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Vous Et Nous
A brilliant collaboration between these two dark moody French singers -- every bit as great as their classics from the early 70s! Recorded in 1977, with enough material to make up 2 LPs, this set features 33 tracks that slip and slide into each other with cool sounds, spare instrumentation, and amazing vocals that are difficult to describe, but which cut you to the quick once you've heard them! Extremely haunting, with a feel that sounds like the wind blowing through an empty cottage on…
Journey Through A Body
Recorded in Roma in March 1981. It was recorded in five days, a day per body section. No tracks were re-recorded or added to after their day. Each was immediately after recording. No tracks were pre-planned, all tracks are invented directly onto the tape.
Orchestral Works
The second CD of col legno's Wien Modern Edition is dedicated to Luciano Berio, who throughout his life kept on searching for new sounds, and new instrumental and orchestral organizing principles in his work. His Sequences for solo instruments are among the most important landmarks in recent music; later on, Berio decided to "comment" on some of these notoriously complex solo works from an orchestral perspective. Chemins and Chemins IIb are adaptations of the Sequences for harp and viola. "The b…
Cipher
It has been Chicago, not New York, that has been the confluence of music of Europe, jazz of the Americas, and improvised music. Whereas NYC claims all things to be "New York" (sort of like Al Gore inventing the internet), music makers in Chicago identify and defer to varying regional influences.Such is the case on Cipher, where seemingly disparate forces come together to create heady and engaging music. But then leader Josh Abrams has made a career of such things. He began with the Philadelphia …
Discreet Music
Orignal master series reissue: a real masterpiece...after a car accident put Brian Eno in the hospital in 1975, he came out with the idea of creating Ambient music, or music that was essentially to be used as atmosphere. Discreet Music was the first of his ambient experiments and is therefore a landmark recording in addition to being a beautiful combination of tape-delay and composition.
Solitudes
Hirschfeld deliberately distinguished solitude, or loneliness, from a state that leads to depression or despair. For him, the contemplation of one’s self leads to the “dialogue with one self and with nature”, as is the case, e.g., in his Chant of the Night, which is based on poems by Walt Whitman. Hirschfeld chose Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with its portrayal of human solitude in the plains as a starting point in order to develop the music from a simple melodic cell, “which, like human consciousn…
Siete Cantos De Espana
The three cultures at the center of the songs on this recording make a joint appearance in the finale of the Siete cantos de España. They are formed into a unified whole in Ensalada, as the soprano and the baritone begin singing together texts of Castilian, Sephardic and Arabic origin. The poems’ subjects are love, agony and death; and in order to bring them to life Halffter requires a large orchestra of about 100 musicians and two soloists with the baritone singing Spanish texts and the soprano…
Aerial # 2
This release is the second (Volume 2) in the three-part Aerial series. Tod Dockstader is one of the all-time great figures in the world of musique concréte composition, with his "organized sound" works from the 1960s being amongst the most radical ever conceived -- in league with Schaeffer, Henry, Stockhausen, and Varese. Aerial is a rare new work in the realm of shortwave radio, from one of America's most experimental composers. Volume 1 was released in March 2005 inside a slipcase. Volu…
Natura renovatur
Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) has featured prominently in my music writing life for a decade and a half, ever since I wrote Discovering Scelsi on my first computer for Piano Journal (Oct. 1986), one of the first UK articles about this fascinating and elusive composer.There are particular reasons why the Scelsi CD in the latest, indispensable batch from Kairos prompted a trawl of my files. Scelsi applauded my analysis of his piano music and we had a cordial correspondence, after which I met him tw…
Trac(k)_t
his is the final work in the series of works-encompassing ataraxia, bradycard, trans~, and back_forward – using the cymbalon as source material. The process of working with this hammered stringed instrument for this series has been a “discussion” between the instrument and myself, an exploration of traditional playing, digital processing, and mixtures of both. I feel that trac[k]_t should convey the scope of using an instrument without losing both its intrinsic nature of engagement as …
The Hilversum Session
Originally recorded in 1964. Featured artists: Albert Ayler (tenor saxophone); Sunny Murray (percussion); Gary Peacock (bass); Don Cherry (cornet). The legendary recording, digitally remastered with new artwork, and liners by Russ Musto. Includes free 9.5 x 9.5 pullout poster!
Army Arrangement
Fela Anikulapo Kuti, inventor of Afrobeat, is one of the greatest musicians ever to have lived. He was an innovator, musically gifted, and more important, he was the people's musician.
Quilisma
The succinctness of his work will first become fully apparent when it becomes possible to view the second half of the twentieth century from something more like a bird’s-eye view.
Orchestral Works & Chamber Music
A conductor enjoys the privilege of being able to reconsider his attitude to musical works over and over again. The composer Boulez adheres to the same maxim: of his own compositions he regards only very few as being finished; most of them are, to him, "work in progress." The first two pieces on this collage CD were actually withdrawn by Boulez after their premiere as he wished to think them over again. Later on, Polyphonie X (1951) in view of its extremely strict serial procedure appeared to hi…
Resonant Spaces
****THE WIRE 2008 TOP 50 RECORDS OF THE YEAR WINNER****"A couple of years ago the promoters Arika invited John Butcher to tour a number of out-of-the-way spaces in Scotland. The venues, selected for their extreme acoustic properties, included a mausoleum, a wartime fuel-storage tank and a cave. This album grows out of Butcher’s evident interest in escaping the acoustic confines of conventional venues (work with resonant spaces is documented on the earlier Geometry of Sentiment and Cavern with Ni…
Sinfonía n° 1 \'Canarias\' / Tocata vieja en tono nuevo / Los e
The Sinfonia n° 1 "Canarias" is dedicated to the composer's father, an old Canary Islander aged 94 at the time it was written. He was the reason why Cruz de Castro decided to focus the composition's middle movement wholly on the Canarian Folía. This special, important form of Canarian folk music appears both in its original form and in variations: "That's the way it should be: from the simple to the complex, from the melody line to the concentration: a harmonious whole." (Cruz de Castro) The Toc…
Glamour Girl 1941 + Pigface Chant
This CD collects the first Smegma long-player, Glamour Girl 1941, originally released on the LAFMS label in 1979, the Pigface Chant 7" released that same year and recorded five years earlier, and even adds in four bonus recordings from that same era. These early recordings of this long-running group of noise anarchists show an extremely primitive but non-conformist take on the musical world, even more so than, say, the Krautrock band Faust, as Smegma adds a messier element of chaos to its sound.…
ktl 2
This is the second full-length release by KTL, the formidable collaboration between Stephen O'Malley (SunnO))), Khanate, etc.) and Peter Rehberg (Pita, etc.). Devastatingly beautiful four-part follow up to the highly acclaimed debut CD, recorded in a former abattoir in Angers, as well as a 16th century manor in the extreme west of France. Taking the blueprint that was laid out on the first record even further, with the ecstatic build up of "Theme," the near-psychedelic "Abattoir," and closing wi…
String Quartets Vol. 3 (Nos. 7-9)
String Quartets Nos. 7, 8 and 9 suggest that Rihm has finally left behind the neo-romantic expressive pathos of earlier compositions: “Real or virtual allusions to the past are rarely to be found any more – and the same holds of the luscious and revelling strings. Remnants of tonal harmony are, with a few exceptions, almost completely obliterated. … Instead, new constellations come to the fore, emancipated from traditional conceptions of sound – heeding, in particular, the principle of polarity …
The Sapphire Nature
"One of the world's premier noise percussionists and a learned scholar of Kabbalah, Torah and Talmud, Z'ev has been a vital force in the downtown scene since the late 1970s. In addition to his collaborations with Glenn Branca, Rudolph Grey and his fascinating solo work, Z'ev is also a prolific writer and musical thinker. He has written on subjects ranging from music composition, ritual performance and has also translated several esoteric Tibetan and Hebrew texts into English. His latest study is…