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Hearing Metal 1
Performer: Greg Stuart (tam-tam). 'The 60-inch (Mikrophonie) tam-tam is a large piece of metal, a proto-sculpture. Brancusi might have altered it: rounding and tapering the edges, making an oval instead of a circle, polishing the surface into smooth gold. The tam-tam is also a vast sound landscape-an instrument that makes noise at the slightest provocation. A resonance is created just in the act of walking past the instrument or breathing on it ... that is, if your ear (or a microphone) is close…
Je Ne Connais Pas Cet Homme
Beautiful duets between Brigitte Fontaine and Areski -- and an album that's filled with loads of short little tracks that stand with some of their greatest work ever! Instrumentation is spare, but incredibly haunting -- a bit jazzy at times, slightly experimental at others -- but always quiet enough to allow the slightly-whispered vocals of the pair dominate the record. There's a strong sense of poetry here -- but without any of the stiffness or pretension that might imply -- and the re…
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…
Red Morocco
Someday someone will write a history of modern music that will free us of the false dichotomies such as high vs. low, improviser vs. composer, classical vs. everything else… …The written materials Joe passed out to the musicians for Red Morocco was minimal, sometimes more visual than musical, but always modest. Everyone was seated in the same room, in a circle. The music heard on this recording occurred late in the day, when Joe felt a certain clarity was occurring……The results are an elegant,…
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black
Soundtracks To A Color: Gold & Black was an installation at LA Municipal Art Gallery as part of the COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship exhibition from 2004. The installation consisted of 2000 posters: 1000 Gold and 1000 Black. Two separate rooms were covered with these posters that were covered solid in their color with the name of the color printed rather large in dead center. At the bottom of each poster was listed the instrumentation for each particular soundtrack to the color. The GO…
Visions de l\'Amen
Last things and Christian visions: György Kurtág's reflections on Heinrich Schütz, and Olivier Messiaen in search of the "Amen."
3 Compositions Of New Jazz
The mid-'60s formation of Chicago's musician collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), proved a watershed event for jazz, providing a springboard for some of the next few decades' most influential performers, including the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Anthony Braxton. In many ways, Braxton's Three Compositions of New Jazz is that movement's manifesto. Seeking a new degree of abstraction and purity, Braxton opted to eschew drums or bass on…
Chamber Music
Against spontaneity and con-sistency: Poppe manages the feat of being both a systematic and a revolutionary composer, one who plays by the rules and beats them at the same time.
Piano Music
Music as a message without words from far away – from our inner selves. Piano music as metaphor for the thrilling adventures of human existence.
Neither
An opera? An anti-opera? A monodrama? Whatever it may be: Neither (1977) marks the meeting of the kindred artistic souls of Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman.
Steve Reich: Tehillim The Desert Music
Two Reich masterpieces, definitively recorded, featuring a crystalline, high-energy Tehillim with the ONLY RECORDING of the newly revised version of The Desert Music. A must for Reich fans. For freshness and focus, the new recording of Tehillim surpasses the 1981 recording by Mr. Reich & his own ensemble.
Carliol
'John Butcher: tenor or soprano saxophones - plus feedback, motors, embedded harp speaker. Rhodri Davies: pedal harp, lever harp with embedded speaker and electric harp, aeolian electric harp. John Butcher is one of the leading sax players on the free improvisation scene. Rhodri Davies transcends conventional ideas about the harp--an instrument rarely associated with improvised music--in his wide-ranging projects. The two British musicians have worked together in a variety of contexts sin…
Kapnos
Meerkat is a kind of Italian underground big band. Here we find Adriano Zanni (Punck), Matteo Uggeri (Hue), Luca Sigurtà, Luca Bergero (Fhievel), Davide Valecchi (Aal), Andrea Ferraris (Ics), Fabio Selvafiorita, Paolo Ippoliti (Logoplasm), Laura Lovreglio (Logoplasm) and Andrea Marutti (Amon, Never Known). If you have been paying attention in the last few years, you may recognize these names as Italy's finest in the fields of ambient, electronics, microsound, post guitar - well, anything but tru…
Salvaged Violets
Comes in Stoughton mini-LP gatefold sleeve with 6 double-sided cardstock prints.
Garage
Smalltown Supersound's "Superjazz" offshoot delivers this much-discussed darkcore jazz fusion album led by sometime sonic youth collaborator Mats Gustafsson, here rummaging through improvs and cover versions like a garage band picking up trumpets, double bass and drums for their heavily skewed but massively charming workouts. Sticking a hairy a tongue out at the polished slickness of the Bad Plus, The Thing offer up cover versions of tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and Peter Bro…
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!
Hanging gardens
Completely unique, stunningly musical, technically impressive & breathtakingly simple. The Necks have defined an endlessly productive area of performance that is at once both minimal and gripping, obvious yet profoundly subtle. Easy to say, hard to achieve. It can take time for a group with a completely original idea to find its public & The Necks have been pursuing this one for over a decade in their native Australia - but it doesn't age, it just matures.
Jättiläisrotta
The burgeoning Finnish free-folk movement has been garnering much praise & attention over the past year. First CD release by Avarus who play a left-field blend of noise, folk & free jazz. From the same circle of psychos who bring us Kemialliset Ystavat, Maniac's Dream, Pylon & the Anaksimandros. Backward, dirt-eating freak folk that makes the Animal Collective sound like Judy Collins.
Vertical Time Study I / Sen V / In die Tiefe der Zeit / Melodia
In his series Vertical Time Study, Hosokawa seeks to „integrate Noh’s vertical structure of time into my own music. It is about how temporal elements, like wedges, disrupt the vertical, horizontal timeline at irregular intervals. These disruptions produce elements of tension … creating visible fissures in the structure of time and visible cracks in space. My aim is to examine the complexity and the depth of these sounds hidden in the moment.” In his piece Sen V, Hosokawa tries to combine the “ea…
Anthology Of Dutch Electronic Tape Music: Volume 2 (1966-1977)
Reissue of a double LP edited in 1978. Recordings realized by the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht State University and the Electronic Music Studio of the Royal Conservatory at the Hague. Program notes by Dick Raaijmakers translated by Keith Freeman, and program notes by the composers. With Jacob Cats: 'Cadence 1'. Tera De Marez Oyens: 'Safed'. Jos Kunst: 'Extérieur'. Gilius Van Bergeijk: 'D.E.S'. Frans Van Doorn: 'Minnuet'. Thomas Arras: 'A.B.C.' Simeon Ten Holt: 'I Am Sylvia Victor Wentink: Disc…