No grief without joy
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "A collection of five pieces, made between 2016 and 2019, in a short period that echoes, in part, the grief after my mother’s passing at the end of 2015. These pieces bring together artists from (a.o) Cape Town, The Hague, Toronto, Torino, and Johannesburg. Listening back to these earlier pieces I can discern feelings of emptiness, fleeting moments of joy and play. It is the unending sense of absence versus…
Muted Stones: A Tribute to Yadollah Roayee
*Limited Edition Handmade CDR in cardboard string sleeve with liner notes and album art.* "During the period spanning from 2016 to 2020, I underwent a profound realization that led me to feel lost within myself. As each year passed, I found myself feeling a sense of rupture and absence, far from home. In search for comfort, I turned to my native language of Farsi. However, even within the confines of my language, I was unable to escape the feeling of fragmentation. Each sentence I read seemed to…
Scapegoat
‘Scapegoat’ is the new album by Triola, the project led by the prolific Tokyo-based composer & experimental string musician Atsuko Hatano, featuring the Japanese violinist Anzu Suhara. Conceived as a string project, with Hatano on viola, cello, bass and Suhara on violin, Triola involves a rotating ensemble of guest musicians, including the likes of Chicago-born musician, composer & producer Jim O’Rourke (Drag City, Sonic Youth, Steamroom), the composer & musician Eiko Ishibashi (Drag City, Black…
Desolation Pops
"James Moore (b. 1979) is a composer with an eye toward the world of games and experimental theater. He’s an electric guitarist who’s willing and eager to treat his instrument as a playground, not a reverent, static tradition. He’s a tinkerer, a charmer, and a fella who’s always up for another round at the bar of wacky ideas and intellectual questioning. He’s excited for new and unexpected opportunities for collaboration, but always maintains a voice that seems to stay recognizably his own throu…
Six Seasons
Tip! "A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, …
Homage to Annea Lockwood
*200 copies limited edition* Recital presents a book and CD homage to the New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939). The unique concept for this album was conceived by artists Noel Meek (New Zealand) and Mattin (Spain), who each share a deep admiration for Lockwood. A longform Skype conversation between the three artists was arranged at the end of 2020. They discussed politics, aesthetics, and Annea’s compositional practice, and as the conversation evolved, it was decided that …
Κλίμα (Klima)
Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett return with Κλίμα (Klima), their third album as CV & JAB. Using an extensive sound genealogy including piano, flute, voice, and field recordings, the duo dive deeper into their idiosyncratic collaborative language. A reflection on microclimates and their ecologies, Κλίμα (Klima) is an invitation to probe the implicit memories of animal, plant and place, and our connection to the environments we inhabit.
TV Songs
Lisbon based keyboardist, João ‘Shela’ Pereira, a frequent collaborator with many local bands (Paus, Rinding Pânico, LAmA, Linda Martini and others) presents a new strangely haunting album, TV Songs.
A scrapbook of recordings from the heart... Piano TV is a compendium of spontaneous notes of ideas on the piano, to the rhythm of a television set in the background... these are scraps of expression in a form of dirty bucolic sketches aspiring to a hypothetical larger, washed, pristine composition…
Current
The string quartet Current that provides the centerpiece of Adams’ new album dates from 2016, when Spektral Quartet commissioned the composer to write a short work that became the 12-minute study Quartet Movement. Though that piece stands alone, Adams sensed that it might also be used as the basis for something larger, so over the next few years he expanded its scope. The present five-movement work, completed in 2019, was co-commissioned by Spektral Quartet and Cal Performances, with additional …
Organic Music Tapes vol 2
*100 copies limited edition* As its now tradition we start the year with yet another fluid album from Portuguese pianist and composer Tiago Sousa. Presenting now the second volume of his ongoing series Organic Music Tapes, Tiago now adds the electric organ to his trademark piano compositions, broadening his palette of sounds into an even more fluid and organic world with references to American minimalism of the 60’s, in particular Terry Riley and Steve Reich’s influence both looms heavily over t…
Nova
Tip! *2023 stock* Kåre Kolberg (b.1936) is one of Norway`s foremost contemporary composers and is regarded as one of the pioneers of early electronic music and cross-artistic art in the Scandinavia. He has composed music for film, theatre and chamber orchestras to jazz acts such as Svein Finnerud Trio and Jan Garbarek.
The electronic tape composition presented on this CD was composed for the multi-media work NOVA created together with the artist Anders Kjær, presented at the Henie Onstad Art Cen…
Sigils
*80 copies limited edition. 2023 stock* r
ecorded, mixed and mastered by Theo Karonall music and bass playing by Devin Hoffcover photo by DHphoto of DH by Lenny Gonzalez
Insulated Paradise
Atsuko Hatano is a contemporary 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. Working in isolation due to the Covid pandemic, Atsuko Hatano played violin, viola, synthesizer, and electronics to create these powerful, unique compositions. Insulated Paradise is an investigation into the social nature of h…
The Avantgarde Series
The legendary DG Avantgarde vinyl series (1968-1971) is turning 55! In order to celebrate this occasion, the series is now released on 21 CDs for the first time. The Avantgarde series serves as a historical document for a time of radical change in musical thinking and the breaking of artistic boundaries. The question "What is music?" confronted many of the composers and musicians involved in the series, and the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s and 1970s was a palpable influence. Deutsche G…
Peach and Tomato
Leonor Falcón and Sana Nagano met in graduate school at Queens College in 2015, and have since collaborated in many projects. On this release, ‘Peach and Tomato,’ the duo offers fresh new compositions that display both their sense of imagination, and their deep appreciation for classical influences. This is particularly true with their version of two movements from the Prokofiev Sonata for Two Violins and the composition Etude 1 and 2, an homage to Bela Bartok and a fluent conversation between t…
Solo For Cello
The Trilogy Tapes’ first CD presents a studio recording of Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello, a 35’ work written for Anton Lukoszevieze, the cellist, artist, and Director of the group Apartment House, renowned for their recent recordings of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Jim O’Rourke, amongst many others.
“Jack Sheen’s Solo for Cello and fixed audio is an extended exploration of the resonant body of the cello, but also a kind of flickering, glitchy and incessant ‘moto perpetuo’, of extreme intensity…
One Arm Bandits
"One Arm Bandits is an hour-long piece in four parts, scored for four cellists. The cellists play only open strings, thus using only their right arms, never fingering the strings with the left hand. Recorded in Alvin Lucier's dining room, this work features cellists Tyler J. Borden, Laura Cetilia, Charles Curtis and Judith Hamann. Lucier oversaw and produced the recording, and approved the final takes. One Arm Bandits was an important project for Alvin Lucier. The idea for the piece goes back to…
Woodwind Multiples
Biggest Tip! Mary Jane Leach is a composer focussed on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC’s pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman’s work since his death in 1990, compiling the ‘Unjust Malaise’ 3CD set in 2005 and editing the 2015 book ‘Gay Guerrilla:…
Jerusalem
From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of piano pieces, unreleased or virtually inaccessible until now! Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – an Ethiopian nun whose recordings have funded orphanages back home since the early ’60s. Her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever he…
Sound Plantings
Jonas Gerigk is a double bass player who is active as a composer/performer in the fields of improvised music. In addition, he collaborates in projects of contemporary composers and is involved in the realization of their works. A main focus of his work deals with the term Explorative Music. He is doing intensive research on the expansion of the sound spectrum of the acoustic double bass. With a physical as well as technical approach and the use of objects he explores the variety of timbres of hi…