Archimedes - A Planetarium Opera
From Mantua and Bayreuth to warehouses and wilderness, opera composers have often created dramas for particular kinds of spaces. Now add planetariums to the list. That hemispherical stage of scientific wonderment is the perfect venue for James Dashow’s monumental opera, Archimedes. After witnessing some epic laser and electronic music shows that took place in science museum theaters, Dashow – a distinguished electronic music pioneer – decided this venue would be perfect for bringing the Ancient …
Justinian Intonations
Floating miasmic vapors. A chorus of mystery monks. Flights of Angels. Clouds and swirls of echoes. Weightless sounds that swirl and eddy and carry you downstream on your timeless journey to sleep, to death, to birth? It started with a clap – actually three – recorded as acoustic test tones inside one of the many ancient cisterns beneath Istanbul (Constantinople back then). Philip Blackburn then analyzed and stretched the reverb of the space as it were by an electron microscope that revealed the…
The Great Learning
** CD housed in a 4-panel digipak. Comes with 12-page booklet ** Tone Glow Records is proud to present a special archival recording of Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 7 from Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning. Conducted and formed by American composer Dean Rosenthal, the Montréal Scratch Orchestra featured 14 or so like-minded experimental music enthusiasts who performed the pieces at Redpath Hall on the McGill University campus in 1996. This release arrives on Cardew's 85th birthday and follows Ro…
Lake from the Louvers
** 140g black vinyl hosued in printed inner and outer sleeves with gloass varnish ** Lake from the Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang. Created primarily during a stay at the La Becqu…
Assassin Reverie
2005 release ** Arte Quartett: Beat Hofstetter, soprano saxophone; Sascha Armbruster, alto saxophone; Andrea Formenti, tenor saxophone; Beat Kappeler, baritone saxophone Terry Riley, vocals, piano and harpsichord (Uncle Jard) A free spirit, maverick par excellence, creator of a personal compositional style that has spawned entire generations of epigones, Terry Riley (b 1935) embodies the best aspects of the American pioneer spirit, the positive and uncorrupted image of America (and California in…
Cantus Figures Laurus
A boxset compiling the series of inter-related releases that Late Music put out in 2020 - the double album Cantus, Descant, the two disc live set Figures In Open Air, and Laurus, an extended EP of early sketches for the music fully realised on Cantus, Descant.
Mutual Aid Music
* Limited edition double CD + 12-Page Booklet. Six panel gatefold CD package beautifully designed by Lasse Marhaug and featuring an exclusive essay on the social and artistic philosophy behind Mutual Aid Music by the composer (including notated examples) * A Double-CD of of Eight Ensemble Concertos by Wooley Performed by Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, Violinist Joshua Modney, Cellist Mariel Roberts, Pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, Percussionists Matt Moran and Russell Greenberg, and N…
Sculthorpe Studies
Sculthorpe Studies marks a thoughtful and searching entry from Josten Myburgh, situating contemporary ensemble practice within a deep engagement with Australia’s sonic environment and historical legacy. Drawing direct inspiration from the harmonic language of Peter Sculthorpe, himself known for invoking landscape and indigeneity in his music, Myburgh constructs a work for sextet and field recordings that is at once interrogation and homage. The piece unfolds in a sequence of episodes, each pairi…
Jankélévitch Sextets
Jankélévitch Sextets brings together Antoine Beuger’s reductionist poetics and the responsive intelligence of Apartment House, resulting in a recording defined less by overt drama than by its expansive sense of space and attentive musicianship. Over the span of sixty-four minutes, Beuger crafts a patient tapestry for violin, viola, double bass, bassoon, bass clarinet, and accordion. Each instrument enters as if in dialogue, their lines arising not from thematic contrast but from a shared willing…
Dead Beats
Dead Beats: A new composition by American avant-garde composer Alvin Curran for Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt, brought together with the first ever recording of Inner Cities No 9 '9-11-01' The piano has always been at the core of Alvin Curran's oeuvre. Granted, you'd expect a statement like that from the liner notes to a collection of his piano pieces. In this case, however, he's said so himself, in a candid interview with sound artist Andrew Liles: "It’s the focal point and kind of a totem fo…
Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps
James Tenney, for almost the entirety of his career, was one of the great, unsung giants of the American musical avant-garde - an artist’s artist, whose towering contribution and influence was everywhere - equal to Feldman and Cage, but who, like Nancarrow and Partch before him, was a maverick - radical to the core, refusing to play by the rules, and thus suffered at that fate’s all too predictable hand. Since his death in 2006, his legacy in devoted hands, recognition has slowly begun to grow, …
Femenine (Apartment House)
Femenine, composed by Julius Eastman in 1974, stands as a landmark for American experimentalism - bringing minimalist structure together with exuberant, open-form collaboration. In their intensely engaged rendering, Apartment House conjures music that listens as much as it declares. Simon Limbrick’s insistent vibraphone motif and a persistent field of sleigh bells anchor the performance, as piano, strings, winds, and keyboard join, layering intricate phrases, timbral color, and nuance. The music…
Just So
Just So delivers four engaging string quartets from Canadian composer Cassandra Miller, performed by the ever-adventurous Quatuor Bozzini. Miller’s approach, marked by bold quotation, direct lyricism, and inventive repetition, allows each piece to breathe with immediacy and sincerity. The title track opens the album with gentle humor - a brief, buoyant play on gesture and motif, sketching out the record’s ethos without pretension. Throughout, Miller’s music draws on folk textures, swirling patte…
H
H documents the intersection of Japanese composer Taku Sugimoto and Chilean guitarist Cristián Alvear, realized in an unassuming but luminous live performance. Originally written for Sugimoto’s duo project ‘Songs’ with Minami Saeki, the piece was rearranged for two guitars when Sugimoto and Alvear came together in Tokyo. The composition’s title signals its creator’s ongoing departure from elaborate naming conventions - only single letters, roman numerals, or numbers. For H, this stripped-down fo…
Yogurt
Yogurt is the second release of the collective Blutwurst. Produced by Tom Relleen and Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga) the LP takes its title from the project Yogurt, started in 2013 and focused on the electro-acoustic exploration of unisons and drones. From its earliest stages the influence of new American music was essential to define the sonic identity of the collective: the music of La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, as well as Europeans Giacinto Scelsi and Eliane Radigue, has represented and repr…
Guitarist Alone
Jurg Frey - guitarist, alone played by Cristian Alvear. A double CD featuring all of Jurg Frey's music for solo guitar, beautifully interpreted by the Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, including a new piece written specially for Cristian. “Not one for the impatient listener, this softly entrancing double-disc set contains all the solo guitar music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey – and that means an awful lot of silence and not a huge number of notes. The first piece, Abendlied, contains exactl…
A mist is a collection of points
Michael Pisaro (b. 1961) is a member of the Wandelweiser collective, an international organization of musicians which he has defined as 'a particular group of people who have been committed, over the long term, to sharing their work and working together.' Its members have shared an interest in John Cage and experimental music, and extended durations, indeterminacy, and silence have featured in many works they have made; but Michael Pisaro is quick to point out that the members of the colle…
Caroline
2014 release. More solo percussion from Weighter Recordings, this time from Tim Feeney, whose work I had been unfamiliar with up to this point. The long, drawn-out drum rolls from which the album's two tracks are formed invite immediate comparison with the work of Weighter director-in-chief Nick Hennies, with whom Feeney performs in the trio Meridian. However, much as artists of the Sixties and Seventies explored the shared format of monochrome painting with very different concepts in mind…
Grizzana And Other Pieces 2009-2014
Grizzana features Swiss composer Jürg Frey at his most introspective, realized by Ensemble Grizzana - Frey (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Richard Craig (flute), Emma Richards (viola), Philip Thomas (piano), Seth Woods (cello), and Ryoko Akama (organ & electronics). The work, together with companion pieces on the double CD Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014(Another Timbre), marks a deep engagement with sonic transparency, tension, and the delicate equilibrium found in Morandi’s painting. Ea…
Tokyo 1972
Tip! *2022 stock* Some of the best recordings from Sydney's vibrant exploratory/spontaneous music scene ever released. Teletopa was “one of the earliest recorded examples of improvisation in Australia“. The trio was formed in Sidney in 1970 by Peter Evans, David Ahern and Roger Frampton, with various guests for each performance. Using conventional instruments like flute, saxophone, piano and percussion, Teletopa explored extended technique, unusual ways of playing, dissonances and silences, in …