Spaces . An Hour For Piano
Performed by Keiko Shichijo. Tom Johnson's An Hour for Piano was written in 1971. The piece began as a series of short, improvisatory sketches in 1967 when Johnson was accompanying a modern dance class at New York University. Johnson gradually expanded these sketches and added transitions between them, writing a piece that is to be played in exactly one hour. Achieving this goal requires an absolutely steady tempo for the duration of the piece, which Johnson has set at quarter note = 59.225 beat…
Socrate
Beautiful rendering of French composer Eric Satie's 1918 masterwork "Socrate", originally for four sopranos and chamber orchestra, here stripped to its essence as a duo with Olalla Aleman on soprano and Guy Vandromme on piano, maintaining Satie's characterist reserve and refinement in the 3 parts: "portrait of socrates"; "banks of the ilissus"; and "death of socrates".
Mundanas I - V
The title mundana comes from Boethius' (427-524 AD) printed work on ancient Greek music: De institutione musica. John McCowen is a New York based composer and performer whose work focuses on extending the possibilities of the clarinet family. John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensionality within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. His works for ensemble utilize spectral techniques to superimpose the timbral/sonic c…
This Is Not A Lament
Return of Richard Youngs to Fourth Dimension, a label that has supported his work since the early 1990s via collaborations with Simon Wickham-Smith. The latter returns to this set, based around the notion of songs featuring special guests. Spread over the two discs, the eleven songs here assume all manner of sonic guises that are often difficult or sometimes blissed-out, but always rewarding. Most include guests, themselves from a wide variety of backgrounds (taking in all from groups such as Tr…
Un Lloc entre Dos Records
Un lloc entre dos records stands as the third piece in Ferran Fages’s trilogy for guitar and sinetones, plunging listeners into an environment of memory, duration, and pure perception. Composed and performed by the Catalan musician on Another Timbre, the work deconstructs traditional guitar sonority, instead proposing a landscape shaped by precise tunings, persistent resonance, and the interplay of acoustics with brief, pure electronic sinewaves. Fages draws on the legacy of Morton Feldman, Alvi…
Aftermaths
Aftermaths assembles a series of solo piano meditations from Mark R Taylor, each miniature realized with extraordinary nuance by pianist Teodora Stepančić. Taylor’s writing gathers its force not from spectacle, but from distilled detail, calibrated pacing, and a disciplined embrace of small form. The works—ranging from twelve-second “flashes” to pieces that stretch over nine minutes - invite a listening experience grounded in patience, repetition, and subtle surprise. Taylor leverages the piano’…
Lines and Tracings
Lines and Tracings documents the unique meeting of American experimentalist Michael Pisaro and Boston-based composer-performer Morgan Evans-Weiler, realized with the forward-thinking ensemble Ordinary Affects. Through two expansive works, the album melds field recording, slow-motion counterpoint, and Wandelweiser-influenced reduction, opening vast temporal landscapes for the listener. Pisaro’s composition foregrounds resonance and contingency, using glacially-paced lines and occasional electroni…
Rosso Napoletano Rework
400 copies in black vinyl. After 44 years, the real masterpiece Tony Esposito's Rosso Napoletano sees the light again with this marvellous 13-minutes rework by Mushrooms Project
Une Autre Version de Territory
On of the latest release on the ever-excellent Standard In-Fi (the imprint run by France's Jeremie Sauvage), with the help of Mental Groove, is this incredible beaturing double bass, lapsteel, bagpipes, guitar, violin, percussions... With musicians also playing in bands such as Toad, France, Sourdure or Abat. Far-out instrumental stuff with killer sound
Solo Guitar Volume 2-1/3
"Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized it would take sc…
Solo Guitar Volume 1-1/3
"Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized it would take sc…
Playing Moondog\'s Music
2019 repress. Recorded in 1955, released on his own short-lived Moondog label. 4 tracks of manic saxophone and snare drum mayhem. You will not find an original of this anywhere. Blind from the age of 17, classically trained in music, Moondog aka Louis Hardin left the countryside in the late 1940s to busk on the streets of New York, playing percussion instruments of his own creation. He later became the darling of the NY arts and music set. He also recorded for Folkways, Woody Herman's Mars label…
Moondog and His Friends
2019 repress. Originally released in 1953, this collection of very early Moondog pieces features the same tribal rhythmic impulse as his famed Prestige recordings, but there's an impressive line in chamber music running through these compositions. It's a fantastic collection of recordings from the eccentric genius that was
Moondog. This mini-album features Moondog's pioneering techniques in
tape overdubbing -- he harmonises with himself on voice, double bass and
home-made drums. Touches of h…
Inside
The saxophone is most often associated with jazz, a lead instrument that’s strong on melody and a potent vehicle for improvisation. Urban Sax puts all those ideas to bed. For those unfamiliar, Urban Sax is the creative outlet of composer Gilbert Artman, who started the group back in the mid-70s, and composes and arranges all of the group’s material. The “group” in this case is over 75 performers, consisting mostly of saxophones (the entire family from sopranino to bass), but also including clari…
Melting Landscapes
Last copies, don't miss this wonder! Astonishing release. Edition of 300. White Marbled Vinyl LP with a photo book of 12 analog large-format photographs of the glacier in winter and summer. Concept by Ludwig Berger. Rapid ice melt has been profoundly shaping the alpine region in recent years. It has become an omnipresent and tangible phenomenon, and an iconic symbol of ongoing climate change. Over the past three years, the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot and archite…
Par Les Damné.e.s De La Terre 1969 - 1988
2-LP vinyl edition comes with a comprehensive 36-page booklet. Stunning double LP set collecting rare protest songs from around the world - mostly from former French colonies - with a distinctive experimental/free jazz and avant-garde touch all over. All are sung or delivered in French and the tracklist also features short extracts from anti-colonialist political speeches. Featuring Art Ensemble of Chicago, Colette Magny, Salah Sadaoui, Francis Bebey and many more
First Flight
Studio Mule present a reissue of Mitsuaki Katayama Trio's First Flight, originally issued in 1979 on Johnny's Disk Record. Johnny's Disk Record is an independent jazz label run by the owner of jazz cafe Kaiunbashi No Johnny, located in Rikuzentakata City in Iwate prefecture, Japan. The legendary label released a string of albums of high quality but down-to-earth music, spanning from modern jazz and avant-garde jazz to left-field pop. Albums such as Farewell My Johnny/Left Alone (1980) and Aya's …
Songs Without Throats
Black Truffle announces the release of Songs Without Throats, a collection of recordings from Paul DeMarinis. A key figure in the history of electronic music since the 1970s and collaborator with the likes of Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and David Tudor, DeMarinis is a pioneer in the development of gallery sound installation and digital music technologies. All tracks have been selected in collaboration with the artist, focusing on DeMarinis's exploration of synthesized voice and the digital ana…
Galerie Randolph
Edition of 500. Black Truffle present the first-ever vinyl reissue of Ruedi Häusermann's Galerie Randolph, a masterpiece of solo multi-tracking originally released on CD by Unit Records in 1995. Born in 1948 and residing in the medieval Swiss town of Lenzburg, and virtually unknown outside of the German-speaking world, Häusermann is a multi-instrumentalist and enormously prolific composer who works primarily in the medium of absurdist music-theater. A virtuoso wind player and free improviser who…