North of North
Instruments which sound like instruments!!! Unbelievable real-time compositions for the unlikely instrumentation of piano, trumpet and violin courtesy of North Of North: Anthony Pateras, Scott Tinkler and Erkki Veltheim.Drawing from improvisation, Carnatic music, 20th and 21st century compositional strategies, mathematical theories and open forms of jazz, their music is fused together by virtuosic instrumentalism, critical listening and a shared philosophy of musical and physical discipline. The…
Gong Gongs
**Warehouse find, still sealed original copies 1987 edition** Gong action suported by catalan fussion percussionist Santi Arisa. Main attraction here is the percussions and electronics piece Secuencia I.
Where Are We Going, Today
Christian Wolff, piano, objects, charango, flute. Antoine Beuger, voice, whistles, EWR recordings (1995) of Christian Wolff’s “Stones”.Antoine Beuger started composing music in 1990 and has released on his own label, Edition Wandelweiser Records, as well as Erstwhile Records. Beuger’s work is best exemplified by two releases, his first, Calme Étendue (Spinoza) and A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger. Calme Étendue (Spinoza) is an album that attempts to take the 17th century philosopher Spin…
Njinga: The Queen King – The Return of a Warrior
Written and Directed by IONE Original music and Sound by Pauline Oliveros Traditional Congolese Music by Titos Sompa Set and Costume Design by Valerie Maynard, Dance and Movement by Carol Chappell, Nego Gato, Biza Sompa and Titos Sompa, Traditional Brazilian Music and Dance by Nego Gato.
Njinga the Queen King is a collaborative effort between writer/director Ione and composer Pauline Oliveros, which they refer to as “a play with music and pageantry.” It is based on historica…
The Works for Percussion 2
John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an intense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion. This release includes all three of the groundbreaking Constructions. First Construction (in Metal) utilizes dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other w…
Music in 2 Dimensions – Works for Flute
In honor of the 40th anniversary of great composer/ conductor Bruno Maderna’s (1920-73) death, Mode is pleased to release the first complete CD of Maderna’s music for flute. The flute played an important part in Maderna’s oeuvre due to his friendship with the exceptional flutist Severino Gazzelloni, who had premiered almost all of the flute compositions. Musica su due dimensioni is among the earliest examples to make live music interact with electro-acoustic sounds recorded on tape. There …
Naima
Swiss musician Roland Dahinden is not your typical trombonist. Equally at home in New Music, Jazz and Improvisation, he is a favorite interpreter of Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier, as well as being acclaimed for performances in the trombone/piano duo with Hildegard Kleeb. On disc, Dahinden is well known for his Hat Art recording devoted to Cage and Wolff. This disc is the first release of his own compositions and interpretations of John Coltrane's classic Nai…
The Great Works For Voice
Mode's reissue of Christine Schadeberg's 1995 recital of vocal music by Luciano Berio is a welcome addition to the catalog. While her performances don't make the listener forget the individuality and panache of Cathy Berberian, for whom most of these pieces were written, Schadeberg more than holds her own in her technical and expressive mastery of the music. Her voice is not large, but is remarkably flexible and secure, and her tone is pure. These performances are models of precision and clarity…
The Zürich Concert
Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940 - 1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up next. This recording is from a 1980 solo seventy-minute improvisatory concert in Zürich, a cherished cassette made by a friend of Eastman's, who recently realized its uniqueness and decided that he should share it.The Zürich Concert was performed on Oct…
17 Stücke
Helmut Kaplan is multimedia artist that belongs to distinctive art scene of styrian capital of Graz. His medium of expression belongs to visual arts (mostly comic), as part of Tonto association, which once included legendary record label with artists that are already seen on GOD roster (Robert Lepenik, Winfried Ritsch, Kauders, Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger). He was part of bands like Fleischpost and skin and since middle '90s he is interested in different loop structures through different med…
Winter Music (1957)
John Cage’s 1957 composition in a visceral realisation for four pianos, played by John Tilbury, Philip Thomas, Mark Knoop and Catherine Laws.
“Chance procedures were used to assign each of the pianists five of the twenty pages of the score. The pianists agreed an overall duration of 40 minutes and prepared their parts independently. At the recording there was no rehearsal and the piece was played once only.” Winter Music was written in 1957 at a time when Cage was exploring different ways …
Drifter
The first in the Canadian Composers Series of CDs is a double album of chamber works by Linda Catlin Smith, who was born in New York, but studied in Canada and has lived in Toronto for over 25 years. The album ‘Drifter’ contains ten pieces dating from 1995 to 2015 played by Quatuor Bozzini and Apartment House. In his introductory essay to the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers CDs, Nick Storring says that “One of the primary tensions in Linda Catlin Smith's music is between its equal a…
Subvoice
Subvoice is a collection of nine recent works by composer Yannis Kyriakides for various ensembles ranging from single instrument to large orchestra, that represent an investigation into ideas of voice and language. The music is built on traces of voices and texts that seem to speak or sing in an intimate form of dialogue, either as text that is directly encoded into music, or in traces of voice that are embedded and dissolved into the musical fabric. Performers on this double CD include: MAZE, H…
Musica per un Anno (March 28th, 6 pm)
Musica per un anno is a pivotal project by Italian pioneer of electronic music Enore Zaffiri. In 1968 Zaffiri devised a project to create music for each hour of the year, by providing precise instructions to organise various layers of sinusoidal sounds. Working in isolation but ideally sharing the same attitude of La Monte Young’s approach to sound in time and space of those same years, Zaffiri created some tape versions of his masterpiece. The version recorded in this album is a radically…
Les Espaces Électroacoustiques
Milestones of electroacoustic music – from Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique (1958) to Brian Ferneyhough’s Mnemosyne (1986) – are investigated from a music-historical perspective and presented in a contemporary 5.1 surround edition.The selection of works on this double CD mirrors the development of electroacoustic music over a period of 30 years, from the early analogue studios to the shift to digital technology in the 1980s. It includes electronic compositions and works for instruments and e…
Explosion Of A Memory (A Literary Canvas For Orchestra)
An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…
Gaps, Absences
A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…
Funnel to a Thread
Since the late 1970s Biota has ploughed its own furrow, producing a body of work that resembles nothing anyone else has done or is yet doing. Their compositions evolve in long, constantly shifting timbral blocks filled with fragments and echoes of quasi-familiar musical languages and sounds – or none - and use instrumental resources that span half a millennium and two thirds of the planet to create unique combinations of timbral colour in constant motion; this is a music in which everything is i…
Sale Quanto Basta
Paolo Angeli’s latest is an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar; and although it’s just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than 3 people. Great compositions, each like a short novel, beautifully recorded. Paolo’s unique music defies genre or category - at once accessible, experimental, tuneful, tactile, ambient, with a folk root and a rock inflection and a contemporary outlook. And his instrum…
Propaganda
Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise- sculpting, as well as invented and real instruments played by Fred Frith. This was a hard time and the mood is intense, lean and not cheerful, though there are some gruesomely cheery inserts. There's no fat but a lot of meat here.