★XI Records
Blasco / Vítková / Anette
On this album Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco explore cyborgness through their relationships with their instruments. Lucie perceives the accordion as an extension of their body - sound, matter, and movement locked in a self-generating cybernetic loop. Merche built Anette, a 3D printer, as her interlocutor and companion in the performance space; in return, Anette printed thimble-microphones Merche wears on her fingers, which render the machine's unique electromagnetic voice audible to human ears.…
Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut / a lot of tiles (trivial scan)
XI Records is very pleased to announce the release of a 2 CD set of Michael Winter’s music organized by guitarist Elliot Simpson. Each CD features a single composition, demonstrating different sides of Winter’s work. The first, Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut, is a socially-engaged piece written for Simpson and in honor of George Floyd. The second, a lot of tiles (trivial scan), derives music from a set of mathematical tilings (often referred to as tessellations). The album art features r…
The Live One
XI Records is very pleased to announce the release of Tom Chiu’s new double-CD The Live One, a diverse and thoroughly engrossing album that showcases the multiple facets of Chiu’s visions. Chiu is a polymath who is as comfortable with lyricism and the beauty of tonality as he is with process-based works and challenging conventions of composition. Chiu specializes in creating spatial experiences and altered states of mind with his music, with a singular, questing path. He is a gifted improviser a…
NuDaf
A 65-minute electroacoustic composition featuring Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon. NuDaf (2020) is the second longest piece in Phill Niblock's repertoire of recorded audio works. NuDaf is a departure from his previous pieces in that he makes extensive use of multiphonics and constructed the work with fewer tracks than usual, creating uniquely transparent and ephemeral textures. The piece is the result of a collaboration between Niblock and the stellar bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval. Her music…
Sonance for the Precession
The electroacoustic composition Sonance for the Precession was commissioned by Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The piece furthers Neil Leonard's practice in large scale sound installation, with recent commissions by documenta, Venice Biennale, and Fujiko Nakaya of Experiments in Art at Technology. The original composition, created for the quad adjacent to WCMA, played from the dome of the historic Hopkins Observatory, the oldest working astronomical observatory in the United States. The …
Red / Machinic Fantasies
** 2021 Stock ** XI Records presents Involution by Cecilia Lopez. Red is more than a musical composition. It roots lie in its physicality. Nestled on a large cargo-like cable web are an array of small speakers and contact microphones. As this web sways the speakers and microphones come in and out of proximity and form an evolving feedback network, which slowly reveal themselves as a myriad of permutations accompanied by sympathetic synthesizer tones. Zero-input mixing works seem to be very popul…
Involution
From the liner notes by Dean Rosenthal: XI Records announce the release of Dave Seidel's new double-CD, Involution. The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel's second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel's own compos…
Baobab
Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's Baobab and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the…
Drop By Drop, Suddenly
XI Records releases Drop By Drop, Suddenly, a two-CD set of eleven compositions for bassoon composed and performed by Leslie Ross. Ross is not only an internationally renowned instrument builder but is also an uncompromising creative musician. The first disc starts with a series of short seed pieces that play primarily with the timbral and microtonal differences highlighted between tone-holes, forming a layered effect while playing with only one fingering, single note or multiphonic. They range …
Body music
Body Music is music for Ellen Fullman's unique Long String Instrument, an eighty-foot long instrument with approximately eighty strings. Fullman has been developing this instrument for longitudinally vibrating long strings over the past thirteen years. Having received a BFA in sculpture, her interest in music began with the resonance of materials used in making sculpture. When she started making the Long String Instrument, she saw it as "sculpture as music;" now she has come full circle in conce…
Electroacoustic Works
Electroacoustic Works collects three major pieces from the early 21st century New York-based composer Dan Joseph. This double CD release includes Set Of Four, a group of fixed-media sound collages using the processed hammer dulcimer as the primary sound source, two live performances of Dulcimer Flight for electroacoustic hammer dulcimer, and a 64-minute version of Periodicity Piece #6, a mixed-media work that originated as a multi-channel sound installation. With roots in early minimalism, a…
The South Shore
XI Records is pleased to announce the debut full-length release from Michael Vincent Waller, The South Shore, featuring chamber works from 2011 through 2014, with album art photography by Phill Niblock. Waller has collaborated with numerous musicians and ensembles to bring this album to life. This kind of listening is for the brain to relax and enjoy, for the soul and emotions together as art for the universal. Reveling in subtext and subtlety, a symbiotic exploration of the history and future o…
Partitas for long strings
Restocked. "Two aspects were of central interest to him: different tunings and density of sound. He made an installation in the large space of Het Apollohuis, stretching four strings lengthwise and attaching them to the wooden wall on the far end, which served as a resonator. He did not use automatons or electric amplification. He played the strings by brushing them, walking back and forth at an even pace. His aim was to make his playing as continuous and even as possible. For each partita he re…
Toot!
Composer/producer/shaman Charlie Morrow is equal parts Fluxus, Occupy Lincoln Center, Lakota mystic, and tech wizard. Charlie Morrow is a conceptualist whose music and sound work explores many styles and forms, from events for media and public spaces to commercial soundtracks, new media productions, museum installations and programming for broadcast and festivals. Assembling expert project groups, Morrow employs a collaborative style that fuses arts, artists, and environment. Charlie Morro…
Privacy Issues (droneworks 1996 - 2009)
Long overdue overview of composer David First's drone works. This special and specially priced set (3 CDs for the price of 2) is comprised of nine works composed between 1996 and 2009. Featuring Chris McIntyre and Peter Zummo, trombones; 'Blue' Gene Tyranny, keyboards; and The Black Jackets Ensemble. 'This was something unexpected and truly different: pulsing electronic textures that derived their rhythm from the beating patterns of closely-tune pitches -- as if Alvin Lucier and Philip Glass had…
Five Sound Installations
Five Sound Installations is a DVD-ROM (for MAC and PC) that contains 5 sound compositions generated in real time by a computer algorithm. The works are: 'Room Piece Twenty-Four'; 'Noema'; 'Steiner Suite'; 'Unintending'; 'Scene'. 'Sound Art, algorithmic composition, chance operations, multi-channel sound systems, immersive installations, computer music; these terms all intersect at a point defined by the new XI release 5SI by MJS. Schumacher is a composer, curator (he runs Diapason, NY's only 'so…
The animation of lists and the Archytan transpositions
There are any number of ways to hear Warren Burt's music for tuning forks; as many ways as there are listeners, probably. The most immediate one is simply to revel in its beauty and enjoy the music as sound. Or, to be more accurate, as clouds of sound; sonic colors that momentarily hover here and there, as they move slowly across the musical horizon. Of course, Warren Burt's music may also be heard as the mature work of a major experimental composer, one secure in his craft, and still filled wi…
The chord catalogue
I like to think of The Chord Catalogue as a sort of natural phenomenon--something which has always been present in the ordinary musical scale, and which I simply observed, rather than invented. It is not so much a composition as simply a list. I have often tried to explain that my music is a reaction against the romantic and expressionistic musical past, and that I am seeking something more objective, something that doesn't express my emotions, something that doesn't try to manipulate the emoti…
Music for 88
Simplicity and clarity have always been among Tom Johnson's chief concerns as a composer. That concern led him to research number theory, particularly by Pascal, Fermat, and Euclid, and these sources suggested musical structures somewhat more complicated than those that he had used before. Music for 88 is the result of these researches. It contains nine sections (six of which are on this recording), each of which is a musical demonstration of a mathematical phenomenon.
Ten thousand shades of blue
Bronze Cloud Disk (1975) for multitracked, processed bowed tam-tam; Two Mirrors Face One Another (1976) for multitracked, processed bowed Japanese temple bells; Cities of Light (1980) for multitracked, processed voice; TenThousand Shades of Blue (1985) for realtime interactive computer music system; Staring at the Moon (1987) for realtime interactive computer music system with bowed and struck vibraphone; Walking Slowly Backwards (1989) for vibraphone.“Lainhart’s music rings true to the spirit o…