Caminantes... Ayacucho
2007 release - Luigi Nono No hay caminos, hay que caminar … Andrej Tarkowskij (1987) “Wayfarer, there is no path. Yet you must walk”, in Spanish: “Caminante, no hay caminos. Hay que caminar.” These words are the contents of an inscription, which Luigi Nono read on the wall of a monastery in Toledo in the middle of the 1980s. They must have affected him most deeply, since in the last three years of his life he made them the basis of the titles of a trio of works. In “Hay que caminar” he surely re…
For Samuel Beckett
1999 release - For fifty-five minutes the great American composer Morton Feldman weaves his tapestry of sounds, a pattern always the same and yet never the same, an iridescent, thick fabric, full of details, although these never distract the listener's attention. Feldman met Beckett only once in his life (though Beckett later sent him a postcard on which the composer discovered the text for his opera Neither). He created music of a beguiling tonality and beauty, inspired more by painting and lit…
La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura
2000 release - Nostalgic, utopian, future distance\", the title of this piece investigates the possibilities of violin playing, the intimate, physical quality of the sound and the historical dimensions inherent to this instrument.
Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen
1998 release - While standing at the waterfall, we become aware of our thoughts, but not the waterfall itself; if we succeed in letting our thoughts stand still, we hear a melody within the turmoil. Everyone his own. (Peter Ablinger)
Enban Live at the Strange Fruit
Avant-primitive improv from the duo of Takehisa Kosugi (Violin, Recorder, Voice) and Takashi Kazamaki (Percussion, Harmonica). Recorded in 1983, Kosugi shows yet another side of himself, trading his drone for a more free-hillbilly style, which meshes perfectly with Kazamaki's masterful tumbling and clattering. A ritualistic, shamanic vibe: the music has natural flow, nothing seems forced, percussions are all over, underlining the shamanic explorations for the soulful violin (or bamboo flutes) pl…
24 petits preludes pour la guitare
Composer : Antoine Beuger. Performer: Cristian Alvear Montecino (guitar). It takes waiting. Then another string, another finger. A pass in the middle of an arpeggio: an alvearium must be built, a conduit, an in-between- arpeggios --- (very) slow, very free, molto legato
Hildegard von Bingen : John Cage
Two ways of hearing these two sets of 9 pieces:first separate, then alternating. And all of a sudden 800 years of temporal distance seem to dissolve and the pieces communicate with each other. Isn’t one even tempted to think, that John Cage wrote his pieces to be combined this way with Hildegard von Bingens songs, as an attempt to overcome the “nasty ditch” (Lessing) between two completely different historical situations?
On Foot
This compact disc contains recordings of pieces from the 2005 project On Foot, onwhich Craig Shepard walked 250 miles in 31 days across Switzerland. Every day, he composed a new piece, wrote it down, and performed it outdoors in a public space such as a bridge, public square, intersection, or mountain-top. The pieces are intended to frame the everyday sounds of the place in which they are heard. The performances on this CD were recorded in the work spaces of the performers.Careful listening will…
keine fernen mehr
'keine fernen mehr I' and 'keine fernen mehr II'. Antoine Beuger, whistling. Recorded Studio von Buktu, Wuppertal, August 2010. Recording, editing, mastering: Tim Buktu. Recommandation: this CD is best played at a very low volume level.'
piano piece
piano piece (2006)Starting from nothing except the idea of the sound of the instrument, and the possibility of anything.From this starting point, then tracing a path through this limitless field of constant possibility.Focusing on the present. Every moment in the piece as a beginning. piano piece (2007)To work, for a period of time, until that work and time is over.Working, and the resultant work itself, as a means of knowledge, an instrument of exploration; which is therefore always beyond ones…
duos
Since their formation in 1998 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, duo Contour have commissioned and performed over 40 new pieces by composers from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. Their collaborative work has combined the acoustic world of trumpet and percussion with dance, electronics, improvisation, origami, story-telling, theatre and video, as well as and with other musicians in their 'duo Contour plus….' programmes. The duo has been resident at …
im sefinental
Stefan Thut 'Aussen raum' (2008). Manfred Werder '2008(3)' (2008). A field recording near a river divided in two parts.
two . too (for erwin-josef speckmann)
two . too (for erwin-josef speckmann) two: two, who are at one with anotherzwei, die sich einig sind too: two, who are at one with another (twice)zwei, die sich einig sind (zweimal) text: “as the full moon rises / the swan sings / in sleep / on the lake of the mind” (kenneth rexroth)indes der vollmond steigt / singt der schwan / im schlaf / auf des geistes see
Selected Works 1982-1992
A fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings Giancarlo and Roberto Drago aka The Tapes, sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever. This set surveys a blind spot in most people's knowledge of early-'80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di piombo or Years of Lead -- a period of domestic political turmoil between the late '60s and early '80s -- and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war. L…
Singulacra
Bristol, England-based sound artist and producer Sophia Loizou presents Singulacra, the follow-up to her 2014 debut, Chrysalis, which is itself a staggering exploration of the conflict between nature and technology and the space between natural and synthetic sounds. With Singulacra, Loizou builds on the framework of Chrysalis for her most ambitious offering to date. Ghostly remnants of hardcore and early jungle percolate throughout while fragments of radio transmissions seep in and out through t…
Zauberberg
**restocked** "A few years ago, an idea germinated while readingThe Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible aural journey through the memories of a place lost in the heights of the Swiss mountains. A century after the events depicted in the book, we went to where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and th…
II (Machinery)
Going is a double duo: 2 drums, 2 keys. They bring fat groovy beats, warm and distorted rhodes, mixed with dirty organ sounds and silly 80’s synths. Odd rhythms and polyrhythms go hand in hand with free improvisations and loose compositions.313 hand-numbered copies, laser-printed covers, hand-folded and hand-packaged
Exercise 15
"Exercise 15" was made out of and invites transformations or transcriptions. It's for piano or ad hoc instrumental arrangement. Its material is from a 1920s song "Union Maid" (as I found it in Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer's collection "Songs of Work and Protest") by Woodie Guthrie using an earlier popular song tune. The tempo of the music is not specified. Sometimes it's played rather fast, as the original tune probably was, sometimes at a deliberate, 'prosaic' tempo. Here it's in a slow motio…
string quartets
Material can be anonymous. Consider, for example, the middle voices in medieval hymn books: unadorned, not artful, a simple handiwork, a leisurely alternation of single notes. It might be a scale, or, beyond music, the stones of a wall, not artfully stacked, but simply and properly, the formal idea being nothing other than that of a wall. When I was working on the String Quartet (1988), I encountered the painting of Agnes Martin. I saw clear-cut forms, not overgrown with rhetoric and figuratio…