New Arrivals
Awakening At The Inn Of The Birds
Continents of City and Love and Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and double bass. They both feature expanding piano lines that intersect and compliment individually expanding textures provided by the strings and synthesizer. Continents cycles slowly through four harmonic areas via a sort of structural counterpoint, achieving a finely knit fabric of understated sensuality. Tidal combines strictly notated music with measur…
The Light That Fills The World
These three works exist amid an undeniable esthetic spirit of the times—the embracing of pre-compositional principles and structural processes in the service of a highly personal artistic statement. However, John Luther Adams’s recent work tends to transcend his compositional devices—it is simply potent, compelling music that is timeless in its sublimity. This is quietly expressive music in which process never intrudes on the music’s “sounding,” but churns away in the background, while the foreg…
Adams / Cox / Fink / Fox
This album presents four noted West Coast composers—three from Southern California and one from Fairbanks, Alaska—writing haunting, generally quiet, sometimes lyric, occasionally pensive music for clarinet and bass clarinet accompanied by either string quartet or percussion and piano. All the pieces feature the playing of clarinetist/bass clarinetist Marty Walker.John Luther Adams’s Dark Wind was written for Marty Walker and this CD in 2001. Although it is a process-driven piece involving polyrh…
Aluminum Overcast
Chas Smith's six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener’s sense of time—the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place—as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense.The first five sections/variations are built from shared/recurrent phrases—melodic phrases (for bowed and struck metal), rhythmic phrases derived from geometric and Fibonacci structures, and phrases of “harmonic noise” that vary in density. The sixth mov…
Cold Blue
Back by popular demand (and available for the first time as a CD), this essential collection of West Coast new music—an anthology known simply as Cold Blue—is a classic. Originally issued on vinyl in 1984, shortly before the demise of the old Cold Blue label, the disc quickly became the company’s most popular release. When Cold Blue was started up again in 2000, the company received numerous letters encouraging it to re-release the anthology as a CD.Although bound together by a common concern wi…
Maria Falling Away
This CD brings together six of Rick Cox’s elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Cox’s subtle, idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques, which sometimes employ preparations placed amid the strings (similar to those utilized in prepared piano works) and the use of such objects as sponges and brushes and glass lab slides to s…
Dancing On Water
All the music on this album, with the exception of Song(s) of the Sirens, was written specifically for remarkable clarinetist/bass clarinetist Marty Walker. As Is Thought/Aurora, a casually dramatic work for bass clarinet, harp, and vibraphone, is like a miniature concerto in its structure, contrasting solo bass clarinet phrases with tutti lines.Song(s) of the Sirens, a lush work for clarinet, piano, and woman’s voice, gradually and systematically builds in texture, harmonic richness, and melodi…
I Hear It In The Rain
Five Pieces for Piano (1997), Two Preludes for Piano (1996-97), and For Celesta (1985)—the latter for an instrument that is very seldom featured in a solo setting—display Michael Jon Fink’s command of crystalline forms that are Debussyian in beauty (and occasionally in gesture) yet hold a distinctly contemporary artistic distance from their musical materials. These fragile and primarily extremely quiet pieces are performed with great aplomb by Bryan Pezzone.Living to be Hunted by the Moon (1987)…
Nikkowolverine
Nikko Wolverine (1999) is a three-movement piece scored for various bowed and struck metal instruments in non-tempered tunings. These instruments, which were designed and built by the composer, emit tones that are rich in complex harmonics and often sound more electronic than acoustic. All three movements of this work share motivic materials, but each successive movement adds more harmonic complexity and textural density to the movement that preceded it.Tons Tons Macoutes (1999) is a texturally …
Last Things
Last Things, for bass clarinet, pedal steel guitar, piano, and electronic keyboards, was written for clarinetist Marty Walker in 1987, and has been subsequently performed (as a piece for bass clarinet and tape) by Walker at concerts across the U.S. Somewhat a rhapsodic call and response between bass clarinet and pedal steel guitar, it is constructed of seven connected sections (or songs) that over the length of the piece slowly build in intensity. As the piece progresses, each section expands in…
Racional Vol 1
Exact LP repro edition. Grey-area reissue of this legendary album, with top audio quality: the seminal "Racional 1" privately released by Tim Maia on his own Seroma imprint (the name Seroma is the sum of the first syllables of Tim Maia (Sebastião Rodrigues Maia) names. SE from Sebastião, RO from Rodrigues and MA from Maia). It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Brazil’s Tim Maia. A wildly restless creative mind Tim Maia was also a huge personality. The larger than life man made a huge co…
Skies Of China
**Original 1985 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** What emerges from Giorgio Gaslini’s various suites is a happy explorer, recalling worldly journeys and launching musical adventures. He was the first Italian jazz musician to play in India and China and the result of each journey was an extended suite. Gaslini’s own language that emerges triumphant, a fondness for floating clusters and fractured boppish themes (his writing can hint at influences from Monk to Schoenberg, George R…
Swimming Pool Orchestra
**Original 1981 vinyl edition of the album. Few copies available** A real piece of creative madness. With "Swimming Pool Orchestra", Mario Schiano decided not only to continue with the humor of provocation (two musicians are locked in a dilapidated recording studio, where the sound engineer tries to repair the water pipes. The two try to wait, quarrel, until the studio is flooded and the record can no longer be made), but also inviting in the studio Umberto D'Ambrosio, aka Trottolino, a minstre…
I'd Rather Be Lucky Than Good
I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Good is a new recording collaboration of Sam Ashley and Werner Durand. Sam Ashley’s mystic parables imbued with benevolent humor are drawn from a lifelong pursuit of a present-day shamanism. Werner Durand’s wind work on invented and traditional instruments stems from the minimalist tradition, routed through his unique study of obscure world musics. The two artists first met in Berlin in 1984 while Sam was touring Atalanta with Robert Ashley’s opera company, with whom he …
Budd Box
Anthology box set containing 7 hard-to-find and critically acclaimed albums, released on labels such as Cantil, Opal and All Saints. 57 tracks across 6 discs plus a 68 page softbound book with spine compiling interviews, essays, poems and archival photos.Produced as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Each disc comes in a foil-blocked wallet and the entire contents are housed in a sturdy slipcase with foil-blocked lettering.The Serpent (In Quicksilver) (1981)Abandoned Cities (1984)The White Arcad…
Stealth
Stealth” is the aptly-titled debut album from Tokyo-based composer/producer Takao. Gliding in under the radar with thirteen slyly sweet and subtle miniatures, these pieces are refreshing light-explosions of gentle harmony and modestly grand melodies. Fans of New Age and tonal minimalism will enjoy this music, but its brevity reveals a pop-influenced aesthetic as well, and the level of care and detail in the arrangements and recording evinces a nuanced, surprisingly mature sensibility. There’s a …
Owl Splinters / Twin
2LP ltd edition 200 Copies Silver. Deaf Center's second album Owl Splinters from 2011 gets a lavish re-packaging as a gatefold, double-LP. It includes the Svarte Greiner re-interpretation album, Twin, as well as new cover art with photos by cinematographer Joshua Zucker-Pluda. Owl Splinters was originally released six years after DC's debut, Pale Ravine. In contrast to their previous work, it was recorded in a studio setting (Nils Frahm's Durton studio, to be exact), and the lo-fidelity, haphaza…
Low Distance
Low Distance is Deaf Center's third full-length studio album and perhaps the most focused effort by the Norwegian duo to date. After their last record Owl Splinters (2011), which was quite an eclectic endeavor, Erik K Skodvin and Otto A Totland draw their sound back into something quieter and more minimal. The record starts with a piece of sweeping analog electronics. It's a spacious, yet dynamic opener that leads directly into the static tones and piano motifs of "Entity Voice", which balances …
Seven Horses For Seven Kings
Seven Horses For Seven Kings’ is the staggering new Black To Comm album by Marc Richter, who applies a whole new rhythmic force to his avant-garde sound designs with results landing in a wildly imaginative space between Rashad Becker, Cam Deas, and Nurse With Wound... The project’s first new album since ‘Black To Comm’ for Type in 2014 marks a radical new phase for the german artist. Drawing on recent years’ work, ranging from writing for theatre and film to composing for art installations, app…
The Debatable Lands
In December 2017, Howlround (Robin the Fog) was invited to
perform at "The Winter Solstice Soundscapes" for the recently opened
record store "Vinyl Café" in his home town of Carlisle, Cumbria.
Inspired by the reception to his first ever performance in the great
border city, he covered his parent's dining room table with the same
equipment, stretched loops of tape around his mum's seasonal
candlesticks when she wasn't looking... and this LP is the result. The
only equipment used on the alb…