Dragging Her Wings of Rusty Knives: Selected Recordings 1994-201
A Handful of Dust was founded over three decades ago by two giants of the New Zealand underground, Bruce Russell (The Dead C) and Alastair Galbraith. Declaring their raison d'être in the now infamous Free Noise Manifesto the group has advanced a radical aesthetic; rejecting any notion of structure or comfort they've ground music to its sub-elemental parts. A scraping and howling electricity, spontaneous, unrestrained, physical. Contains expanded and unreleased works spanning the group's history …
Mare Australe
"Another brilliant posthumous album by Letha Rodman Melchior. Letha's music, as her visual art, was a great collaged pile of extreme strangeness, with seemingly irreconcilable objects butting heads in ways that end up making great sense. I met Letha a long time ago, when she was in Cell, but I had not much idea of her work beyond that until she had moved to North Carolina and I started hearing her health was bad. Siltbreeze put out an amazing album called Handbook for Mortals (2013), and it was …
Home Fi
Edition of 400. "Vinylization of the recent Home Fi cassette (originally released on the Australian Brierfirld Flood Press label) by this magnificent New Zealand singer/songwriter. We were never able to score a copy of the tape, despite the fact we released Maxine Funke's last LP, Silk (FTR 410LP), so we figured we would perform the public service of making it generally available to the whole wide world. That's just the kind of guys we are! Recorded in stark and simple terms, Home Fi represents …
35 Whirlpools Below Sound
35 Whirlpools Below Sound presents a fantastical soundworld of 19 short, richly detailed, multilayered electro-acoustic soundscapes jointly composed by Thomas Newman and Rick Cox, whose musical friendship and ongoing working relationship date back to 1985. These enigmatic works, built of often mysterious juxtapositions of sounds, have been gestating and changing shape for many years, with ever an eye toward their eventual completion and release, which this CD marks. The album’s title was taken f…
From A Folio
Michael Jon Fink's From a Folio, a suite of six short pieces for cello and piano and one central piece for six cellos, a set of songs without words, was composed for new-music cellist Derek Stein, with whom Fink has been performing in various small groups during the past few years.As the elegant, subtle music unfolds, radiating a deep, emotional sense of form, the listener is quickly drawn into a highly nuanced, lyrical sound world. Fink’s characteristically reductive but expressive style is evi…
Music For Airport Furniture
Music for Airport Furniture is Cold Blue’s first release of Stephen Whittington’s refined, beautiful music. Whittington is something of a musical vagabond, traveling widely and writing music that is often multicultural in its inspiration. With this in mind, this compelling and sublime string quartet could be heard as a strange homage to the act of traveling, airport to airport.Stephen Whittington writes about the piece, “Music for Airport Furniture is a work for string quartet that alludes to Er…
Patience Soup
Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements presen…
Minus Plus Escapism
Minus Plus Escapism is the third album from Everest Magma, which follows "Modern/Antique" and "Gnosis", both released by Boring Machines.This record is inspired by Salvia Divinorum. It has been played using an acoustic guitar, voice, various effects and tape recordings. It’s acoustic music which sounds like an electronic record, or maybe the contrary. There are songs but there are no lyrics to it, the voice is an instrument, but you can sing along if you so wish. What emerges is a blues for the …
Il Vento Disperderà la Schiuma
Boring Machine released the first work by Fabio Orsi after his move from native Puglia to Berlin many years ago. The record was the obsessive “Wo Ist Behle?” which reflected the heavy mark on Orsi who has been stricken and enthused by the psichedelic feeling of the long Berlin winter. Covered in snow, the most remote places of the city have the same hazy feeling of the hot summer days in Salento but the glacial weather gives a different perspective and transforms the atmosphere perception.Then w…
Bloom Into Night
Bloom Into Night is the new album from ByMyDelay, the solo project of Marcella Riccardi (Blake/e/e/e, Franklin Delano, Massimo Volume) started in 2011, initially as a one-woman band with an array of loopers end effects to accompany her own songs. During time she got closer to a lysergic kind of folk music, always in between British Folk and West Coast style and in recent times she further opened the structures of her songs, which became more and more stretched out and free-form, like a river wit…
The Book Room
Marionette presents Kilchhofer's debut album 'The Book Room'. Benjamin Kilchhofer is not new to the world of recorded music, yet he doesn’t seem to fit into a particular scene or group. As an outsider he is, however, fully immersed and melded into his own universe. He mentally escapes to a parallel world and weaves an alternate reality which would otherwise not exist in his daily life. Kilchhofer avoids the spotlight and therefore isn’t really visible in today’s culture of ever changing content …
The Lion's Throne
The Lion’s Throne bears witness to the performances that the legendary composer Terry Riley and Italian singer Amelia Cuni did together in the United Kingdom and Italy between 1999 and 2006. Riley, whose remarkable body of work seamlessly integrates a lifetime of devotion to Indian classical music into the western classical tradition, collaborates with Cuni, a singer trained in Dhrupad who, like Riley, experiments with Indian singing in a variety of ways.In these recordings, Riley plays piano or…
Black Water
Jim Fox’s music is usually noted for its quietude and ambling pace. In the mid-1980s, however, he drifted from these defining stylistic penchants for a couple of years, penning music that often bounced along, energetically and loudly, at a good clip. His clangorous Black Water, from 1984, is rich with dense, sometimes shimmering, sometimes rumbling tremolos and loudly struck chords covering the full range of the piano, set off by brief moments of quiet, twinkling serenity.Jim Fox writes, “Black …
Cold Blue Two
Cold Blue Two is an eclectic anthology of 14 new, previously unrecorded works—many of them written specifically for this CD—by a diverse collection of composers whose personal musical visions usually blend intuition with process. The composers include both the well-known and the not-so-well-known, most with longtime associations with Cold Blue, and two making their first appearance on the label: John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, In…
Four Thousand Holes
Four Thousand Holes is a sometimes lush, sometimes fragile, rhythmically complex and technically demanding work for piano and mallet percussion (performed by the extraordinary pianist Stephen Drury and percussionist Scott Deal) and ghostly electronic “auras”—electronic sounds created by processing the acoustic instruments’ sonorities.Unlike John Luther Adams’s other works, the pitch material used in Four Thousand Holes is drawn exclusively from Western music’s most basic elements: major and mino…
Last Cicada Singing
Four serene, unique, and entrancing pieces for solo qin (a zither-like Chinese instrument). Quiet, sparse, almost Feldmanesque, almost delta-blues-like, too. Performed by the composer, Christopher Roberts, who mastered the qin while living and teaching for many years in Taiwan. (He performs on a qin built by Lin Li-Zheng.)Christopher Roberts writes about the piece:“Chinese scholars in antiquity took their qins to the mountains to compose music in accord with the aesthetics of nature. They develo…
Sudoku 82
Sudoku 82, a spare, beautiful, spacious piece for eight pianos, was composed utilizing systems derived from Sudoku puzzles and the GarageBand computer program.Christopher Hobbs writes about the piece: “Sudoku 82 is one of a series of pieces I have been working on since 2005. There are now over 125 of them that use Apple’s GarageBand software and random procedures culled from the numbers found initially in hexadecimal Sudoku puzzles and latterly from online random number generators. I choose the …
Sult
Based upon Maja Ratkje´s music created for the ballet ”Sult” (”Hunger") by profiled director Jo Strømgren for the Norwegian National Ballet, this is a departure from records and live settings normally associated with Maja S. K. Ratkje, as we find her placed behind a modified, wiggly and out of tune pump organ, singing songs and improvising. Metal tubes, PVC tubes and a wind machine were built into the organ; guitar strings, a bass string, a resin thread, metal and glass percussion and a bow are …
The Place We Began
John Luther Adams's The Place We Began contains four mysteriously evocative electro-acoustic works that the composer built from short recorded moments—audio fragments—of his early music (circa the early 1970s). This is not a trip down Memory Lane: in The Place We Began, Adams has reappropriated and transformed these sonic fragments into completely new works that speak to his current musical interests and directions, especially his recent installation pieces, and refer to his past only in ways th…
String Quartets
This CD presents the premiere recordings of two spirited and enticing quartets that draw on Peter Garland’s well-traveled ear and great sense of personal vision. Both works move with a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is purely Garlandesque—marked by a sometimes lively dancing, a sometimes alluring stasis, and an often sauntering gait that allow musical ideas to seem to appear intuitively and develop subconsciously..Performed and recorded beautifully by members of the ren…