The Webster Cycles
As it casually explores the trombone’s timbres, The Webster Cycles is at times lush, at times stark. Mobile-like in the way that phrases and individual notes drift in and out and twist as if blown by the wind, it is something of a musical conundrum: comfortably adrift in a sense of motionlessness yet definitely propelled by a sense of forward motion. From moment to moment, an individual voice calls out or a crowd murmurs or voices unite in contrapuntal or parallel efforts.The Webster Cycles, an …
Solar Ipse # 09 (Magazine)
Magazine, 64 pages A4 format (Italian Language), with overviews, artciles and interviews on Bbz Bz Ueu, Luminance Ratio, Saba Saba, Martello, Ludmilla Spleen, Giorgio Salomon / Acrobati Liquidi, Giovanni Lami, The Star Pillow, Patrizia Oliva, The Barnacles, Dubit) Speciali (Stefano Giust: ten favourites) and 128 records reviews
Red Arc / Blue Veil
The four pieces that make up this CD—Dark Waves, Among Red Mountains, Qilyuan, and Red Arc/Blue Veil—are for various combinations of one or two pianos, percussion, and electronics. Each piece is built from a complex, polyrhythmic layering of voices that combine to form large, multi-arch musical shapes that explore a rich palette of harmonic and timbral colors, lush textures, and clear, simple compositional forms. This is music of broad strokes and ever-changing ebb and flow. John Luther Adams ha…
A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies For Maybeck
Charlemagne Palestine's A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies For Maybeck is a piece for two pianos played simultaneously in a tremolo style that Palestine calls “strumming,” a technique that has defined his piano music since the late ’60s. It spins out its sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs, and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones grow from its few opening pitches.This live recording from the Maybeck recital hall also contains Palestine’s short comments about his l…
The Tubes
This CD is made up of three compositions: Sevan, The Tubes, and Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre.Sevan is built from a recording of Armenian musician Parik Nazarian’s vocalizations in massive pipes near the shore of Lake Sevan, Armenia. It explores resonance, echoes, and voice properties.The Tubes weaves together the breath-like sounds of the Atlantic Ocean as it strikes tubular volcanic rock formations on the Island of El Hierro (the westermost of the Canary Islands) with the breathy tones of Jon Hasse…
Descent
Chas Smith is one of the most unique musicians working today. He has created his own musical world—complete with its own instruments and “language.” It is a world of expansive musical tapestries and carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolutely still, but evolve via a slow, constant change of aural perspective. Smith’s soundworld, however, it is not an altogether alien one, and critics, in their praise of Smith’s work, have repeatedly compared his compositions—some resonantly beautiful, …
On The Leopard Altar
Daniel Lentz writes about the album, On The Leopard Altar:“The form and flow of Is It Love? is determined by that of the text/lyric. Unlike much of my music-with-text work, it does not use an additive process. Rather, it uses a subtractive one. The voices begin each line with the nearly simultaneous sounding of all the phonemes of all of the words. As the work progresses, phonemes and notes are taken away until a finished line emerges.“Lascaux is scored for wineglasses, sixteen of which are rubb…
Notes on Other Music
Notes on Other Music is a 112 page A5 perfect bound book published on the occasion of the Fourth Edition Festival for Other Music in Stockholm. The book collects photographs, essays, interviews and conversations relating to the festival programme since its inception in 2016.The book features an extended piece on Eliane Radigue by Kate Molleson who visited the composer at her Paris apartment to discuss her instrumental music ahead of the Swedish premiere of Occam Ocean — her work for orchestra pe…
Descansos, Past
JimFox's Descansos, Past, written in April 2004 in memory of composer-performer John Kuhlman, who died a few years earlier, was premiered in Los Angeles (by the same musicians who are heard on the present CD), June 2004, as part of a series of concerts held at the historic Schindler House.Descansos, Past sets an ever-pizzicato double bass (a five-string, extending to low B), which is featured in a few solo sections, alongside a choir of nine ever-arco cellos, one of which soars up to the highest…
Fade
In three connected sections, Rick Cox's Fade offers a series of harmonic “moments” of various densities and complexities and timbres and lengths. Throughout the work, these moments, like elements in a mobile, are in a constant state of changing perspective.
Rick Cox is a composer and skilled multi-instrumentalist whom guitarist/composer Ry Cooder called “the hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.” Cox was an early explorer/developer of “prepared electric guitar” techniques His conc…
Long Night
Kyle Gann's Long Night is exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding music for three pianos that sometimes play independently and at other times in synchronization with one another. Gann calls this “the most successful piece from my early, Brian-Eno-influenced, ambient period, a variable-length piece for three non-synchronized pianos at different tempos.”For this recording, all three piano parts were recorded by Sarah Cahill.The composer writes about the piece:“I wrote Long Night very much under the i…
Top Ten: 2008-2018
Edition of 200. 550 pages, LP size. Top Ten: 2008-2018 is the second volume in James Hoff’s Top Ten series. In almost every issue since April 1998, Artforum has asked an individual from the art world to compile a top ten list of their favorite recent exhibitions (or concerts, television programs, books, events, etc.). In 2008, Hoff compiled the first ten years of this column into a new publication, with all of the articles’ accompanying images redacted, rendering the pictorial layout and design …
Top Ten: 1998-2008
Edition of 200. 440 pages, LP size. Top Ten: 1998–2008 is a new edition of the long-out-of-print publication by James Hoff. In almost every issue since April 1998, Artforum has asked an individual from the art world to compile a top ten list of their favorite recent exhibitions (or concerts, television programs, books, events, etc.). In this volume, Hoff compiles the first ten years of this column into a new publication, with all of the articles’ accompanying images redacted, rendering the picto…
From Shelter
Steve Peters's from Shelter is music written in 1997 for choreographer Lane Lucas’s dance/theater work Shelter, which deals with “the concept of metamorphosis, and the way connections between people can bring us to a greater awareness of our place in life.” The gently undulating three-section Three Short Stories and the beautifully insistent My Burning Skin to Sleep form a suite that very successfully stands apart from the theater/dance work for which they were composed. Three violas calmly stro…
A Temperament For Angels
Michael Jon Fink's A Temperament for Angels (written in 1989 and fully revised for this recording in 2003) combines equal measures of beauty and grit in a powerful, kaleidoscopic, elusively shaped textural music that is compelling from its first quiet violin note (to its full sixteen voices of strings and electronic/sampled sounds and percussion) to its final shimmer of decaying cymbals. Often dark and moody, this music speaks in broad, chromatic harmonies and light, nearly detached single pitch…
Los Tigres De Marte
Frequently shifting focus as its harmonies melt one into another, this swirling piece finds its wildly branching roots touching on many styles of music—from Delius and Debussy to bop to techno. Los Tigres de Marte is sometimes lush and enveloping, sometimes brittle and percussive, sometimes suspended and motionless, sometimes agitated and aggressive, but always engaging.Daniel Lentz writes about Los Tigres de Marte:“Like many American composers of my generation, I was raised on a diet of bebop a…
The City The Wind Swept Away
The quiet rumbling of trombones and the soft keening of strings haunt the piano’s slow stream of notes. A mosaic, a tapestry. Rich harmonies and simple triads come and go, like the ever-changing, yet ever-similar, landscapes one passes while driving through a remote area, perhaps a Southern California desert, perhaps a deep woods. Although not in any sense a programmatic music, the events in The City the Wind Swept Away coast in and out of earshot in much this way, or like drifting clouds, slowl…
The Complete 10-Inch Series From Cold Blue
Back by popular demand (and available for the first time on CD), this boxed set of three CDs collects all the music released on a popular series of 10-inch vinyl records that were put out by Cold Blue in the early 1980s. During the Cold Blue label’s first incarnation, this music by seven West Coast composers—Barney Childs, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Read Miller, and Chas Smith—created much of the company’s reputation as a challenging and always interesting source of…
An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Chas Smith's An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Murphey, who played with Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, Sons of the Pioneer, and other classic country artists). Here, Smith’s musical texture, evolving slowly and continuously over the course of the piece, is without dramatic flourishes. Like the spare la…
Awakening At The Inn Of The Birds
Continents of City and Love and Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and double bass. They both feature expanding piano lines that intersect and compliment individually expanding textures provided by the strings and synthesizer. Continents cycles slowly through four harmonic areas via a sort of structural counterpoint, achieving a finely knit fabric of understated sensuality. Tidal combines strictly notated music with measur…