Danses Organiques
***Very last copies*** "Luc Ferrari is one of the most important and intriguing figures of the last forty years, a pioneer of musique concrète at the beginning of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales in Paris, and perhaps 'the only real artist among many excellent researchers' as someone suggested. With a very peculiar sensibility he creates his own musical world in which wit, sensuality, extreme sound realism, playful analytical abilities, social concerns, and love for good food are important a…
The Piano Works 1
Performed by Louise Bessette (piano). "This marks not only the first volume in Mode's new Scelsi edition, but also the initial disc of the traversal of his piano works. Written in 1939, Scelsi's 'Second Sonata' was premiered by Yvar Mikhashoff in London (1979). Marking a new compositional direction, Scelsi suspended thematic development and frequently introduced various kinds of repetitions: reiterated single tones, chords, and patterns, often suggesting the sounds of bells or Oriental gongs. Sc…
Rumori alla Rotonda
Live recording at the Rotonda del Pellegrini, Milan, January 21st, 1959 featuring John Cage, Morton Feldman, Juan Hidalgo, Leopoldo La Rosa, and Walter Marchetti. Among all the events involving John Cage during the long stay in Europe that followed his controversial appearance at Darmstadt Ferienkurse in September 1958, the concert he held in Milan on January 21st perhaps represents a less well known episode.
Featuring Cage's intervention both as composer and performer of one's own work as well …
Zeitenwechsel 2
A beautiful sound art compilation featuring works by Ellen Fullman, Horatio Vaggione, Fast Forward, Takehisa Kosugi, Mario Verandi, Olga Neuwirth, celebrating the 35 years of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm. Comes with 32-page booklet.
Ellen Fullman: Transmission Particle 1 for Long String Instrument and Oboe (2001; 9:00 min)[Ellen Fullman, long string instrument; Eliza Slavet, oboe]Horatio Vaggione: Scir for contrabass flute and tape (1988; 11:37 min)Beate-Gabriela Schmitt, contrabass fluteFast F…
PROJECT’SON 2. TRANS’ÉLECTROACOUSTIQUE
Project'son 2 : Jean-Louis Clot ; Olivier Renouf ; Jean-Luc Therminarias ; Eryck Abecassis. Audio DVD. The pieces have been masterised for DVD 5.1.
Inventionen 98
A documentary of pieces performed at the Inventionen Festival in Berlin, 1998. Features: Unsuk Chin, Patrick Kosk, Werner Cee, Francois Donato, Robin Minard, Wolfgang Mitterer, Francis Dhomont, Erik Mikael Karlsson, Trevor Wishart. "Not as much as a bringer-up to speed (or yet another history lesson at that) as a fine cache of current keepers of the crop. New ('93-98), complete pieces from Trevor Wishart (northern-UK composer/programmer known and loved these days for his mid-70's works such as M…
20 JAHRE INVENTIONEN II
Volume 2 of the CD documentation of the Berlin festival "Inventionen" (volume 1 containing Horatiu Radulescu's string quartet no. 4)a various artists retrospective sampler including recordings of works by the following composers: Hildegard Westerkamp, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Cage, Sainkho Namtchylak, Joe Jones, Giacinto Scelsi, Masanori Fujita, John Driscoll.Hildegard Westerkamp: Whisper Study (1975-79, Tape work, Inventionen 1986)Salvatore Sciarrino: Codex purpureus, Trio per archi (1968-1983…
Organ and Silence
File under: minimalism, conceptual sound art, organ music. A music whose talking about, as the author writes in the disc notes, 'the importance of silence in music'. This work is conceived not 'for organ' but, really, for 'organ and silence', as the silence is a founding part of it, and it's not possible to give it up. It's the tentative, as the author explain 'to permit as much silence as possible, without allowing the music to actually stop'. Tom Johnson is one of the masters of minimalism,…
The chord catalogue
I like to think of The Chord Catalogue as a sort of natural phenomenon--something which has always been present in the ordinary musical scale, and which I simply observed, rather than invented. It is not so much a composition as simply a list. I have often tried to explain that my music is a reaction against the romantic and expressionistic musical past, and that I am seeking something more objective, something that doesn't express my emotions, something that doesn't try to manipulate the emoti…
Music for 88
Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. That concern led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those that he had used before. Music for 88 is the result of these researches. It contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.
Kientzy plays Johnson
In Kientzy Loops, the accompanying loop is a mix of six alto saxophones played in continuous blowing, while the principal lines are played on alto saxophone, except for the third section, played on baritone. The piece, premiered at the auditorium of the ADAC in Paris, was awarded a French national prize in the Victoires de la musique as the best piece of contemporary music for the year 2000. We are indebted to our friend Marc Chemillier for La Tortue de mer. As a mathematician Chemillier became …
An Hour For Piano
"First, the booklet notes. If you pine for Gertrude Stein speaking circles around herself, meaning what she doesn’t mean, and not meaning what she means, you’ll probably like Tom Johnson’s non-sort-of-explanation of his magnum keyboard opus, An Hour For Piano. The composer prefers that you don’t read his notes while listening to the music. In fact, don’t read them before you play the CD for the first time. Listen to the piece first. Then, if you’re feeling artsy, put on the CD again and read the…
A Retrospective (1977-2009)
The music on this disc was written over a period of more than thirty years. Over the course of those years, so much has changed in technology, in music, in life in general. But throughout the work represented here one can recognize the remarkable, entirely original voice of Charles Dodge (b. 1942). He is truly a composer who writes music that does not sound like anybody else's. He has never been part of any “ism” or movement; he is his own category. And although his stylistic approach and his…
Cabaret per Nulla
This album comes from the love for Music. Contemporary music, but also Songs. From the love for History and People. From the observation of a stage before and after a concert. And from Friendship and Collaboration.Erik Satie and John Cage were two musicians of great influence and supreme coherence. In their rigorous path they choose the road to astonishment. On the road to their artistic ideal they met the “music”, when others only loosely saw it. Satie and Cage are, now historically, two compos…
Foreign Experiences
Foreign Experiences was commissioned by Performing Artservices,
Inc. (1993) with funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. The
opera was premiered by the Robert Ashley Ensemble at the Festival d'Avignon in 1994. This realization is a duet version by Sam Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert. The pre-recorded voices of the Ashley ensemble are the background chorus. Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea
is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of
events seen from four, diff…
Dust
Dust is an opera by Robert Ashley and Yukihiro Yoshihara (video direction) whose imaginary setting is a street corner anywhere in the world, where those who live on the fringes of society gather to talk, to each other and to themselves, about life-changing events, missed opportunities, memory, loss, and regret. Five "street people" recount the memories and experiences of one of their group, a man who has lost his legs in some unnamed war. As part of the experience of losing his legs, he began a …
Your Money My Life Goodbye
An opera commissioned by Bayerisher Rundfunk Munich's Hörspiel und Medienkunst department about an internationally renowned swindler, who almost took down the European and American banking system. Featuring the voices of Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jackie Humbert, and Joan La Barbara. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton. Robert Ashley on the piece: "Your Money My Life Goodbye is one of forty-nine vocal-ensemble pieces of various lengths (from ten minutes to ninety minutes or more) …
eL/Aficionado
1994 release. The fourth opera in Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy: Junior, Jr.'s story. A group of scenes from the life of an agent. The scenes are a kind of debriefing to a jury of interrogators, in which the Interrogators challenge the agent in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to American society's ongoing fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. Featuring Thomas Buckner as the agent and Jacqueline H…
Yellow Man With Heart With Wings
1990 CD issue of Robert Ashley's 1978 piece for voice and electronics. A two-part composition with narration (part one in Spanish and part two in heavily altered English) commissioned by public radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, this music has a plain, serene beauty. Part one is a narration by Guillermo Grenier in dreamy, flatly inflected Spanish, backed by a four-note synthesizer track, and punctuated by mysterious, heavily processed vocalizations. Ashley throws in extensive sound washes and ot…
Music by
"Features The Soldier String Quartet performing in 'Five More String Quartets', a piece for five multi-tracked string quartets and in 'Early Winter' for flute, bass flute, string quartet and synthesizer, also featuring Susan Stenger (flute) and Eberhard Blum (bass flute)." This is purely awesome drone work and one of the loudest, most commanding minimal works you could ever dream of basking within, even living up to the following: "Dense, elusive trance music distinguished by its singular method…