Papers
Sean McCann, Recital label head, on Papers (April 2020): "In addition to the musical objects she creates, Sarah Davachi is also immersed in the theoretical issues that surround her practice. This twin engagement began in her youth in Canada, studying philosophy and music, and working at a specialized musical instrument museum. Her compositional ambitions led to the doorstep of Mills College, fertile with history. Accompanied by a thesis for pipe organ and electronics, she also wrote a tangential…
Birds
**limited edition single-sided heavy weight vinyl record in full colour luxury sleeve** Birds is a collaboration between Erik Kessels, Anthony Burrill and Malcolm Goldie. Bird song and aeroplane recordings are carefully arranged in an audio collage of pleasant and unpleasant sounds. The record creates an unsettling listening experience featuring amongst others the House Sparrow, Airbus A320, Blue Tit, Boeing 777X, Wood Pigeon and a Cessna 172. In times where the sound of birds and airplanes are …
Music with Roots in the Aether
"Music with Roots in the Aether" is a series of interviews with seven composers who seemed to me (Robert Ashley) when I conceived the piece-and who still seem to me twenty-five years later-to be among the most important, influential and active members of the so-called avant-garde movement in American music, a movement that had its origins in the work of and in the stories about composers who started hearing things in a new way at least fifty years ago.There is, of course, our indebtedness to Eur…
Outside of Time - Ideas about Music
English-German Edition, 655 pages (!) collection of writings about ideas concerning music by American composer Robert Ashley. For nearly forty-five years, composer robert Ashley has pursued his vision of opera in the face of near complete indifference from the American mainstream culture industry. Ashley’s experience parallels that of other American indepen-dent avant-garde figures such as Terry Riley, Alvin lucier, and Pauline Oliveros. like these composers, Ashley uses notation only to the ext…
Cues: Writings & Conversations
544 page English/German Edition. In 2002 Christian Wolff was a guest composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and during the course of the festival he was interviewed by Christopher Fox and by James Gardner. Fox's interview took place before an audience in the Lawrence Batley Theatre on 25 November; Gardner's interview was recorded in private in the George Hotel, Huddersfield on 27 November, and edited excerpts from that recording were subsequently used in a programme produced by…
Mo-No Music to Read | Musik zum Lesen (1969)
Expanded new edition of this 1969 classic. 244 pages, English/German edition. There must be no victors, not even in the arts… This was the credo Dieter Schnebel shared with artists like John Cage and remained faithful to his whole life. The arts and the world, music and everyday life – these were no contrasts to the composer, church minister, musicologist and teacher who had been born in Lahr in Baden. He created a new open concept of work which left boundaries in space and time behind and saw t…
Morton Feldman in Middelburg: Words on Music
Massive! English-German Edition in two volumes 906 pages. These lectures, discussions were within the last years of Feldman's life, he died in September 1987, these were 1985 to 1987, for the "Nieuwe Muziek" in Middleburg, and the topics, subject matter runs the entire cornocopia of post war music, modernity, complexity, post-modernity, post-truth, post metaphysics. The discussion(s) are with all top-recorgnized composers Kaija Saariho, Iannis Xenakis, pianist Geoffrey D. Madge, Louis Andriessen…
Essays
**Original 1985 edition, few copies in stock** Morton Feldman was a big, brusque Jewish guy from Woodside, Queens—the son of a manufacturer of children’s coats. He worked in the family business until he was forty-four years old, and he later became a professor of music at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-one. To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who o…
Radio Happenings
** 224-page hardcover book with audio DVD of the complete 5-hours of audio from the radio broadcasts** In 1966-67, radio station WBAI in New York City invited composers John Cage and Morton Feldman to make 5 one-hour radio conversations. Unscripted and improvised, they were free to talk about whatever they wished. The fascinating conversations cover music, politics, sociology, current events, the arts and more.These Radio Happenings are legend to fans of these composers, as well as a unique mom…
Finding Music
A general introduction to Tom Johnson’s music, as well as many articles written from 1961 until 2018, with texts both In English and German. "I can not say that I always manage to find my music. Sometimes it still seems necessary to compose it, particularly when I want to produce another opera. I can say, however, that there is something particularly satisfying about projects where the logic (the music) seems to arise naturally from some discovery outside of myself, and where everything comes to…
Works For The Ever Present Orchestra
Black Truffle’s documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer, as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier’s works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross (recorded by two core members of the Ever …
Playing Piano
"Playing Piano features a partially deconstructed upright player piano prepared in the spirit of John Cage. This fully mechanized 1920’s player piano is animated by a motor and pneumatics (as opposed to being played by a person). A perforated paper roll, the physical translation of the musical score, controls the mechanized elements.
The preparations to Playing Piano include various machines which strum and press a pie plate against the strings, whistle using the air of the pneumatics and amplif…
Ring Road Ring
**in process of stocking** "This album features sound recordings of the low-level vibrations pulsing through the megastructure that is the Coventry Ring Road. Built between the 1950s and 70s, it was a key part of the plan to rebuild Coventry after the devastation of World war II. The Ring Road was intended to keep traffic out of the city centre and form the basis for a radical vision of a modern pedestrian-focussed city. However, politics, economics and the contingencies of history combined to p…
Un|sounding the Self — A Portrait
**Includes 120-page booklet** "Silent quest for sound, constant listening in the streets of Brooklyn, the Swiss Alps, the forests of Pennsylvania and the landscape of New Mexico. What if, after hours of walking, the mind finally clears, the ears open? Keep on walking, listening, giving space to resonances. Christopher Shultis, drummer and Professor Emeritus of the University of New Mexico and Craig Shepard, trombonist and member of the Wandelweiser collective, take Henry David Thoreau at his wor…
Next City Sounds: Interfaces
**in process of stocking** "As part of the 20th Kamuna (Karlsruhe Museum Night), so-called ›in-situ performances‹ took place at three locations in Karlsruhe on August 4, 2018: The project room ßpace, the artist-run space Halo ARS and the pedestrian zone Kaiserstraße were connected to the ZKM via an outgoing audio data stream. At ßpace, sound artist Lasse-Marc Riek condensed naturalistic field recordings, noise and soundscape recordings into a sonic live collage. The live electronic duo Lintu + R…
Smetak Inventions: The Interfused Realms of Inventor, Sound Artist, and Musician Walter Smetak (1913-84)
Musician and inventor Walter Smetak, who emigrated to Brazil in 1937, is one of the most important protagonists of sound art and experimental improvisation of the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960s–80s. His work continues to have an impact today. Forming the core of his creative output are more than 100 instruments and sound sculptures that he invented and built himself, his so-called »Plásticas Sonoras«. His work also includes numerous compositions, sound recordings, books, poetry, writings, an…
Berlin Sonic Places – A Brief Guide
Peter Cusack's Berlin Sonic Places: A Brief Guide is an appreciation of, and an enquiry into, Berlin“s sounds and soundscapes in all their moods of noise and quiet. It asks why does Berlin sound the way it does and what makes one neighbourhood sonically different from another. It pays attention to the aural character of particular buildings, streets, squares and green spaces, listens to the city“s public transport system and celebrates the importance of nature to Berlin“s acoustic environment. B…
The World's Worst - A Guide to the Portsmouth Sinfonia
"Butchering the classics through avant-garde amateurism: the Portsmouth Sinfonia embodied the joyous collectivism of 1970s British counterculture. In 1970, galvanized in part by the musical experiments of avant-garde composers Gavin Bryars, John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, students at Portsmouth College of Art in England formed their own symphony orchestra. Christened the Portsmouth Sinfonia, its primary requirement for membership was that all players, regardless of skill, experience or musicians…
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
"Over 16 years, beginning in 1965, John Cage compiled anecdotes, observations and koanlike tales, originally typing everything on an IBM Selectric and using chance methods to determine the formatting of texts that twist down each page. The Siglio edition preserves the graphic effects, but, more important, it gives a sense of the company he kept during these years—Marcel Duchamp, R. Buckminster Fuller, D.T. Suzuki—and of his passionate feeling about a world locked in a state of perpetual warfare.…
Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press
"There are few art-world figures as influential—and as little known—as Dick Higgins (1938-1998), co-founder of Fluxus, “polyartist,” poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term “intermedia” to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries, the expansion of liminal spaces between traditional modes of art making, and the open field for new forms that cannot be compart…