★Kairos
Watercolors and Psychograms
"In the works of Martón Illés from the early 2000s, physically perceptible energy, gestural force, and visual conceptions of the sonic are already present. After 2010 the composer drew further implications from these for his work: since then, his musical thinking has no longer been based on fixed pitches, but rather on sounds – either as acoustic manifestations of imagined lines or as gestures modeled on the physical. The way he actually implements this by means of instruments is impressively de…
String Quartets
Defining the character of a composer’s music is always hazardous, especially if the composer is restless. But around Stefano Scodanibbio’s music we often return to the concept of wandering, which moreover reflects his life. This is testified by his writings, which tell us how travel, lack of stability, desire were factors to be found written or improvised in his works. An important and restless philosopher introducing the volume that collects those writings (Not enough for me, Quodlibet, 2019) g…
Painted Lights
Painted Lights, a new album of compositions by Kui Dong is now available on Kairos Music. The record, which features performances by Juliet Petrus, Deirdre Brenner, Third Coast Percussion, Arditti Quartet, Koehne Quartett, Volti, Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Robert Geary, and Raphael Schlüsselberg, comprises four pieces of chamber and choral music written by Dong between 2009 and 2017. California Shoreline (2017) for soprano, string quartet and prepared piano opens the album, followed by …
Things That Didn’t Work the First Time
With each composition, Annesley Black embarks courageously on a new experiment with an open future; while at the beginning of the compositional process the material can still mean many things, it gradually ceases to do so. And at some point, all ambiguities are cleared up: the piece stands. The paths that have led to this point are ultimately paradoxical: they are “immensely labyrinthine and completely logical at the same time” (Black). In their own unique way, the pieces gathered on this CD pre…
Ultima Thule
One could take Wolfram Schurig's Ultima Thule for five ensembles, a work whose mere instrumentation in-vokes that utopian place which, according to the composer, should automatically be the goal of any authentic artistic activity, as a motto for Wolfram Schurig‘s entire compositional œuvre. In ancient Greece, the name Thule referred to the northern-most part of the world, whose accessibility and actual existence, however, remained uncertain. Since Virgil, th…
Works for Piano
"The piano was the favourite instrument of Morton Feldman (1926 – 1987). “What is the difference between an orchestra and a piano? A piano has pedals”, he once said. The three works on the CD – Triadic Memories (1981), For Bunita Marcus (1985) and Palais de Mari (1986) – are iconic of Feldman’s compositional trajectory. Firstly, because of their length. The first two pieces each last almost an hour and a half, Palais de Mari 25 minutes. Furthermore, the limitation of the musical material is stri…
Works for Ensemble
Wolfram Schurig's musical career began with instrumental playing. After basic training on the recorder, his concert studies with Kees Boeke, one of the protagonists of historically informed performance practice, left their mark on him. This experience plays an important role in Schurig's working method as a composer: "You simply write music differently when you are on stage yourself. You owe it to the performer to deliver something that is playable, and in which he can find himself as a co-creat…
Aggregate Forms
"The radically mind-expanding challenges of Catherine Lamb’s string quartets have given me great joy and satisfaction. Imagining and creating the sonic relations yields an integration of number and sound, offering a pathway toward ultimate oneness. Opening ears and mind to infinitely rich patterns, these resonances penetrate deeply to the core. The recording is not an endpoint, but part of a broadening process, a continuous evolution of abstract relationships becoming concrete, erasing artificia…
Krypta
The Swiss composer, sound and video artist Jannik Giger lifts the veils and creates access to the usually rather hidden, private worlds of music making on this album Krypta. The rage, teachings, interjections and body sounds of the mostly already deceased world-famous conductors are embedded like relics in the morbid-ritual accompaniment of the fictional orchestra.Can the ex-patriarchs one day be resurrected? At least they are brought to speak in a new way in their own requiem, come to unusually…
1. Keintate / Eine Letzte Art Chansons
Friedrich Cerha, whose monumental Spiegel cycle and his completion of Alban Berg's Lulu have secured him a place amongst the most eminent composers of our time, celebrated his 95th birthday on 17 February 2021. This album presents two of his lesser known very typical Viennese works, featuring chansonnier HK Gruber. While somehow in the tradition of the local music played at the Heurigen, both pieces dig deep into the musical and spiritual soul of Viennas folk and art music. This extraordinary …
Works for Piano
The music of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is one of in-betweens. Stylistically, Lang’s oeuvre occupies the space between a multitude of genres, ranging from contem porary composition and free improvisation to the wider realms of hip hop and DJ-culture. By virtue of Lang’s radical openness to creative conversation and collaboration, and to ideas and influences from other areas of artistic and scientific exploration, his oeuvre finds connections to the worlds of film, dance, theatre, …
General Theory Of Relativity
Wojciech Błażejczyk’s music feeds on scientific theories, internet streams and civilization waves or scrap. It sometimes looks like a nerd’s diary. Full of different colors and fonts, notes, charts, exclamations and underlined words. This diary is the composer’s reaction to what surrounds him every day. Global news often appear together with local events, fake facts – with perceptual illusions, war strategy – with a pacifist message. All of that put in a new music idiom spiced up with a pinch of…
Mosaïque
Could you imagine music as a geyser? Erupting violently, waiting on tense standby, forever renewing itself... Or, just the contrary, as a sigh? An operatic sospiri, inhaling and exhaling, a tangible, rhythmic fluctuation... Or as walking with your eyes closed with full alertness to the sounds of unknown origin? That’s what Marcin Stańczyk’s music is like.The milestone of his career turned out to be the composition Sighs (2008–10, rev. 2012) for chamber- or symphonic orchestra. It got him the pre…
PhonoPhantomatics
Cezary Duchnowski, although perceived as a specialized composer with consciously chosen specialization, is very open to extremely versatile activity in the musical field. Apart from absolute music, he’s also keenly interested in relations between music and the word, music and theatre (or rather performance art) as well as visual arts in the wide sense. What he aims at with this kind of syncretism is a genuine interaction of various media. In his musical activity, he explores various areas of the…
Interialcell
Aleksandra Gryka is undoubtedly one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures of the young generation of Polish composers. She does not comment on her works, does not give interviews, and does not provide critics with an insight into her scores (which even causes the occasional international scandal). She is also mysterious in her music: her works are like planets with their own atmosphere and laws. The narrative is usually torn, fragmentary and always incom plete, it leaves the listener uns…
Complete Acousmatic Works — Vol 1 (16CD Box)
Epic box set containing 16 CDs, presenting more than 40 works and 18 hours of listening, including never released before music by Denis Dufour and texts in a detailed booklet
Moult
At first I found it impossible to organise my thoughts about this disc. I listened in bed to Moult through headphones; it seemed an entirely different beast through speakers. The two pieces in the middle are quieter, and more consistent in their impacts with headphones or not. Listening to them for the fourth or fifth time under the duvet one really begins to perceive the extraordinary subtlety of Clara Iannotta’s schemes. They provide the kind of measured sensory stimulation which is exquisite …
Works for Flute
** In process of stocking ** Salvatore Sciarrino, speaking of his own art, refers to fascinating encounters and movements in Sicilian civilisation, recollections of cultures, layered one upon the other over the centuries in the land of Empedocles. His music is molten lava and basalt, music so taut and eminently dramatic, with incipient violence, yet the volcanic eruption perceived from a distance seems muffled. The music casts light, if not on absence, at least on the creation of a remote univer…
Works for Violin and for Viola
** In process of stocking ** Giacinto Scelsi (La Spezia, 1905 – Rome, 1988) is one of the most original Italian composers of the twentieth century. Musician and poet of aristocratic descent, Scelsi spent his childhood in his family’s castle, in Valva, where he received “un’educazione medievale” in which he recalls “scherma, scacchi, latino”, 1 and developed an early attraction towards improvisation on the piano. “De l’age de trois ans et demi, j’ai commencé à improvisers au piano. [...] je ne s…
Parametrical Counterpoint
** In process of stocking ** Kairos presents Parametrical Counterpoint by José Luis Hurtado. Composer José Luis Hurtado’s music has been performed across continents by ensembles and soloists such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, JACK Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, CEPROMUSIC Ensemble, Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, Quatuor Molinari, Émile Girard -Charest, Lora Kmieliauskaite, Tony Arnold, Garth Knox, Claire Chase, Le Nouvel En…