Tape Works of Kuniharu Akiyama. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 006
Kuniharu Akiyama (1929-1996) was well-known as a music critic, mainly of modern and contemporary music. However, his career was not only in the music field -- he was also a very well-regarded avant-garde artist (he especially related to the early Fluxus movement). This release consists of his three unknown tape music pieces. They are very strange. Excerpt from the liner notes: "'Environmental Mechanical Orchestra' (1966) was made for an exhibition called 'From Space to Environment,' carried out …
The sad mac
4-panel V-fold hard cardboard with Japanese OBI strip, softer insert for CD and a 4-page fold-out booklet in English and Japanese. Lucky restock, few copies available. Stephan Mathieu's original Japanese edition copies of his lost classic, recorded and produced between Summer 2001 and 2004 and originally released on the Headz label from Tokyo in the Winter of 2004. All the factors that make Mathieu's trademark sound today are already in full play here, the spectral drones, early instruments an…
Cycle des souvenirs
2023 restock. First ever release of a large scale electroacoustic piece five years in the making that revisits numerous periods from Luc Ferrari's five decades of work. From the composer's liner notes: "I have been composing a new series of works under the general title Exploitation des Concepts. The point is to take concepts I have been experimenting with throughout my entire life as a composer, and to put them to use in every possible direction: in instrumental as well as electroacoustic music…
Chœurs imaginaires
This piece develops a preoccupation already begun in “Naissance du verbe” (Birth of the Word), the result of research on language and phonemes undertaken by Bernard Ucla. The idea behind this research is that the sign in language is not arbitrary, but that the choice of phonemes at the origin of languages obeys a long elaboration, and that between the meaning of words and the phonemes that express them, mysterious relationships exist: the phoneme is not a neutral acoustic substance but carries s…
Subgestuel - Diffluences - Phonophonie
A first monographic compact disc for this composer born in 1951, a pupil of Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel, winner of the Villa Médicis Prize "hors les murs" in 1995, who has also contributed to the musical research activities of the IRCAM, in the Atelier de Recherches Instrumentales (1985 and taken part in the development of the Quatron, the real-time synthesis computing system of the IMCA at Auch (1989-1990).
On 'Diffluences': "The relationship between tape and piano is not the classical one…
Une Saison En Enfer
Composed in 1979 and realized at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (Lyon, France) by Gilbert Amy with the assistance of Daniel Teruggi. Performed with Fusako Kondo (soprano), Edwige Parat (soloist of Maîtrise de Radio France), Jean-Pierre Drouet (percussions).
Dubravko Detoni With Acezantez
Croatian composer and pianist Dubravko Detoni is a name barely familiar to even the most hardened and fanatical followers of avant-garde composition. Although he has managed to consistently escape almost all forms of wider public recognition, Detoni has, since 1970 -- both in the solo context and with his Acezantez ensemble -- doggedly pursued a singular and unique musical path. Drawing on the conventions and traditions of modern composition, avant-garde electronics, musique concrète and group a…
Musica Mundana / L'Estran
'Musica Mundana': Mixed, fusion and root music, work on 'harmonisation' of various music and vocals. A genuine alchemy! 'L'Estran': What a beautiful metaphor is this piece of coastline. It conveys an impression of in-between, uncertainty, contraries. After studying music in the French National Music School, a decisive encounter with Ivo Malec, Guy Reibel, Jacques Lejeune and Jean Schwarz at the GRM will introduce him to electroacoustic music which he will afterwards focus on. He has composed aro…
Hinterland
Carlos Roque Alsina is an Argentinean-born composer who tends to mix acoustic and taped sounds together in a manner that evokes natural sounds to some degree, something of a more programmatically inclined Iannis Xenakis. The title piece combines piano and percussion with taped sounds that often possess an organ-like quality. While the acoustic instruments dance around each other in intricate patterns, the tape heaves and respires ominously, depicting the sort of backcountry that's unsettling in …
Time drops
2000 release. This mini-CD follows on from Akemi Ishijima's previous electroacoustic composition on Variations 2 -- A London Compilation. It includes one new piece and a reissue of "Ab Ovo," previously released on 5 Composers Second Coming on Fylkingen. The two pieces explore a broad range of traditional electronic techniques, both subtle and powerful. "Time Drops" (2000) -- a single stroke of a bell, in its decay, sometimes evokes a sense of infinity in our mind. "Time Drops" is an attempt to e…