Dispersion
"Working with forces unknown to me has always been an exciting challenge,” says Elliott Sharp, “especially when those forces are in the form of younger musicians, highly skilled and enthusiastic.” For his work with the musicians of the Veni Academy, he chose three previously composed works that would be easily adaptable to a large ensemble whose instrumentation was not the result of prior design plus one newly composed for the occasion. The chosen pieces were based on well-defined processes that…
Absence
"The main focus of Gerald Eckert’s music is frequently not placed on a centrally triggered event or center of action, but on what has been triggered by this event and how the consequences are subsequently developed. In other words, he focuses his sights on what an impulse is followed by. For Außen, von tief innen (Outside, from Deep Within), the consistent subtle and quiet tonal structure of the work is the fine delineation of multiphonics in bass flute and double bass clarinet alongside the ton…
Works for Flute
"Flutist Roberto Fabbriciani continues his releases dedicated to the flute repertoire of single composers with works by Belgian composer Henri Pousseur (1929-2009). Previous releases on Mode featured Aldo Clementi and Bruno Maderna.As with Fabbriciani’s preceeding Clementi and Maderna releases, this Pousseur release marks the first time Pousseur’s works for flute have been collected in one recording. It is important to note that Fabbriciani had a long working relationship with the composer.The s…
For Bunita Marcus
"For Bunita Marcus opens with a clear call to our attention. With these first six notes, we step over the threshold and into the journey of the piece. We know that we are in this for the long haul: Morton Feldman’s late works are notorious for being marathons. He composed For Bunita Marcus in 1985, immediately after his four-hour For Philip Guston, and two years after his six-hour String Quartet (II) These earlier works make an hour-long solo piano piece seem short. Still, it is a long time to …
Harawi
**Deluxe 2LP set with gatefold cover** "Harawi is a cycle of twelve songs scored for soprano and piano composed in 1945. Harawi (known to Spanish speakers as yaraví) designates a song about a fated love that ends in the death of both lovers. Olivier Messiaen remarked that “it is the story of Tristan and Isolde.”The surrealistic text of Harawi is Messiaen’s own. Using the musical structures Messiaen had created for Harawi, he built massive phrases in these songs, expanding space and time, creatin…
Terra che Cammina
"We know Belgian-based pianist Giovanni Di Domenico from his album with Tetterapadequ, and his recent collaboration with Alexandra Grimal, Seminare Vento. On this album, he is joined by John Ruocco on clarinet, Ananta Roosend on violin, Anja Naucler on cello, Claus Kaarsgaard on bass.The music is slow, intimate, precise, and quite expressive. The album starts with solo piano, an eery melody, with sparse notes of the right hand repeating a bluesy phrase. Yet it starts for real with the second pie…
Two Paths With Active Shadows Under Three Moons and Surveillance
"This piece and group developed over the course of a year. It was presented in concert over three initial phases. The concert recorded here (second phase) occurred six months into this process. However, this is not completely accurate; in different forms, the group continues to develop. This recording documents one of many possible manifestations."With: Marcia Bassett, Barry Weisblat, Ron Stabinsky, Che Chen, Laura Ortman, C. Spencer Yeh, Michael Bullock, Andrew Lafkas, Rick Brown, Ryan Sawyer, …
Augmented Study (2012)
**200 copies** "This is a study version composed in the studio from a single recording of a violin glissando. It was never intended to be performed live. The final version for 7 violins was the result of this study.""A single recording of the violin glissando of Johnny Chang has been turned into a multi-track recording. Here one violin becomes sixteen. Peter Ablinger’s Augmented Study Serie is focused on 'tension between redundancy of material and complexity of experience'. Because this work is …
Unconscious Collections
Unconscious Collections emerges as a resonant dialogue between Tomás Cabado’s classical guitar and Christoph Schiller’s prepared spinet, both artists known for their work within experimental, microtonal, and Wandelweiser-inspired aesthetics. The album consists of pieces co-composed and performed by the duo, recorded during a period of close collaboration in Switzerland. Through a process that blends score-based direction and improvisational openness, Cabado and Schiller achieve a rare degree of …
Ricercar nell’Ombra
Ricercar nell’Ombra grew out of a collaboration between French composer Emmanuel Holterbach and the seven-member Florence-based ensemble Blutwurst, both devoted to the acoustic investigation of slowly transforming sonic patterns. Conceived during residencies at Villa Strozzi and other venues across Florence, the project sets out to pay homage to Italian music history while inventing new forms through a deeply collaborative method. Holterbach’s admiration for Italian music across centuries led hi…
Chamber Works
Luiz Henrique Yudo’s Chamber Works marks an insightful journey into the translation of visual art into sound, presenting music that bridges architecture, painting, and sculpture with contemporary chamber idioms. Brazilian-born and Amsterdam-based, Yudo composes using an original approach that is self-taught, drawing inspiration from structures, patterns, and artworks he admires. The album’s five works are performed by Apartment House, a leading ensemble in contemporary experimental music. Their …
Piano Works
The French pianist and composer Melaine Dalibert possesses an exquisite touch and engagement with his repertoire. On this new album he tackles the stripped-down music of Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos, a key member of the post-Cagean Wandelweiser Collective, tracing out the delicate, sparsely mapped notes from a dozen contemplative, spacious miniatures. The pieces are built around austere melodic fragments, all of which hang pregnant in the air, unfolding carefully before the next p…
Under The Void
Three fascinating contemporary classical compositions from Henry Cow alumnus Tim Hodgkinson for flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, horn, trombone, violins, violas, cello, bass, piano, percussion, virtual strings, accordion, Siberian frame drums, gongs, viola, electronics, bowed cymbals, lap steel guitar, Yamaha DX21 and bass clarinet -- an iconoclastic hybrid of materials, real, virtual, imaginary and observed that flatter and puzzle the ear, drawing from many disciplines and taking a phenomenologi…
Ending(s)
While certain recognizable fingerprints are found throughout the body of Daniel Lentz's (b. 1942) work, he has never been content to settle within one particular style or mode of music for long, moving ever forward in an evolutional continuum, an overriding arc that defines his growth as a composer -- beginning with traditional music, diverting into electronic music, moving into performance art pieces for his various touring groups, then sallying into minimalism, followed by work distinguished f…
Palm Sunday
An insatiable listener, learner, and reader, Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) has taken into his mind and spirit myriad styles of musical performance spanning centuries, methods of compositional practice of all sorts, and innumerable close personal relationships with artists of all disciplines. He has absorbed this vast expanse of knowledge, art, and personal experience, and rather than mimicking anything he has encountered along the way, he has manifested a truly personal, honest voice that ring…
The Fish That Became the Sun
Frank Denyer’s The Fish that became the Sun (Songs of the Dispossessed) stands as one of the most ambitious and singular orchestral creations of recent decades. Conceived over several years and premiered over twenty years after completion, this piece distills Denyer’s fascination with sonic diversity and theatrical intensity. The score assembles a phantasmagoria of acoustic colors: alongside chorus and solo violin, one encounters sitar, crumhorns, cimbalom, children’s songs, and a host of constr…
The Boundaries of Intimacy
British composer Frank Denyer presents seven beautiful chamber works dating from 1974 to 2018, opening a door to his unique soundworld. Released by Another Timbre in November 2019, The Boundaries of Intimacy features sublime, unexpected pieces of delicate intimacy performed by a variety of artists including Luna String Quartet, Juliet Fraser, Elisabeth Smalt, Jos Zwaanenberg and Nobutaka Yoshizawa.
"Most of the music on this CD is soft, some of it very soft indeed. To achieve the optimal listeni…
Traces of Eternity: of What Is Yet To Be
**300 copies** "There have been quite a few releases of Antoine Beuger’s music over the past several years and it’s an odd, and very pleasurable thing to consider them en masse. On the one hand, his music is so diaphanous, so air-suffused that you’d think it might be difficult (not to mention unnecessary) to differentiate them mentally. On the other, they’re always very different. There’s that old AMM aphorism: “as alike or unalike as trees” that conveys something of my feelings about Beuger’s w…
Regular Music
Regular Music were early instigators of the UK post-systems movement whose work straddles the spheres of rock, minimalism and post-punk. The band was formed in 1980 by composer / performers Helen Ottaway, Jeremy Peyton Jones and Andrew Poppy who met at Goldsmiths College in SE London where they studied music in the 1970s. Rather than wait for commissions they looked to models such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman who formed their own ensembles to play their music.The …
Lokale Musik
Despite having an undeniable canon, the minimalist music movement which developed during the 1960s and continues to flourish and evolve today, is defined by a remarkable breadth in ideas and compositional approach. Particularly in Europe, it rapidly took on a diverse number of influences and became very much its own thing. Of the composers who proposed an alternate reality for this territory of sound, there have been few more accomplished than the German composer, Walter Zimmermann.All too often…