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From The Kitchen Archives No.3: Amplified: New Music Meets Rock
From the Kitchen Archives Vol. 3. Amplified: New Music Meets Rock, 1981-1986 is the third release in a series of CDs compiled from The Kitchen's archive that documents historic concert recordings at The Kitchen from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. While the first two releases, New Music, New York 1979 and Steve Reich and Musicians, Live 1977 focused on major figures of new and experimental music from The Kitchen's first decade, Amplified moves into the early 1980s, representing a vocabulary th…
Oboe Concertos
The oboe more than suited Maderna's partiality for clear structures and sensual-concrete sounds. It was not without good reason that at a time when the supply of music dedicated to the oboe was anything but plenty, Maderna wrote, not one, not two, but three concertos (besides several other works for oboe) for this "nasal" sounding member of the woodwind family. The first oboe concerto (1963) seems almost classical in its character, in the interplay of oboe and orchestra, or involving other instr…
Congotronics
This group was founded over 25 yrs ago by Mingiedi, a virtuoso of the likembé ('thumb piano'). The band's line-up includes 3 electric likembés, equipped w/ hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, & plugged into amplifiers. There's also a rhythm section which uses traditional as well as makeshift percussion, 3 singers, 3 dancers & a peculiar sound system including megaphones dating from the colonial period. Their repertoire draws largely on Bazombo trance music, to w…
Vita di San Francesco
When, in the summer of 1992, Lutz-Werner Hesse visited St. Francis’s hometown in Umbria, he was deeply moved by Giotto’s frescos in the Basilica. Using prints of the frescos, Hesse later developed a dramatic sequence, which was meant to serve as the basis for a composition revolving around the life of the saint. Gongs had always held a special fascination for Hesse. So, for this piece, he pitted 13 gongs against one organ: “The organ, I thought, is a particularly suitable partner for the gongs s…
Intimate rituals
This Romanian-born composer is noted for having developed the technique of 'spectral composition' during the 1960s. According to the man himself, this is defined as a "variable distribution of the spectral energy, synthesis of the global sound sources, micro- and macro-form as sound-process, four simultaneous layers of perception and of speed, and spectral scordaturae, i.e. rows of unequal intervals corresponding to harmonic scales." If you're any the wiser as to what he's on about do drop us a …
White Stone Black Lamp
'From Between Trio partners percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and saxophonist Michel Doneda in a duo release of unusual improvisation, the first release on Tatsuya's new Kobo label. Doneda performs on soprano and sopranino, chirping and smearing upper register sounds and laying out long tones that play beautifully to Nakatani's gongs, bows, drums, and inexplicable sound sources. Their long association yields an impressive compatibility and almost telepathic power in discourse. Impressive, un…
Summons Of Shining Ruins
Summons of Shining Ruins is a project of Shinobu Nemoto, who works with electric guitar, tape delay, old rhythm machines, stompboxes and 4-track-recorders. No computer or software is used to record this work. And you can hear that in every tone.
Yesterday night you were sleeping at my place
Flute, harp and percussion are the principal instruments on this recording, though you’d be hard pressed to identify them during the opening measures of “Hamida”, the longest track on the CD. But the buzzing, pulsing drone with which it begins gradually opens out into flute articulations that sound like jets of steam, a barrage of muffled percussion, and various harp-generated supplementary drones. The MUTA soundworld gets richer, louder and more pressurised as the track progresses, and…
Fractal Hair Geometry
The Dekorder label's boss Marc Richter is at the creative heart of Black To Comm, and he's certainly putting himself about a bit these days: there are new albums in the works for Digitalis, and in collaboration with Boomkat barnacle, John Xela, but before all that, we've got Fractal Hair Geometry to contend with, and it's a mightily entertaining three-quarter hours of adventurous and unusual drone studies. Richter combines wordless vocals and miscellaneous electronics with Casio and Farfisa orga…
Music For Percussion Quartet
As early as in 1942, in Credo in Us, Cage employed not only a percussion ensemble but also sounds from the radio and records. Therefore, quite in accordance with what the composer would have wished, the materials used by the Percussion Ensemble Mainz in this recording range from Beethoven's fifth symphony (vinyl record, including the rustling) to ABBA, Tina Turner and advertising slogans. It goes without saying that rhythms play an important part in music for percussion. Cage, though, was also i…
Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell\' op. 41 di Arnold Schoenb
"All my works always start out from a human incentive: an event, an experience, a text in our lives leads to my instinct and my conscience and wants me to bear witness, as a musician and as a man." This is how Nono, in 1960, described his motivation as a composer, the incentive inducing him to speak up through his music. His opus 1, the Canonic variations on the series of op. 41 by Arnold Schönberg, is based on the twelve-tone series used in Schönberg's composition; it actually takes effect in t…
Cellule 75
Back in stock: Irreverent, psychosexual and always fascinating, Ferrari's work manifests itself in texts, instrumental textures, electroacoustic compositions, reportings, films, theatre, etc. It is an honor for Tzadik to release two of his most important works from the 1970s, recorded under the supervision of the composer himself. 'Place des Abbesses,' the first electro acoustic portrait work realized at his home studio in Paris, 1977, is an evocative portrait of a small square between The Sacre…
The butterfly and the bee
Following the success of their very first performance together at the 2004 FREEDOM OF THE CITY festival (heard on Emanem 4215), Roger Smith and Louis Moholo-Moholo went into the studio to record some more. Their second meeting went so well that they recorded enough duo improvisations for a complete CD. The resulting music is heard complete, with Smith on Spanish guitar and Moholo on augmented drum set.
How To Get Started
"John Cage conceived How To Get Started almost as an afterthought -- a performance substituting for another that was previously planned in 1989 for delivery at 'Sound Design: An Invitational Conference on the Uses of Sound for Radio Drama, Film, Video, Theater and Music' presented by Bay Area Radio Drama at Sprocket Systems, Skywalker Ranch, in Nicasio, California. In his introduction, Cage talks about the difficulty of initiating the creative process, while exploring the usefulness of im…
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.…
Musica Viva 03
Musica Viva 03: Pleading for divine forgiveness, exploring the bounds of possibility of clarinets, and tricks of light.
Piano Pictures
Now, which are the points of contact between these two composing gentlemen? "In both composers, a childlike quality shows in their indifference (or impartiality) towards the utilizable musical material: 'sophisticated' and 'lesser' styles, ragtime and music hall, neo-gothic and bitonality, typing machine and doorbell, jocular or praising quotes – everything is linked with everything, without any previous weighing and selection, without preconditions, following a kind of anarchic play instinct. […
missa beati pauperes spiritu
In cooperation with IEM Graz and musikprotokoll 2005 (steirischer herbst, ORF). Excursion into the Middle Ages: Klaus Lang’s latest composition breathes new life into Gregorian chant more than a thousand years old. One hears the traditional sequence of the mass movements, but newly composed material gives it a new interpretation. Klaus Lang does not wish to evoke images in his listeners but rather empty and impoverish their minds.
Complete Works For Clarinet
Giacinto Scelsi was both reclusive and inexact in the way that he dated and named his compositions. This rendition of Tre Pezzi (a broad title Scelsi used numerous times for different pieces) focuses on narrow ranges in the B-flat clarinet, demonstrating the thin margin of tonal range between the phrases that come sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Kho Lho, on the other hand, pairs a clarinet and flute duet so closely that the instruments' tones merge into a thick strand of sound. Maknongan is a r…
Tempus Rei
The second part of Castle sonorisation serie by Alio Die, an epic and intense album with two long tracks, where the usual drones and loops, zither and field recorings go deep intoxicated into an old time surrealism. Limited 300 copies!