Experimental / Contemporary

The latest work, after six years of silence, from Italian berlin-based composer, performer and publisher (Black Letter Press) Claudio Rocchetti, and a welcomed return on the Die Schachtel imprint after the brilliant Another Piece of teenage wildlife (2008), Labirinto verticale (Vertical Maze) takes its origin from the four years long collaboration of Rocchetti with the Parma-based Fondazione Lenz, a contemporary theatre research collective/organization.Immersed in their very fertile milieu, insp…

As long as you come to my garden is a tribute to the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova, through his lyrics and freely inspired by the cult movie about his life: "The color of the pomegranates" (Nrran Guyny, 1968, USSR) directed by Sergei Parajanov.The feature film tells the life of the poet, who lived in the seventeenth century, from childhood in the royal court, to retirement until his death in the monastery of Haghpat, through a series of episodes, static like paintings that do not tell but show,…

It's hard to believe that it's been roughly two years since Blume Edition's last LP, but thankfully the waiting game has come to an end with the delivery of Valentina Magaletti’s “Rotta”, the first in a coming series of stunning releases from the label. Widely celebrated for her work in Tomaga, Holy Tongue, and Vanishing Twin, the album encounters the Italian born, London based percussionist and composer embarking into the territory of the solo performer, sculpting a remarkable sense of emotive …

Tip! This fourth release by Great Waitress titled back, before was recorded before the pandemic and lockdowns in 2018, and has taken four years to get to production. A live set was beautifully recorded by Peter Farrar at the Annandale Creative Arts Centre in Sydney and mixed and mastered by Joe Talia.  In the elegant liner notes, Chris Abrahams writes of Great Waitress transcending “ ...the individual contributions of Mayas, Altman and Brooks. It's an identity made from a multi-dimensional count…

Naiads by Martin Iddon, realized by Apartment House, is a cycle of five chamber works inspired by freshwater nymphs from Greek myth. Each piece constructs its own world of slow-blooming gestures and modestly veiled lyricism, balancing clarity and ambiguity as the ensemble circulates between unison playing, shifting tempos, and suspended harmonies. The result is a collection of subtly haunting, atmospheric music shaped with patient detail.

L’art de toucher by Evan Johnson features five chamber works that probe the outer limits of sound and silence. With a triptych for piccolo, violin, and percussion at its core, the album also presents finely wrought solo and trio pieces. Johnson’s sensitivity to musical detail shapes an experience full of ambiguity, microscopic interactions, and delicate intensity.

**Blue vinyl Limited Edition to 300 numbered copies ** The title alone - rendered in Punjabi, Dutch, Hindi, Icelandic, and Hebrew scripts, all spelling out variations of the word "channel" - signals that we are entering territory where conventional categories dissolve. This extraordinary summit meeting brings together three of the most distinctive voices in contemporary experimental music: Charlemagne Palestine, the grand patriarch of drone and sustained tone; Oren Ambarchi, whose guitar work ha…

Since his Beat Diary debut (a 12xLP box set comprising 365 beats recorded daily over the course of a year), Julian Sartorius has immersed himself in unique and ambitious projects - trekking the path not travelled to arrive at rhythmic life forms through found objects and prepared instruments. Equally as mighty are his two other escapades, the most recent being Locked Grooves - 112 beats cut as endless loops on vinyl spanning 56 dense 1.8 second compositions per side. Preceding that is his audito…

Atsuko Hatano is a contemporay classical Viola player who works with electronics to add textures and layers to her sound. Located in Tokyo, Japan, she is a commanding instrumentalist and composer who constructs innovative compositions with strings and layered electronics. When not playing solo Atsuko is extremely active recording, collaborating and playing live with Jim O’ Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Mocky and many more acts....

A series of six works for piano and instruments by Ryoko Akama, performed by Apartment House. Commissioned by Philip Thomas and Another Timbre, and dedicated to Philip Thomas. Played by Apartment House: Siwan Rhys (piano), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Gavin Morrison (alto flute), Angharad Davies (violin), Heather Roche (clarinet & bass clarinet), Simon Limbrick (vibraphone & marimba) Ryoko Akama is a Japanese-Korean working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield…

** Edition of 200 ** A collaborative project between two seasoned sound artists dedicated to a profound listening of sonic phenomena. Created with original recordings from power plants along the Bidasoa river in the Basque Country, Erkizia and López have built vivid, straighforward and transformed sound environments from a myriad hums, rattles, crackles, and drones from the wide variety of machinery and industrial electrical facilities inside the power plants. A macro and microscopic journey int…

Two pieces for cello and piano by Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, both performed by Anton Lukoszevieze (cello) and Kerry Yong (piano). "In Ballad (45 minutes in duration) I was extending myself into a longer work; I wanted to make a work that could be the entire concert, that could unfold over a longer time. With Through the Low Hills (10 minutes), I was working with a very restricted vocabulary in a process of constrained variation, working and re-working just a few elements. I felt like …

5 chamber works by James Weeks, beautifully performed by Explore Ensemble. An album of interlinked pieces that form a sequence. James Weeks says "I was aware of tying the pieces together as a set, by continuing and extending certain poetic ideas, ways of using and combining instruments, and ways of thinking about material....Things like the use of mixed instrumental duos, which comes from Violet-Violute, the use of a slow-moving or static background harmonic layer, which comes from Summer, the o…

** 2021 Stock ** "Boris Kovac is one of a handful of modern composers and performers from the region of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia whose names reached Western Europe and America. Strongly influenced by folk music from that region (a fascination he shares with István Mártha and Ernö Király), minimalism, Bela Bartok, and the philosophy of Bela Hamvas (also influential on Hungarian composer Tibor Szemzö, Kovac's music takes multiple forms."  - François Couture/All Music Guide ‘His compositio…

Wonderful engaged and engaging music by the young Western Australian composer Josten Myburgh. ‘Sculthorpe Studies’ combines harmonies taken from the work of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe with field recordings made in Whadjuk Noongar in Western Australia. Jet Kye Chong, percussion   Jameson Feakes, electric guitar   Djuna Lee, double bassStuart James, piano & electronics   Kirsten Smith, flutes   Josten Myburgh, alto saxophone & electronics

Three mysterious, shimmering chamber works by the Australian composer Newton Armstrong, performed by Plus Minus Ensemble and Séverine Ballon (cello) "In 1990 I was studying composition at university. I basically wanted to be Stravinsky. Chris Mann took an interest in me and I started spending a lot of time at his house, drinking tea and talking. He changed my mind about a lot of things and introduced me to people who were making music that excited me. The Melbourne experimental scene was thrivin…

**White vinyl LP** Re-issue of the incredibly rare Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza 1975's album, which comes in a fully remastered version with new sequence / structure as per recently discovered original tapes.When gazing over the expanse of 20th Century avant-garde music, few European projects can claim the seminal importance of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Formed in Rome in 1964 and considered to be the first experimental composers collective, its membership incl…

Built on Erv Wilson's Meta-Slendro scale, seventeen pitches to the octave, for an orchestra of brass and woodwind made or adapted for the purpose. The diamonds of the title are shapes that turn up inside the tuning when the intervals are drawn as a lattice.

Five works for flute, percussion & electronics, recorded during Covid-19 lockdown in a church in Basel, Switzerland, March 2020. Commissioned by Another Timbre and performed by Mara Winter - flute and Clara de Asís - bowed objects, percussion & electronics. "There were some pieces that I composed and others that were formed by Mara and I, where the roles of composer / performer dissolved into each other. ‘A passage through’ was composed specifically for Mara’s bass flute, also relating very much…

**300 copies** "After 10 years of making music together, Oceans Roar 1000 Drums is finally releasing a proper vinyl document of their work. Although their music is best experienced live, this warm recording is the first release in 5 years and genuinely captures their energy and depth of communication. Recorded on a rainy day in the Summer of 2017 this album features the floating presence of Catherine Lamb's "secondary rainbow synthesizer", which is filtering both recordings of the band and envir…

Experimental trio Giraffe crystalize time on Desert Haze, their new LP on Marionette. Giraffe is the musical project of Sascha Demand (guitar), Jürgen Hall (keys), and Charly Schöppner (percussion). Sascha Demand is a composer that comes from a contemporary and improvised musical background, collaborating with the likes of Ensemble Integrales and Vinko Globokar. Jürgen Hall works in electroacoustic experimental projects, theatre and film scores, with releases on Staubgold and Edition Stora. Char…

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…

1,000 copies in yellow vinyl. Singing songs while playing ding dongs, Charlemagne Palestine’s solo voice over the bells of his studio carillon is a premiere in his recorded works, and possibly the first voice/carillon record in musical history. All the little shamanic stuffed deities inhabiting the carillon added their souls to the spirit of the reverberating songs, including a song in memory of Mika Vainio.

Finally the second batch of CDs in the highly-acclaimed Canadian Composers Series is here.Just So (2008/18). 5 Warblework (2011). About Bach (2015). Leaving (2011) by Quatuor Bozzini with Clemens Merkel & Alissa Cheung (violins), Stephanie Bozzini (viola), Isabelle Bozzini (cello).Another disc of extraordinary music by Cassandra Miller, this one containing four string quartets superbly played by Quatuor Bozzini.

Formed in 2003, the Oslo-based trio Bushman's Revenge (named after a type of mouth-searing hot sauce) are upfront about their love for the progressive rock of Cream and Jimi Hendrix, the galactic jazz of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Sharrock and Alice Coltrane, plus the raw power of Black Sabbath and The Pixies. Thou Shalt Boogie! is their sixth album for Rune Grammofon, a relationship that began with 2009's You Lost Me at Hello (RCD 2083CD/(RLP 3083LP). Its velvety, warm sound was captured at…

Angharad Davies, violin. Rhodri Davies, electric harp, melodica. Michael Duch, double bass. Lina Lapelyte, violin, voice. John Lely, objects, electronics, melodica. John Tilbury, piano.They perform three new works by Jurg Frey, Sarah Hughes and John Lely, plus an extended group improvisation.

A double CD of beautiful chamber pieces by the wonderful Swiss composer and clarinetist Jurg Frey, who will be composer in residence at this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Played by Ensemble Grizzana: Jurg Frey (clarinet), Ryoko Akama (organ & electronics), Mira Benjamin (violin), Richard Craig (flute), Emma Richards (viola), Philip Thomas (piano) and Seth Woods (cello).The CD cover features a watercolour by Giorgio Morandi, whose work is one of the inspirations for the music.

This CD presents compositions for piano using the instrument in an unorthodox way. The strings are bowed with nylon strings, stimulated by E-Bows, rubbed with metal, the keys' sound is examined as a corrugated surface and staccato rhythms are repeated in a narrow register. On the one hand, the pieces introduced here explore new ways of playing the piano. In this sense they are enlarged playing techniques, as they have been developed for most instruments in the second half of the twentieth …

Michael Mantler's 1988 WATT song cycle on poems by Beckett, Soupault and Meister, sung by Jack Bruce, Marianne Faithfull and Robert Wyatt with the Danish Concert Radio Orchestra and Rick Fenn (guitar), recorded in 1987 in Copenhagen, London, Willow NY and Boston.