Directors
Celebrated Czech musicians Floex & Jan Šikl present Directors, a collaborative album exploring neoclassical composition, electronic experimentation and chamber ensemble performance. Across four movements, Directors reveals a musical language where classical formality and electronic spontaneity exist as equal voices due out on via Minority Records. The dream of melding classical music with contemporary music, electronic in particular has been a cherished if not always successful one – it is as if…
Music for Strings
Three string works written between 2020 and 2023, performed by Ensemble Modern: a nonet locked in seven-eight, a piece that splits sound the way a prism splits light, and a score written in mirror notation. Ikeda's electronic precision, played on bowed strings.
The Evil of Banality
Tip! Last autumn, Ni Vu Ni Connu released Fagaschinski's debut album as a sole composer, entitled Aerodynamics. The double LP features two large-scale clarinet ensemble pieces: an octet composition performed by The Paranormal Clarinet Society and a nonet multitrack conception. The 2-LP set comes housed in a gorgeous gatefold jacket and includes a booklet with extensive liner notes, photos and scores – a true feast for the eyes and ears.
The follow up and continuation of this mission arrives less…
Rulfo/voces/ecos
The works on this CD were realized in collaboration between the composer Germán Toro Pérez and the musicians of PHACE – Petra Ackermann, Mathilde Hoursiangou, Ivana Pristašová-Zaugg and Roland Schueler – over a period of 15 years. They reflect two aspects of composition that have shaped Toro Pérez’s music from the outset: on the one hand, the question of how musical form emerges from the interplay between construction and perception; and on the other, an exploration of language as a means of con…
Manara
Manara is a trio that emerged from a love of poetry, a shared interest in the musical traditions of the Middle East and poetry as political resistance. The musicians had worked together before separately – Alya and Khabat performed together in Suleimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan as part of the Space 21 Festival, and Alya and Pat have improvised together in several ensembles over the past decade.
Alya had arrived at a time where she was desperate to explore the performance of more poetry in her mother …
Mineralization
“The role of the composer is to act as a filter between reality and the listener, transforming real life into something different from what the listener is accustomed to,” summarizes composer Mioko Yokoyama, reflecting her personal view on her profession. She wants to show that contemporary music is not difficult or hard to listen to. In order to compose, she must first open up new realms of experience, not only through writing, but also through study and analysis. Her aim is to enable people to…
Mômo
The album Mômo comprises a collection of Adam de la Cour’s concert pieces – more specifically, his most important solo keyboard-based compositions. De la Cour draws his inspiration from languages where abrupt tonal shifts and grotesque exaggeration are simply how things function. His influences come as much from psychotronic cinema, rubber-mask practical effects, vaudeville, genre tropes, and forms of satire as from contemporary classical music. De la Cour shares a particularly close artistic pa…
Time is no line but a wound that curves
Huck Hodge, an American composer and multi-talented artist, writes, as the New York Times puts it, “harmonically fresh works […] full of splendour and thunder”. Both intellectually and immediately poetic, his music explores the many invisible connections between the most diverse artistic and philosophical traditions of East and West. His passion for learning both ancient and modern languages, his own poetic output and his original choice of texts are reflected in the interplay of colour, light a…
Fumée
Smoke, sometimes, gets in your ears. Neuma Records announces the release of Fumée, featuring world premiere recordings of three major orchestral works by British-American composer Geoffrey Gordon. Each composition transforms visual art into music: Willem de Kooning’s explosive Abstract Expressionism, a haunting Belle Époque chanson, and the early-20th-century Synchromist movement’s “color orchestration” all find new life through Gordon’s vividly imagined scores. The album opens with Gotham News …
Kinesis, Vol. 3
If 3 is the perfect number, Galan Trio’s third installment in their series dedicated to the American piano trio hits the jackpot. Following the critical success of the first two volumes, which explored works from the easterly states, Kinesis: Volume 3 expands the project’s acoustic horizons by incorporating electronics for the first time, all while remaining true to the series’ guiding principle: dynamic motion. The double-album presents thirteen world-premiere recordings that treat the piano tr…
New Colombian Music for Saxophone Quartet
Since their founding in 2007, the Madrid based saxophone quartet Sigma Project has premiered more than 85 works and introduced hundreds more to audiences from Teatro alla Scala in Milan to Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Their commitment to commissioning new works is the saxophone quartet’s parallel to the Kronos Quartet. Juan Antonio Cuéllar’s Cuatro Artificios is a four-movement work that follows the classical structure of the quartet or symphony (Allegro-Adagio-Scherzo-Allegro Finale) and draws…
šumum
*200 copies limited edition* Michaela Turcerová’s compositions unfold in slow motion. The saxophonist and composer’s glacial music zeroes in on the granularities of each note as it rings, soaking in every subtle shift in texture and pitch. Šumum exemplifies this patient approach to writing music, branching out from themes of loss and togetherness into an intricate tapestry of introspective sound. These four pieces invite deep collaboration between performers, who together shape the music through…
String Quartets
Rand Steiger’s Introspective Trilogy is a series of string quartets with electronics composed over a period of eight years for the JACK Quartet. Reflecting on emotional states through musical expression, the quartets explore intense feelings of anger, frustration, and despair in response to alarming political developments in the U.S. and globally, from 2016 when the project began, to catastrophic recent developments. Steiger relates the resurgence of xenophobia and well-known elements of authori…
Loo(p)cy
This album is intended to be a retrospective view of Luigi Manfrin’s compositional journey. Rather than following a chronological order, it identifies loops that run through his musical production: recurrences, foldings and returns that never replicate the same pattern, but instead reactivate structural tensions in different contexts. At the core is the idea of sound as an immanent experience. The unity of the album lies not in the identity of its materials, but in the constant questioning of th…
Mille-feuilles
*300 copies limited edition* Combining the lyricism of chamber music, the raw tones of punk and metal, the clarity of post-rock, and the abstraction of electroacoustic music, Dionée offers a unique, cinematic musical journey. The trio, with its colorful instrumentation, delivers with Mille-feuilles an astonishing, orchestral‑sounding work in which oboe, accordion, and electric bass converse with a range of electronic instruments and effects.
Open the windows and let the spirits in and out
Warm Winters Ltd. welcomes Argentinian, Berlin-based composer Ángeles Rojas with her new piece ‘Open the windows and let the spirits in and out’. Originally commissioned by the Buenos Aires festival Ruido, the work documents Rojas’s closing performance of its 2023 edition.
Performed on a Klais Opus 1912 organ with an ensemble of violin, cello, soprano flute, piccolo, baritone saxophone, trombone and bass clarinet distributed throughout the space, the piece unfolds over 30 minutes. Sustained tone…
Midmeste
Australian composer-performers Judith Hamann and James Rushford have worked together in countless projects for two decades, perhaps most notably in Golden Fur, their trio with Sam Dunscombe. Black Truffle is pleased to announce Midmeste, their first work as a duo. Its title is Middle English for ‘the middlemost point’, alluding to how the piece builds on the points of overlap between the highly personalised musical languages Hamann and Rushford have developed in recent years.
Performed on cello …
Cracked Glaze
Matthew Wright’s album Cracked Glaze is performed by virtuoso vocalist Sofia Jernberg, Ensemble Klang (Michiel van Dijk, Erik-Jan de With, Anton van Houten, Pete Harden, Saskia Lankhoorn and Joey Marijs) and Wright’s improv/electronic group Spheric Totemic (Mandhira de Saram, Neil Charles, Alexander Hawkins, Stephen Davis and Matthew Wright). The 46-minute piece was performed live, and is built around a ‘spine’ of one long, descending scale which takes nineteen minutes to unfurl, and which then …
Press
“It’s hard not to figure Jack Sheen’s compositions primordially; they lurch and rock with an abortive conviction, as if heralding culture’s approach—still half-submerged, slouched and red, ages ago. His work is somehow determinedly before almost everything; it feels like a dialectical twin to Beckett’s afterwards. Press moves with grossly impoverished intent—almost as if composed—while trembling and stumbling on the cusp of accident. This projected bodily timidity corresponds with a situation ri…
Glorious Mahalia
Midway through Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington, a voice rang out from behind him: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” That voice belonged to Mahalia Jackson, King’s close friend and one of the most revered gospel singers of the 20th century. Glorious Mahalia, a visionary tribute to Jackson’s life by the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet, uses that moment as a springboard to explore the depth of Jackson’s musical craft and its impact on the Civil Ri…