26 CDs + 1 DVD) in wallets, plus two booklets (132 + 120 pages). Nonesuch Records releases Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven-disc box set featuring music recorded during composer Steve Reich's forty years on the label, on March 14, 2025, available to pre-order here. The collection represents six decades of Reich’s compositions, ranging from It’s Gonna Rain (1965) to first recordings of his two latest works: Jacob’s Ladder (2023) and Traveler’s Prayer …
Documentos
** Original copies of this obscure electro acoustic marvel from Mexico. Few copies available, unplayed ** Sparse avant-garde composition from Mexican great Manuel Enriquez. Aleatory, contrapuntal, and soloistic passages alternating with long timbral blocks are characteristic of his music though the 1960s and 70s . Manuel Enríquez Salazar (17 June 1926 – 26 April 1994) was a Mexican composer, violinist and pedagogue. He was a fellow member of the Academy of Arts of Mexico, of the National Seminar…
Musica De Camara
** Original copies of this obscure electro acoustic marvel from Mexico. Few copies available, unplayed ** Musica De Camera it's an interdisciplinary creative group formed by Angel Cosmos (writer, multidisciplinary author), Juan José Diaz Infante (photographer and designer) and Arturo Márquez (composer and musician). Created in Mexico in March 1984, it has already presented several concerts, being the world premiere of its first eight works -among them, five of those included in this disc-, one o…