Experimental / Just Intonation

A single 51-minute piece for four Wuhan cymbals played with bows, without electronics or amplification, timed on a recording of the composer's breathing while asleep. Recorded in Bristol in 2026.

Recorded in rural eastern Washington State, Walk in Praise of All Metals reflects the raw expanses of the‘Channel Scablands’, a region which gladly bares the scars of ancient volcanism, ice age floods, &hydroelectric power. Like the landscape—born of cataclysm, yet steady in its austerity, the music speaksthrough sustained resonance and momentary intersections. Structure emerges through sharedharmonics, with passages from Matt Sargent’s re-tuned guitar (13-Limit just intonation) activatingsympat…

Other Minds is pleased to present Lost Horse Wash Drone, a new recording by composer and guitarist Giacomo Fiore. The CD features Fiore’s playing on a variety of justly-tuned guitars alongside field recordings from Joshua Tree National Park. The concept for this album grew out of Giacomo Fiore’s week-long residency at the Lou Harrison House in Joshua Tree, California in March 2023. Immersed in the surroundings of the desert, Fiore delved into an exploration of Lou Harrison's musical legacy, draw…

Tip! Maybe it was inevitable that Vilhelm Bromander and Fredrik Rasten would find each other. A symbiotic musical alliance of suggestive combinatory magic that stretches back to the interstitial two day space that separates their dates of birth and manifests here as the movement between ‘perfect’ or ‘just’ intonation and the ragged, psychoactive energy of the slippages from and towards that togetherness that render otherwise simple patterns or generally understood repetitions as wildly other and…

Much-Needed repress * Limited edition. Gatefold Cover, quality vinyl pressed at RTI. Includes a four-page insert with liner notes by La Monte Young, Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr, and Tashi Wada * Saltern's latest offering marks the first-ever release of "lost minimalist" Terry Jennings' visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a clos…

*2026 stock* Ellen Arkbro and Johan Graden embody the limitless curiosity and fearless innovation of the Swedish and Berlin new music scenes they inhabit. Arkbro is a composer and musician whose work has been presented around the globe at prestigious institutions such as the Barbican in London, GRM in Paris and the Kölner Philharmonie in Köln. Graden is one of Sweden’s most sought-after pianists, moving freely between classical music and the European contemporary jazz scene. Currently living in …

"I envision this music as emanating from a moon inhabited by otherworldly life forms and ecosystems; these sounds as evoking the moon’s topographies, beings, lunar rivers, and strands of light — as if this moon’s essence were itself sonic, vibrational matter. Musically and acoustically, strands of lunar light departs from a set of tones corresponding to a confined harmonic series segment of a very low fundamental frequency: 5.15 hertz. Through twelve continuous sections, each employing various m…

*200 copies limited edition* Fredrik Rasten (b.1988) is a Berlin-based guitarist and composer focusing on rational harmony and related acoustic phenomena. Reaching for an active state of listening and an intuitive exploration of the complexities of tonal interaction, his work draws on influences from minimalist styles, folk musics and other exploratory modes of sound making. Besides his solo projects, he both performs and composes as a member of the Berlin based ensemble Harmonic Space Orchestra…

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated Music by Jules ReidyMixed by James GinzburgMastered by Stephan MathieuArtwork by Florian & Michael QuistrebertPhotograph by Camille BlakeDesign and art direction by Bartolomé Sanson  (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its explora…

2013 release ** "what do you do, if you work with just intonation and wish to write a piece for organ? you have to deal with the relation between equally tempered and over- or undertonal (just) intonation. 2001 i had several opportunities to make a study of some wonderful instruments. this eventually put me on the path towards this composition.in this piece only those frequencies of the organ sound that have close to whole-numbered ratios (+/- 6 cents) to a fundamental (in this case C’ at about …

Black Truffle is pleased to announce the first LP documenting master khene player Sombat Simla, the label’s first collaboration with Japanese sound artist, field recordist, and researcher Yasuhiro Morinaga. Simla is known in Thailand as one of the greatest living players of the khene, the ancient bamboo mouth organ particularly associated with Laos but found throughout East and Southeast Asia. His virtuosic and endlessly inventive renditions of traditional and popular songs have earned him the t…

1995 release ** "These pieces for just-intoned electric guitar, bass violin, cimbalon, percussion and horn section emphasize dynamics and sonorities, achieving stunning acoustical effects. American composer Arnold Dreyblatt (now living in Berlin) studied under minimalist greats LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier, and formed the Orchestra Of Excited Strings in 1979. Dreyblatt has released previous albums on India Navigation and Hat Art (Switzerland). The musicians of the Orchestra O…

1994 release (VERY RARE) **  "This important and rare CD was produced by Jonathan and Elizabeth Glasier, Gary Morrison, and Brian McLaren. This is the only extant permanent document of Darreg's work. Includes original booklet with reproductions of tuning charts. Ivor Darreg (1917-1994) was interested in both just intonations (tuning systems based on the ratios between the frequencies of the pitches) and equal temperaments (tunings with pitches equally spaced through the octave, which require a d…

Few copies back in stock. Limited deluxe edition. This vinyl box set is the first-ever official release of La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings (1958), recorded live from the Dream House, a legendary sound-and-light installation by Young, Marian Zazeela, and Jung Hee Choi, and performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis and featuring Curtis, cello; Reynard Rott, cello; Erik Carlson, violin, viola; and Christopher Otto, violin, viola, at Dia:Chelsea in 2015. Featu…

2024 Restock. Before New Age hit terra firma at the dawn of the 1980s, the classically-trained Bay Area composer Jordan De La Sierra's consciousness soared with cosmic concepts. With cues and lessons from the great minimalists La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and help from the venerable public radio program Hearts of Space, De La Sierra embarked on journey in alternate tunings and resounding reverberations, transporting entranced listeners from the Golden Gates to the intergalactic…

Celebrating its one hundredth release, Black Truffle is honoured to present a major archival discovery: a stunning document of the only performance by the trio of Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt and Jim O’Rourke. Across a two-night programme organised by David Weinstein at legendary New York experimental venue Tonic in January 2001, Conrad, Dreyblatt and O’Rourke presented individual projects before performing a collaborative set each night, the first with members of Dreyblatt’s ensemble and the s…

A suite of raga-inspired compositions and improvisations that grew from a fertile collaboration between Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison and John Also Bennett centered around a devotion to just intonation tuning, deep listening, and resonant spaces. Michael Harrison is a composer and pianist who is a dedicated practitioner of just intonation and North Indian classical music. He was La Monte Young's protégé and piano tuner during The Well-Tuned Piano years and a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath, a…

Richard Scott and Axel Dörner’s »Journal of Elasticity« is a two-part site-specific composition recorded at the big water reservoir in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Playing once with the empty space’s acoustics as a third actor and once in front of and with the audience’s presence, their bohemian drips debut is a riveting study of space and intensity.

The debut album from Swedish duo David Bennet & Vilhelm Bromander features their co-created piece Within Reach of Eventuality. Following a semi-open score by Bennet, the duo is treating elements such as complex textures, non-pitched sounds, microtonality, beatings and intense pauses in an improvisatory and careful manner. From the liner notes, by Peter Margasak: "This isn’t music where we need to know exactly what’s happening or trace how it proceeds. It exists to entrance the listener within th…

* Recorded November 10, 1987 at Studio Lussi, Allschwil/Switzerland. * For more than 50 years, Pauline Oliveros has been on a continuing mission: “... to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” If those words bring to mind the voyages of the Starship Enterprise from the television series Star Trek, the parallels are more than coincidental. In fact Pauline would be as able a captain of any Starship in the fleet of the United Fede…

*Limited edition of 200 copies.* An investigation into the compositional properties of prime numbers from Vermont-based electronic musician Greg Davis, New Primes employs custom-written software to translate prime number sequences into a mesmerizing universe of sound. Davis pares his sound materials down to their most basic — a network of pure sine tones — to create a collection of pieces ranging from the almost-tonal to the harmonically alien. In summer 2016, greyfade founder Joseph Branciforte…

'The Harmonic Series' is a compilation of musical works in Just Intonation created by three generations of contemporary composers who utilize this tuning system. This compilation was curated over the span of two years by Duane Pitre and released on Important Records in November 2009. The goal of this compilation and its accompanying liner notes is to educate listeners about the origins and use of Just Intonation, as well as to portray the unique beauty of this tonal “color palette,” which is hea…

Dunscombe is part of the Berlin circle of just intonation researchers, and spent years on the music of the Romanian spectralist Horatiu Radulescu. Two Forests begins from a single central pitch and works outward from there.

In 1957 he founded an improvising ensemble with Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. In 1970 he wrote a drone for three amplified pianos on a single low D. In sixty years he has released almost nothing. Here he plays the Enhanced Piano in Just Intonation, on poems Ungaretti wrote in the trenches.

The only microtonal tuba trio there is, recorded in the Grosser Wasserspeicher, a disused water reservoir in Berlin-Pankow, and mixed with analogue synthesizers. Captured in binaural sound, so the room is as present as the instruments.